Washington D.C. is not a city one associates with cosmic reverie. It is a place of marble certainties and men in identical ties, a town built to look permanent. So it is a small delight that from within its bureaucratic hum should emerge two musicians determined to sound like they've been beamed in from somewhere far softer and stranger. Chris Mathews-Larsen and Trae Tomko, working together as Youth in Government, have made a debut record that treats the guitar the way a lighthouse treats fog: not as an obstacle to be cut through, but as something to glow inside of.

Comfort, that band once suggested, might be the real enemy. On this three-track EP, Watch Me Die Inside make that argument with the conviction of people who've actually lived inside it, and the result is a record that unsettles far more than it soothes — deliberately, gorgeously so.

Fog, by its very nature, resists description. It does not announce itself; it simply arrives, settling over the familiar until the familiar becomes strange, until the contours of the known world soften into something altogether more provisional. That Nelida Oyma has chosen to build a piece of music around precisely this quality — the slow, creeping dissolution of edges — tells you almost everything you need to know about what *Silent Haze* is trying to do. And the quietly remarkable thing is that it succeeds.

The most instructive thing about *Not Over* is what it doesn't sound like. It doesn't sound like *Letters to the Absent*, the 2012 debut that earned By Million Wires comparisons to skyscraping guitar psychedelia and established them as a band of genuine atmospheric ambition. It doesn't sound like the transitional instrumental work that followed Anna's departure — that more decisive, harder-edged post-rock that suggested the band might retreat entirely into wordlessness. And it doesn't sound like a band trying to sound like anything in particular. For a record fourteen years in the making, *Not Over* carries almost no anxiety about its own identity. That, more than any individual moment of brilliance, is what makes it worth your time.

Picture a city that has learned to dream in code. Not the romantic, analogue dream of sleeping bodies and restless minds, but the cold, perpetual processing of servers that never blink, never tire, never forget. It is into this machine-city that Bengaluru's Social Treble drops their new instrumental single, and the results are both genuinely unsettling and quietly magnificent.

**The night of November 5th, 2024 produced many things — disbelief, dread, the queasy scrolling through exit polls that wouldn't resolve themselves into comfort. For Vincent Roose, the Belgian musician operating under the name Scopitone, it produced an album. Not immediately, not explosively, but with the slow, methodical compulsion of someone who had run out of other options.**

Andrew Vickers works alone, and you can hear it. Not in the sense of thinness or limitation, but in the focused, obsessive quality of *Muffled Ears, the World Sounds Bad Quality*—a second LP that bears the fingerprints of a single mind trying to process too much reality at once. Operating as Sightseeing Crew, the Reading-based artist has constructed a remarkably dense sonic world, playing nearly everything himself (bar session horns and strings), producing and mixing a record that sounds like the inside of a very particular kind of contemporary breakdown.

Rick Guistolise emerges from Columbus, Ohio with a debut that announces itself like a thunderclap across the post-rock landscape. Recording under the moniker Mountains of Heaven, he has crafted a double album that refuses to whisper when it can roar, yet knows precisely when to pull back into hushed, reverberant contemplation.

In an age when the average pop song clocks in at under three minutes and TikTok has conditioned listeners to judge music within fifteen seconds, M.D. Trello has thrown down a gauntlet. *Horror Vacui*, the latest offering from his long-running project The Kiss That Took A Trip, is a single composition stretching beyond twenty minutes—a sprawling, unapologetic rejection of streaming-era economics and the tyranny of the algorithm. It's a risky manoeuvre, to be sure, but one that speaks to an artist uninterested in compromise and deeply committed to the post-rock principles that have animated his work since the project's inception in 2006.

The solitary artist, liberated from the constraints of ensemble compromise, often discovers their truest voice in isolation. Komaframe, the Roma-based multi-instrumentalist who has traded the democratic friction of band life for the autocratic freedom of solo creation, arrives with "Working on a New Brain"—a title that promises cerebral recalibration and delivers precisely that through forty-odd minutes of meticulously constructed sonic architecture.