The Washington, D.C. skate scene has always had a peculiar relationship with sound. Concrete parks and parking garage sessions carry their own acoustics — the crack of a board on a ledge, the clatter of wheels down a staircase, the distant throb of a Bluetooth speaker somebody dragged out from a backpack. What Geese Da Goon has done with *Let Me Take You to Snap City EP* is bottle that ambience and make it sellable, portable, and — on his best days here — genuinely thrilling.

The sophomore record is the great test of nerve. Any artist with half a pulse can stumble into a debut — accident, urgency, and luck conspire to create something irreducible. The second album is where intention is revealed: does the artist know what they are, or were they simply discovered by their own sound? With *Devil May Care*, Valley Lights answers that question without flinching, and the answer, delivered with considerable swagger and no small amount of craft, is an emphatic yes.

Washington, DC has long nurtured a particular kind of artistic honesty — from the go-go rhythms of the city's streets to the confessional fury of its punk basements. WiLL, born and raised in Northeast DC, carries that legacy forward on "IG Love," a single that cuts through the noise of contemporary R&B with the precision of someone who has grown quietly furious at how hollow the language of modern affection has become.

Mary Margaret Klein lived for ninety minutes. That is not long enough to hear music, not long enough to recognise a face, not long enough for the world to register her presence in any of the ordinary ways. It is, however, long enough to be loved — and long enough, as Jim Klein and Ian Jamison have now demonstrated, to inspire a work of genuine and lasting beauty.

Rock music has always had a peculiar relationship with its own extinction. Every decade produces at least one obituary — usually written by someone who has just purchased the very album that proves them wrong. Motihari Brigade, arriving with the sharp clatter of "The Great Refusal," are the latest to decline the funeral invitation, and they do so with considerably more wit and moral fury than the genre typically manages.

Let's be honest about what pop music owes the world right now: a little hope. Not the saccharine, focus-grouped kind that arrives pre-packaged with a corporate sync licence and a strategic TikTok rollout — real, messy, guitar-strummed hope. The kind that catches you off guard on a Tuesday morning and makes you feel, briefly, like everything might actually be alright. cadzo, a four-piece out of Denver, Colorado, seem to understand this with a clarity that is almost embarrassing given how rarely it's achieved.

The word "raw," when affixed to a single as a qualifier, usually functions as an apology — a whispered disclaimer that the machinery wasn't quite ready, that what you are about to hear is provisional, unfinished, apologetically underdressed. Savannah-based project Cries of Redemption, the vehicle of the artist known as Silva, uses the word differently. For them, rawness is the point. It is the argument.

Carrie Schoenfeld and her New York collaborator Grant have the nerve to ask the question that most pop music is far too comfortable to even approach: not whether we can save this planet, but whether we ever truly believed it needed saving at all. "Planet B" — the latest transmission from their project Energy Whores — arrives not as a protest song, not as a lament, but as something considerably more unsettling: a diagnosis delivered with a synthesiser and a smirk.

The great paradox of the love song — and it is a paradox that has kept songwriters honest or dishonest since Cole Porter first sat at a piano — is that the best ones are never really about a person. They are about the *idea* of a person, the ghost of feeling that lingers after the object of desire has been replaced by something more durable: longing itself. Anthony Casuccio, a man who has spent thirty years in the engine room of professional music-making, seems to have understood this intuitively. His new single, "Love Song for No One," does exactly what the title promises, and the audacity of that promise is precisely where the record's considerable power lives.

There are songs that announce themselves. They arrive with the bluster of precedent, wearing the costumes of every influence they have absorbed, and they dare you to resist them on those terms alone. And then, occasionally, a song arrives that seems entirely unbothered by its own existence — one that simply is, with the easy, unpretentious confidence of someone who has spent years learning how to be exactly themselves. "Same Stars," the debut single from Santa Fe-based singer-bassist Montana Joanna, belongs firmly to the latter category, and all the more remarkable for it.