Two decades and six years is a peculiar gestation period for a pop song, longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. And yet C'batch's new EP wears its slow-cooked origins not as a burden but as a badge, the way a good stew tastes better for having sat on the hob since roughly the turn of the millennium.

"Arioul in Dub" takes the eponymous single from Syna Awel's forthcoming record and strips it down to its bones before rebuilding it in echo and smoke. The original "Arioul" was already a study in restraint — a Berber tale carried more by breath than by melody — but this reworking finds a different kind of patience. Where the album version lets David Aubaile's piano open the space, the dub mix hollows that space out entirely, leaving room only for a heartbeat kick, a ghost of bass, and Syna's voice arriving like a memory that refuses to fade on schedule.

Two years is a long stretch to leave fans waiting, and Franklin Gotham have chosen to break the silence not with a whisper but with a sunburnt holler. "Sunshine & Gasoline" arrives less like a comeback single and more like a band flinging open the windows of a clapped-out estate car and gunning it down the nearest coastal road, windows down, decorum abandoned at the petrol station.

The Pacific has always had a complicated relationship with popular music. From the surf-drenched mythology of the Beach Boys to the languid psychedelia that washed through Californian studios in the late sixties, the West Coast of America has perpetually promised listeners a kind of salvation by sunshine — the notion that somewhere, just beyond the horizon, the living is easier and the air smells of salt and possibility. Annika Bellamy, a Las Vegas-born, Long Beach-based singer-songwriter with Dutch, Indonesian, and European Spanish blood running through her veins, understands this mythology instinctively. "Palm Tree," her latest single, doesn't merely nod to that tradition — it plants itself squarely within it, stakes its flag, and dares you to feel nothing.

Nick Page — Count Dubulah to those who knew his work through Transglobal Underground and a sprawling catalogue of over 200 recordings — died in May 2021 with unfinished business. Not the anxious, unresolved kind: the joyful, purposeful kind. He was, by all accounts, always making music right up until the end, and *Dub Will Keep Us Together*, completed posthumously by his life partner Cristina Morán (Dubulette) and collaborator Toby Mills, carries none of the valedictory gloom one might expect from an album conceived under such circumstances. It sounds, rather defiantly, like a party to which death was not invited.

From the industrial heartland of Düsseldorf emerges Stephen Sooter's St. Tamarin project, a curiously compelling one-man operation that defies easy categorisation. His debut EP "Come With Me" arrives with the kind of understated confidence that suggests years of patient craft rather than hurried ambition.

Paul KasticK's latest gambit represents the kind of bold reimagining that could either crash spectacularly or soar beyond expectation. Fortunately, his reggae-infused take on Whitesnake's bombastic 1987 classic lands firmly in the latter category, delivering a transformation that feels both inevitable and revelatory.

The song Better 'Living (Viver Melhor)' is the result of a collaboration between two talented artists, an Englishman Paul Fox and a Brazilian Jhayam. The single 'Living (Viver Melhor)' was released on March 21 and announces possible future collaborations between these two creative people.

Dukes of Roots is a band that plays roots reggae in the best form of this style. And this is not surprising, because this team includes real cult musicians, among whom we should mention Stephen Marley, Darius Rucker, Andrew Tosh, Kabaka Pyramid and Natiruts.

On January 17, German artist Loopro released his new single 'Down to Earth'. This song is colorful and bright and it definitely reveals Loopro's talent as a singer and songwriter.