Grief rarely announces itself politely, and Blade of Thorns understand this better than most bands currently working the industrial-rock furrow. "Deep Waters" arrives not as a single polished for radio rotation, but as a confession dragged up from somewhere cold and unlit, then set to music that refuses to flinch.

There is a particular kind of record that could only have been made by a drummer, and *Rincore*, the debut full-length from Latvian percussionist and composer Rinalds Maksimovs, wears that lineage proudly. This is music built from the inside of the beat outward — not songs decorated with rhythm, but rhythm itself, dressed up and sent out into the world.

Shorty has spent a career serving other people's songs — first in Millhouse, then Symbiosis, then IONS — learning the architecture of a band from the inside before deciding to strip it all away and build something alone. *home*, his debut as motko, is the sound of a musician finally answering a question he'd been circling for years: what happens when nobody else is in the room?

There's a particular breed of British music writer — the kind who cut their teeth queuing outside the Roundhouse and now speaks exclusively in em-dashes and impossible compound adjectives — who would take one look at a red furry dragon fronting a phonk-metal outfit and dismiss it before the needle drops. More fool them. "Rive," the latest transmission from Canadian artist Matt Mars' shape-shifting project MARSUG, is exactly the kind of gloriously unhinged, genre-blind noise that this scene has been crying out for, and it arrives with the swagger of a band that knows precisely what it's doing even as it sounds like it's making it up as it goes. There's something fitting about it too — Canada has long produced musicians with an outsider's fluency in other people's genres, absorbing UK metal, Southern trap, and internet-native phonk alike without ever quite sounding like a tourist in any of them, and MARSUG wears that same borrowed-and-bettered confidence.

Milan's CARTONGETZ has chosen a fine moment to launch its "Fuori Quadro Sessions" imprint, and "Nylon Crush" announces the project with the kind of unshowy confidence that separates real bands from the merely competent. This is a trio operating without a safety net — no overdubs, no studio sleight of hand, just three musicians in a room deciding, in real time, whether to whisper or detonate.

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.