The Murdoch press spent the better part of two decades doing a particular kind of damage — not the damage of the outright lie, though there was plenty of that, but the more corrosive damage of the coded verdict. *Single mother.* Two words deployed like a sentence, a moral tribunal condensed into a tabloid font. JK Jerome has spent, one suspects, considerably longer than two decades working out what to do with that. *Profanity*, his debut single, is what happens when a songwriter finally finds the right room for that anger — and discovers it isn't anger at all. It's something stranger, sadder, and considerably more interesting.

Nostalgia, as any decent songwriter eventually discovers, is a trick of the light. It does not preserve what was — it burnishes it, rounds off its rough edges, renders the ordinary luminous. Anders Ekblad knows this instinctively. The Swedish artist's new single "Early Mornings" does not simply visit the past; it inhabits it, turns it over in both hands like something fragile and irreplaceable, and in doing so produces one of the year's most quietly devastating pieces of pop music.

**The moment a musician strips away every comfortable habit and steps naked into a new room is rarely pretty. It is, however, often revelatory.** Karen Salicath Jamali has built her reputation on the extraordinary: a composer who began writing music after a near-death experience in 2012, who had never touched a piano before that spiritual rupture, who subsequently performed at Carnegie Hall multiple times and won two European International Music Awards for her album *Wings of Gabriel*. She is, by any reasonable measure, not a woman who plays it safe. Yet "Seeds of God" — her new single released April 17 — represents a risk of a rather different and more personally exposed kind: her first vocal performance and first recorded guitar work, captured and committed to tape for the world to judge.

**The American desert has always been fertile ground for the imagination — vast, indifferent, ancient. Jana Pochop has made it her instrument.** Released on the kind of date that feels almost cosmically deliberate — the 25th of March, the very cusp of spring — *Powerlines* is the Albuquerque singer-songwriter's most audacious statement yet, a seven-track record that collapses the distance between place and person, between landscape and lyric, until the two become indistinguishable. This is music that smells of red earth and cold desert night.

Few artists dare to excavate the truly undefended territories of the self — not the performative wounds so fashionable in contemporary folk, but the kind of raw, pre-verbal terror that lodges itself in the body before language has a chance to explain it away. With *Tapestry*, Fish And Scale — the artist name under which German-born Roland Wälzlein has quietly built one of the more compelling independent folk catalogues of recent years — does precisely that, and the results are quietly, stubbornly extraordinary.

The Dutch delta is not, historically, territory one associates with the slow-burning romanticism of American folk music. Yet Joseph Turner has built something quietly remarkable from those flat, rain-soaked lowlands — a sound that borrows from the Appalachian songbook, bends it through a European sensibility, and arrives somewhere altogether more intimate and strange. *A New Moon*, the opening salvo from his forthcoming thirteen-track debut, announces a songwriter who understands the most important lesson in the genre: restraint is not the absence of emotion but its most precise delivery mechanism.

*There is a particular kind of English songwriter — unhurried, quietly certain, rooted in soil and faith rather than trend or spectacle — whose work asks nothing of you except your full attention. Alexander Joseph is emphatically one of them.*

When San Francisco artist Michellar sat down to write "LOVE PEACE WAR" during the opening salvos of the Ukraine conflict, she faced the perennial challenge that has confronted protest singers since Woody Guthrie first scrawled "This Machine Kills Fascists" on his guitar: how to channel righteous anger and political despair into something that transcends mere editorial commentary. The result, released this week as an acoustic remix produced by Bay Area collaborator Robi Bean, proves that the old folk tradition still has teeth—even if those teeth occasionally show their age.

Fredrik Kristiansen's The Quiet North arrives with "Tremble," a single that refuses the well-worn paths of indie folk catharsis. This is music that understands the value of withholding, of allowing silence to speak as eloquently as sound. Where so many contemporary artists mistake volume for depth, Kristiansen has crafted something altogether more disquieting: a song about the aftermath, the strange hollow peace that follows turbulence.

The Amanda Emblem Experiment's latest release arrives with the weight of cultural history and ecological urgency strapped to its back like a swagman's bundle. "Ancient Dingo" represents that rarest of artistic achievements: a song that manages to be both politically engaged and musically compelling, avoiding the sermonic pitfalls that typically plague such endeavours.