Detroit has never been short of people who can make a racket. It gave us the Stooges, the MC5 and the White Stripes, and it has a long habit of exporting noise with a point to it. Lyons Lane, five young men with a Little Richard fixation and a horn section, are something stranger and more welcome. They have made a debut EP that swings like a saloon door in a gale and still manages to sound like it was cut last Thursday.

Three minutes and eleven seconds: that is the whole of the ask, and Winnipeg's CAR287 spend every one of them as though the bar were closing and the jukebox had one coin left. Among streaming-age running times that bloat and songs that outstay their welcome, "End Of The Day" amounts to a public service.

Three sisters from Delray Beach have walked into Abbey Road's Studio Three and come out the other side with a record that sounds less like a debut single and more like a statement of intent. "Baby Blue Bronco" arrives loud, unpretentious, and gloriously unbothered by cool — a pop-rock confection built on the unglamorous, universal memory of a first car.

Andy Smythe has spent the better part of 2026 proving he can do difficult. *Quiet Revolution* and its companion EP were dense, needling things — theatrical art-pop records that wore their intelligence like a well-cut overcoat, all wit and social bite. So it comes as something of a relief, and frankly a surprise, that his new single trades the barbed commentary for something disarmingly simple: a love song, unashamed and unguarded, called "Beautiful Day."

Now and again a band arrives sounding like they've been eavesdropping on the right pubs. Slow Life, the London-Welsh five-piece who've spent the last twelve months quietly stacking up momentum, have returned with "Last Train," and it's the sound of a group finally cashing in every chip they've been sitting on.

Every so often a record arrives that feels less written than excavated, and Matsos's "Change" belongs firmly in that camp. This is a song built from dust and static, from the ghosts still rattling around the walls of New Monkey Studio, and it wears its haunting like a favourite coat.

The thing about songs rooted in place is that they either smell authentic or they don't. You know within eight bars whether a songwriter genuinely inhabits the geography they're invoking, or whether they're renting it for colour. With "So Moseley," Crane inhabits it entirely — the Moseley of junk shops and retro clothing emporiums, of antique spectacles and art school posture, of a particular kind of Birmingham bohemia that never quite made the history books but shaped the people who passed through it more profoundly than any NME cover story ever could.

The title alone is a manifesto. A middle finger extended not with rage but with the quiet, devastating confidence of people who have absolutely nothing to prove and know it. Luxury Fruit — the Knoxville trio of Brett Cassidy, Jeff Caudill, and Gray Comer, veterans of the fondly remembered Westside Daredevils — have delivered their third four-song EP with the unhurried ease of craftsmen who learned long ago that the best work happens when you stop caring what the room thinks.

Love songs are a minefield. For every transcendent declaration of human connection, popular music has gifted us a thousand soggy greeting cards set to a strummed G chord. The genre demands either total commitment or total reinvention, and most artists — confronted with that choice — quietly choose neither, hovering instead in some beige emotional middle distance where nothing is risked and nothing is truly felt. Rooftop Screamers, the Portland-based outfit whose name suggests considerably more chaos than their music delivers, have done something rather more admirable: they've chosen honesty. Radical, unfashionable, quietly devastating honesty.

Christmas songs occupy a peculiar space in our cultural consciousness. They exist largely to peddle myth - the snow-dusted fantasy of familial harmony, romantic bliss, and untroubled joy. Walsall five-piece The Assist have taken a wrecking ball to this cosy fiction with 'Divorced For Christmas', a track that dares to document the season as most of us actually experience it: chaotic, emotionally fraught, and frequently disappointing.