Native Greek artist Nick Anastasakis debuted at the end of last year with his band The Afro Nick by releasing the single 'Get There Before Noon (LA mix)'. This song is a real manifesto of the fact that each person has a task for a specific day and various things that surround us tell us what we should do today and at this very time.

Let us be clear from the outset: *Thunderbird Lodge* is not an album that wants to be your friend. It will not bring you soup when you're ill. It will not text back. Madison, Wisconsin's The Flavor That Kills — a band whose very name reads like a coroner's verdict on good taste — have returned with their fourth record, and it is a genuinely strange, occasionally magnificent, deeply uncomfortable piece of work that demands full submission or nothing at all.

Brighton has always been England's most entertainingly deluded city — a place that genuinely believes it is both New York and Ibiza simultaneously, and somehow makes you believe it too, at least until your train back to Victoria delivers you to reality. It is fitting, then, that the town's finest sonic exports tend to carry this same quality of gorgeous, slightly disorienting conviction. Fierce Friend — the long-running solo project of one Alan Grice — is exactly that kind of proposition. *Blood Red Hills* is the sound of a man who has paid his dues quietly and at considerable length, and has now decided, with impeccable timing and zero apology, to make some actual noise.

Soft as Hell — the project of a Brighton-based one-person operation with a cinematic imagination operating well above its budget — arrives with "I'd Rather Fly" like a tumbleweed rolling through a town that didn't know it needed visiting. This is music for the wide shot, for the long horizon, for the slow zoom onto a squinting eye beneath a hat brim. And yet, crucially, it never quite lets you get comfortable with that reading. Just when you think you've pinned it to the spaghetti western corkboard, the thing pivots and starts to groove in a manner that Ennio Morricone, God rest him, would have found genuinely perplexing and possibly magnificent.

There is a particular breed of artist who understands that the most unsettling thing you can do is make something beautiful. Not beautiful in the soft-focus, Instagram-filter sense — but beautiful in the way a Victorian music box is beautiful: ornate, precise, and faintly threatening if you listen long enough. Moon Construction Kit, the solo project of Lausanne-based polymath Olivier Cornu, has always belonged to this lineage. With *Snake Charmer*, his first transmission since *Chemicals* crept out in the dying hours of 2025, he doesn't merely confirm that suspicion — he weaponises it.

Jeff Burton and John D'Agostini have spent decades quietly building one of the more defiantly unfashionable careers in independent music — two men in a room, or several rooms across several decades, armed with real instruments, no willingness to compromise, and apparently no publicist. Their latest single, *Do You Feel Alright*, is the kind of track that makes you wonder why the music press hasn't been camped outside their door with notebooks and flattery. The short answer, one suspects, is that Burton and D'Agostini have never made it especially easy to be noticed. The longer answer is that records this good have a way of finding their audience eventually, whether the world is paying attention or not.

London has always had a peculiar talent for reinvention. From Carnaby Street to Camden, the city has forever absorbed the past and spat it back out with a cheeky grin and something new tucked behind its ear. David Goundry, a singer-songwriter and guitarist operating out of this perpetually restless metropolis, understands that tradition instinctively — and with *Lucy (Remix 2026)*, he makes a convincing case that the most thrilling thing a musician can do right now is refuse to live entirely in the present.

Let us be honest about the state of psychedelic rock in 2026: it has, for the most part, become a genre that mistakes reverb for revelation. Bands slather their guitars in chorus pedals, mumble something vaguely cosmic, and expect the listener to connect the dots to Syd Barrett by sheer force of association. Against this backdrop, Hallucinophonics arrive with "Afternoon of Acid Rain" like a thunderclap from a sky nobody was watching — and the result is genuinely, disarmingly strange in all the right ways.

The third long-player from Scotland-born, Australia-based Coolonaut arrives like a Molotov cocktail wrapped in paisley silk. Recording to analogue 8-track in splendid rural isolation, this artist has fashioned a record that deliberately thumbs its nose at contemporary production values while delivering a furious moral statement about our present moment.

The Julie July Band have spent the better part of a decade quietly building a reputation as one of the UK folk circuit's most compelling acts, and "All in Our Minds" – the standout track from their album *Flight of Fancy* – demonstrates precisely why their stock continues to rise. This is psychedelic folk-rock that understands the hyphen matters: neither pastiche nor po-faced reverence, but a genuine synthesis of influences that feels both timeless and distinctly now.