Rock music has always been about leaving. Elvis left Tupelo, Bowie left Earth, and every teenager with a guitar and a grievance has left their parents' semi-detached for somewhere louder. Patrick Doval takes the oldest rock and roll impulse and follows it to its logical conclusion: he builds a rocket, climbs in, and goes to the moon. It is magnificently daft, and it is also rather wonderful.

Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.

The House Flies have never been a band content to sit still in the genre box built for them, and "Derelict Crawl" — the first taste of their forthcoming second album *Lions and Ore* — confirms it with a swagger that feels earned rather than borrowed. This is a Moline, Illinois four-piece taking the bones of English post-punk and dressing them in denim and rust.

Something rare has landed on our desks this week, and it arrives wearing the wrong shoes on purpose. "Deaf Inside The Cult" opens on a single sustained drone, a low hum that could be a tuning fork left to rot in a cathedral, before a drum machine stumbles in like it's late for its own funeral. The Ghostly Pulse have made a career out of sounding like they don't quite trust their own instruments, and here that mistrust curdles into something genuinely thrilling.

Some records announce themselves with a shove. Others — and these are the rarer, more interesting creatures — arrive like a cold hand laid quietly on your shoulder in a darkened room. *NineFortyFive*, the new single from Irish post-punk artist pMad, belongs emphatically to the second category. It does not demand your attention so much as it seduces it, drawing the listener into a space where the gothic and the genuinely human become, somehow, the same thing.

Some records announce themselves. Others creep up behind you, and by the time you know they're there, it's already too late. "Yankee Candle," the new single from Newcastle-upon-Tyne's HMRC — the project of songwriter Lloyd Holmes — belongs emphatically to the second category.

Some records arrive like they were always going to, inevitable as weather. Grizzberg's "Feeling the Fire (Re-Imagined)" is precisely that sort of release — the kind you suspect the artist has been circling for years, returning to its orbit, nudging it forward incrementally, until one day the stars simply align and it steps blinking into the light. The wait, it turns out, was not procrastination. It was craft.

The great lie of polished production is that it makes you feel something. Decades of industry sheen have taught us to confuse competence with emotion, technical precision with truth. tcr! — the exclamation mark doing considerable heavy lifting, a punctuation choice that feels simultaneously ironic and earnest, which is, of course, entirely the point — have no interest in that particular deception. *On Vancouver Island*, the lead single from their 2026 EP *Dear Rabbits*, arrives like a cassette tape found wedged behind a radiator: slightly warped, faintly warm, absolutely candid.

Some songs carry their origins lightly, wearing influences as a kind of fashionable accessory, easily slipped on and just as easily discarded. And then there are songs like this — songs that carry something heavier and more irreducible, songs that emerge not from the desire to make music but from the apparent necessity of it. "Whispers of 1000 Dreams Ago" belongs firmly in the second category, and the further one digs into its backstory, the more that initial impression hardens into conviction.

Right, let's talk about the elephant in the room — or rather, the screaming, lipstick-smeared, thoroughly unbothered woman on the cover art. Hitlist have arrived with the kind of debut single that makes you feel slightly embarrassed about everything you've been listening to for the past six months. *Girlfriends* is the sound of a band who have absolutely no interest in being palatable, which, paradoxically, makes them almost impossible to resist.