There is a particular strain of English music writing — the kind that used to spill out of the inkier corners of the weekly papers — that trusted a record to reveal itself slowly, the way weather changes. No hooks flagged in bold, no chorus arriving like a delivery van. Just attention, patiently rewarded. Tom Hartman's new single, "High Tree Climb," is exactly the sort of record that style was built for.

Every songwriter eventually confronts the same terror: the page that refuses to fill. What separates the merely competent from the genuinely compelling is what they do with that dread once it arrives. Cas du Pree, the Dutch artist whose restless curiosity has long outpaced easy categorisation, turns that anxiety into three and a half minutes of gleaming, hook-laden pop that never once sounds like a crisis of confidence.

Martin Kuiper has always worn his influences like a well-loved denim jacket — patched, faded in the right places, and unmistakably his own. On "Still I Promise," the sixth single lifted from his forthcoming album *Prison Of Modesty*, he takes that jacket out for a stroll along a sun-bleached boardwalk and returns with something genuinely radiant.

Picture Mozart handed a chainsaw instead of a harpsichord. Picture Kurt Cobain developing a dependency on a sampler rather than anything more predictable. Picture the softest note salvaged from an amplifier mid-explosion, somehow coaxed into a ballad. Picture Jimi Hendrix, asked to invent a new instrument capable of channelling a far more brutal century. None of these images quite prepares you for Shortout Kid, and yet all of them circle close to what he's actually done.

Some records announce themselves. Others simply happen to you, the way weather happens to you, and "RIFF" belongs squarely to the latter camp. Released on 17 June, this single takes its cue from Bob Gramsma's land art monument of the same name — a hollow scooped out of the Flevoland polder, a wound in reclaimed earth that has spent years quietly arguing with the North Sea about who owns the ground beneath it. Vanschothorst, harpist and evidently something of a quiet excavator herself, has gone looking for the sound that hollow might make if it could speak, and the result is less a song than a séance.

Every so often, a song arrives that feels less like a new release and more like an old friend finally showing up at your door — weathered, road-worn, and carrying stories you somehow already knew. Erik Neimeijer's *Birds Of A Feather* is precisely that kind of song. The Dutch singer-guitarist, riding the momentum of his soul-rock single *Green Eyed Soul*, has chosen to close his album of the same name with a track that has been gestating for over two decades, and the patience paid off. This is music that has been allowed to breathe, to settle, to find its own shape — and it sounds like it.

Koentakhinte — the performing name of Dutch singer-songwriter Koen — arrives on the British radar with Quiet Colors, a single of such disarming emotional honesty that one wonders quite how it slipped beneath the commercial machinery for this long. It is the sort of song that does not announce itself with fanfare. It settles, instead, like afternoon light through net curtains: soft, pervasive, and surprisingly difficult to ignore.

The past three years have been conspicuously quiet from Greg Germain — a silence that, with hindsight, carried its own weight. The Surinamese-Dutch artist's return with "Cloud Highways" is not merely a re-emergence; it is a reckoning, a carefully assembled emotional architecture built from grief, memory, and the peculiar solace of moving through darkness at speed. This is music that understands what absence costs.

**Patrick Bossink, recording as Arpatle from his base in Utrecht, has delivered something genuinely unsettling with this four-track EP — a record that operates less like music and more like geology made audible.**

Parenthood has always been music's great unexplored frontier. We have songs about falling in love, falling apart, losing friends, losing faith — but the particular, grinding, unglamorous weight of raising children while simultaneously trying to remain a functioning human being? That territory, rich as dark soil, is almost always left to the poets and the novelists. Amsterdam trio Tonneau have planted their flag in it, and what they've built on that ground is quietly extraordinary.