There is a particular kind of fury that doesn't announce itself with a scream. It arrives, instead, wearing a fixed smile and a to-do list. It shows up on time, does the housework, books the therapy, completes the workout, and somewhere in the grinding repetition of all that cheerful compliance, something snaps — quietly, almost politely — like a knuckle cracking under a velvet glove.

Reading, Berkshire has rarely been celebrated as a cradle of musical adventurism. It is, after all, a town more associated with a festival held in a car park and the quiet suburban anxieties of the Thames Valley commuter belt. Yet it is precisely that geography — the ring roads, the retail parks, the grinding ordinariness of a life lived on schedule — that seems to have pressed itself into the grooves of Lee Switzer-Woolf's remarkable new single.

Grief, they say, is love with nowhere to go. Jacob's Cry has located the equally devastating companion emotion — the one that has no tidy name — and built a song around it. "You Don't Know" is about the paralysis of witnessing someone you love in pain, standing at the threshold of their suffering with your hands full of useless words and an aching, wordless devotion that cannot cross the distance. It is an uncomfortable subject for a pop song. Jacob's Cry makes it feel completely inevitable.

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.

**By the time the opening chord lands, you already know exactly what kind of people made this record. And you want to be their friend immediately.** Luke Mortimore and James Mcrea — operating under the gloriously deadpan banner of PILL-BOX — have arrived with the sort of debut single that makes you wonder why anyone bothers writing anything other than post-punk kitchen-sink comedy. *Cost Of Living* is three minutes or so of Berkshire-brewed agitation, a lovingly sarcastic dispatch from the frontline of modern British mediocrity, and it is, frankly, a bit of a triumph.

Pop music, at its most honest, is the art of the confessional dressed in its Sunday best. It is the ache beneath the melody, the longing that hides inside a good chorus, the peculiar bravado of a man who picks up an instrument and insists — against all probability — that the feeling he carries is worth your time. Max Restaino, the Sheffield-bred multi-instrumentalist, singer, and songwriter whose Italian grandmother unknowingly launched a career by bringing a button accordion back from the old country, has built his entire artistic identity on precisely this proposition. And with *Girl of My Dreams*, he makes it stick.

Somewhere between the tidal flats of Pawleys Island, South Carolina and the damp lanes of Sussex, something quietly extraordinary has been made. Sophie Moore's debut single 'Closer Than' arrives not as a comeback — that word implies a stumble — but as a reckoning: proof that the music always knew where it was going, even when its author took the scenic route.

**If pop music has a responsibility — and the best of it always has — it is to take the unsayable and make it undeniable. barDe, on this gloriously impertinent debut single, does exactly that.**

Let's be honest about what British pop has spent the better part of two decades getting wrong. It has confused sincerity with sentimentality, confounded catchiness with cynicism, and produced a generation of artists so terrified of looking foolish that they've forgotten foolishness — glorious, arms-wide, head-back foolishness — is precisely where the best songs live.

British music has always done its finest work at the intersection of pain and defiance. From the bruised soul of Dusty Springfield to the barnstorming confessionals of Adele, this island has a particular gift for turning heartbreak into something that feels like a collective reckoning. Carmen Rose Davidson's **Make Sure** belongs squarely in that lineage — and it arrives, with rather impeccable timing, at a cultural moment crying out for exactly this kind of song.