Though of course, the result is not that simple. Just as life is more complex than a journey from A and B, so to does Lick the Spoon, Let It Soften reimagine what finding the correct path might look like in practice. Which is to say, it rejects the notion some map exists to steer our course, and instead views the quest from a different angle. The aforementioned single was inspired The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran and the connection between this iteration of Lamplight and Gibran’s work is illuminating. “That book speaks about love like an actor, more than something that can be given, taken, broken, lost,” Williams explains. “Someone that changes us, that does not soften itself when we are weak, though it can be gentle. That perspective is very much present throughout the record, and this song is from deep in the throes of learning to see love this way.”

Part of this process is learning to not only be centred in the moment, but to allow oneself comfort in the knowledge that it will give way to another whether we wish for it or not. Take ‘Clover’, a single that “seems suspended between the retrospection of mourning and a look towards future dreams,” as we continued in our earlier piece, “turning to the small certainties of the present as a kind of balm against the otherwise debilitating doubt which might set in when asking life’s big questions.” Elsewhere the present moment is less than inviting, be it ‘Altar’ with its ominous skies or the unabashed despair of ‘I’ll Be Careful With It’, yet with equal parts compassion and patience, Lamplight attempts to recognise each experience as just another part of richer, more fulfilling whole.

The mood culminates in the near-triumphant closer ‘Ring Stains’, song which doesn’t quite reach two minutes in length yet contains the multitude of emotions which precede it. For a record built around a search or question, you might expect the finale to arrive as an answer, the destination finally reached, but instead it functions more like a snapshot of recognition caught within the ongoing motion. The realisation that life itself is that very momentum, and that nothing dear to us is ever quite lost from our lives, no matter how it sometimes might feel. “I think the majority of us have a tendency to think of love as a finite resource,” Williams as explains in the album notes. “I don’t think that’s true. If love has happened, it is there, permanently etched in the fossil record.” Lamplight is here to speak of love and we’d all do well to listen. Lost he might be, but aren’t we all? The important thing is that he’s trying.

Lick The Spoon, Let It Soften will be released on the 23rd October via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it now.

Cover art by Pauline Mauruschat

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“This project was a lot of, just like songs about waking up to the reality we’re in, coping with that and seeing ourselves as victims of it, but then also as participants in it,” explain Georgia‘s Bayou Princess of their fittingly titled new album Dance Tunes for the End of the World upcoming via Indecent Artistry. “And navigating that as a band, rethinking what does a band mean? Or what can it mean, back to that silliness. I don’t want to be a business or a brand. Just an expression of daily living.” The style is introduced perfectly by latest single ‘He Keeps Talking’, a track which seems to barrel towards the encroaching apocalypse and embrace the entropic movement which results, sounding neither ironic nor flippant in the process, but attuned to the reality of a world in turmoil.

Big Warm Bed – June Bug

The new recording project of Leeds-based musician Jacob Andrews, Big Warm Bed has been long in the making. Having cut his teeth with years in the local scene, playing in projects with members of Adult DVD and English Teacher, as well as touring the US with Far Caspian frontman Joel Johnston, Andrews has slowly stepped out and introduced his own work. A long-awaited debut full-length is currently pencilled in for the early months of 2027, but for now we have single ‘June Bug’ to tide us over. Moving away from the post-punk snarl of his collaborators, Big Warm Bed slots into the wistful corner of indie rock, weaving a compassionate picture of friendship and the importance of being there for the ones you love. True to the theme, a full band join Andrews to bring the sound to life, with Niall Summerton (drums), Meg Lama (vocals/synth), Tom Kettleton (saxophone), Jacob Cracknell (bass/vocals), Chris Aitchison (guitar/vocals) and Connal Doo (guitar/vocals) all lending their talents. Watch a live session recorded at The Calm Farm and directed by Andy Little below:

‘June Bug’ is out now via Dance To The Radio and available from the usual places.

Cameron Keiber – Haunted Castles

Back in 2025, Cameron Keiber released full-length Nurser via Midriff Records, an album which confronted the modern world with the scathing eye it deserves. “There’s no hesitance or lily-livered attempts at peace here,” as we concluded in our review, “just a clear fuck you to all those who try to impose their own will upon innocent others.” Fast forward two years and Keiber is back with The Tide, a follow-up which pushes further than its predecessor, embracing the beauty of imperfection both stylistically and thematically and championing the power of the human in a world quickly tipping towards digital oblivion. Opener and single ‘Haunted Castles’ welcomes the listener into the release, opening with a poignant sense of reflection but soon kicking into gear and building into something urgent and cathartic. You’ll notice the beats of Nurser have been replaced by real drums, the guitars have doubled in size, and most importantly Keiber stands atop of if all fervent and compassionate as ever.

Cloudbelly – Phantom Lung

“Holy gods inside me / Why can no one love me / Without running aground?” So ask Cloudbelly on their latest single ‘Phantom Lung’.  The latest track to be unveiled from the project’s forthcoming full-length Throwing the Game, the single is a love song but not in the traditional sense, detailing the slow disintegration of a friendship as it moved from closeness to distance. A warm arrangement foregrounds the intimacy that is being lost, and there is no questioning the fondness which underpins the entire endeavour, though as the sound swells at the conclusion of the track, the answer to the initial question is ultimately fatalistic. “Maybe no one should come in / Nobody, now.”

Throwing The Game will be released on the 13th November and you can pre-order it now.

Darren Hayman – Darling, All the Time

If you’ve been reading VSF over recent months, chances are you know that cult UK songwriter Darren Hayman has been undergoing the mammoth task of making his vast back catalogue available online for the first time (a project you can read about in more depth here). All manner of rarities and deep cuts are being unveiled in the process, with some gems saved from obscurity along the way, but latest release I’m Your Team is one of the most notable to date. The full-length album had been sitting incomplete for a number of years, Hayman prioritising other musical commitments and dealing with artistic insecurities, though came to be viewed in a fonder light by its creator as time passed by. Inspired by the success of the aforementioned re-release project, Hayman has now decided to put out the album in full via Audio Antihero. Recorded in the wake of 2022 album You Will Not Die, I’m Your Team digs further into the same ground to perfect the contemplative, emotive style. “Sometimes after making an album you don’t want to go into a different direction,” Hayman explains. “You want to go deeper into it, and I felt I was just getting the hang of this stripped, slow, emotional music.” Listen to the title track now:

Eliza Edens – Old Home Video

Continuing to pave the way for full-length Death Drive, coming later this month via First City Artists, Eliza Edens has shared new single ‘Old Home Video’. While previous track ‘Hot & Mean‘ was certainly personal (“turning its attention to the queer experience in the contemporary moment, especially the rollercoaster of dopamine highs and lows facilitated by the access we’re granted into the lives of others by social media”) ‘Old Home Video’ takes things even further. A song Edens wrote while their mother was living with dementia which not only struggles with the cruelty of that present but also begins grieving in anticipation for the inevitable loss. As you might expect, the result is the most poignant and unguarded track on a release full of them, the very sound marbled with a combination of fondness and sorrow.

Death Drive will be released on the 30rd October via First City Artists and you can pre-order it now.

Fleur Geurl – stone in the stew

Back in September, Brooklyn-based songwriter Danielle Sorokin, AKA Fleur Geurl, released full-length 11:11, a collection of chamber folk songs which allow the personal and the mystical to blend together into something with real weight. It is not uncommon for recent folk music to bare its vulnerable heart in order to communicate more authentically, and there’s certainly an open, confessional dimension to Sorokin’s work, but where Fleur Geurl stands apart from its contemporaries is its willingness to play with the tension between display and concealment, clarity and opacity. Take single ‘stone in the stew’, a track indicative of the headspace of a record caught between cold reality and portentous dreams.

soon, I’ll sink into the stew
I’ll let it be true, I am too
a hue of geranium blue
soaks every room
every room

Generifus – Bird Beak

We last wrote about Spencer Sult’s Generifus back in 2024 with the release of Summerberrys, an album which provided “a welcome expansion of the Generifus universe,” as we put it, “again using Sult’s eye for the seemingly mundane details of day to day living to explore themes of growing up in the Pacific Northwest amid the wider backdrop of a hostile world.” Now Sult is set to return with brand new record Pulling on the Seam, and lead single ‘Bird Beak’ hints at the direction of the album. A meditation on hard truths and dashed dreams that comes to accept that moving on doesn’t always mean a clean break, the shrapnel of the past destined to remain embedded no matter how far we might run towards the horizon.

Good Wild Gods – Breathe It In

After meeting on tour in 2017, Luke Sital-Singh and Ben Cramer (AKA Old Sea Brigade) quickly developed a strong creative rapport, working together under the moniker Good Wild Gods and releasing the EP All The Ways You Sing In The Dark in 2020. Both artists returned to the successful solo careers thereafter, though a reunion at Cramer’s Swedish home studio rekindled the project once again, the duo this time pushing things further than before to embrace something closer to a full band richness. Sometimes I Go Missing is the result, a full-length album which builds upon what All The Ways… established yet reaches much further. “‘Sometimes I Go Missing’ is the culmination of many years we could have never seen coming,” as Sital-Singh explains. “We made the music we wanted to make.” Listen to latest single ‘Breathe It In’ now:

Sometimes I Go Missing will be released on the 19th March 2027 via Nettwerk Music Group and you can pre-order it now.

Kin Hana – Shōmetsu / Kodō

“Manages to locate the yearning for connection and community which has persisted from our first days, and will persist to the last,” we wrote of ‘Earthrise’ from Kin Hana‘s new LP Howling World forthcoming via Black Meadow. “The result centers the mythic presence of both the past and the future, twin otherworlds which loom large over the present, warping the material of our existence with equal parts pessimism and possibility.” The track embodied the spirit of an album concerned with how we engage with a world at once woeful and wondrous, moving with equal parts curiosity and dread in the hope of making sense of our irrational present. With the album just days away, Kin Hana has unveiled new single ‘Shōmetsu / Kodō’ to further tease the release. A mighty, haunting track which extends over eight minutes, Aaron Hodges joined by Jared Ashdown (Open Head), Gabriel Birnbaum (Wilder Maker) and Otto Hauser (Vetiver, Espers) to push the sound from a mournful piano piece into a cataclysmic doom metal number.

Left Tracks – Popcorn Lung

We last wrote about Left Tracks back in 2023 with the release of their EP End Times Hauling, describing how the collaboration saw Phil Di Leo (DI LEO) and Kabir Kumar (Sun Kin) use group together to imagine a new future in the wake of COVID and the adjacent catastrophes. “[The EP] sits on the precipice of disaster but makes a decision to envisage a different world,” we wrote, “working on the logic that no significant change can occur without first rekindling a sense of imagination.” The project has expanded and evolved in the interim, not least with last year’s record LT2, and now Di Leo and Kumar are back with brand new single ‘Popcorn Lung’ to further mark the direction of travel. A new, heftier version of Left Tracks bolstered by Sam Thorne (bass guitar) and Mark Edwards (drums, percussion) which is capable of both intricate detail and sweeping energy, playing with the tension between lightness and weight to evoke the strange physics of a codependent relationship.

Nick Bellerose – baby

“Paint[s] the experience of falling in love in all of its overwhelming glory with Bellerose’s trademark style, where cinematic richness meets the intimacy of DIY folk.” So we wrote of ‘About Us‘ by Nick Bellerose back in the summer, the DC-based songwriter channelling the likes of Elliot Smith, Sparklehorse and Nebraska-era Springsteen in his authentic style. With EP maybe, someday now announced, Bellerose has shared latest single ‘baby’, and the result is no less sincere. Based within the liminal space between the end of a relationship and the kindling of another, the track “is less about knowing where love might lead than allowing yourself to feel something again” as the press release explains, and possesses all the earnest, homespun charm you want from such a song.

young friend – michael wakes up

Next month Vancouver-based songwriter Drew Tarves, AKA young friend, will release brand full-length New Entertainment via Nettwerk, and single ‘michael wakes up’ highlights how the records signals an ambitious new era for the artist. Foregoing the simplicity of a single narrative arc, the track instead presents a series of vignettes in order to paint a larger picture, each adding up to a mosaic of the human experience in all of its wonders and heartache. “’michael wakes up’ follows a number of characters that are all experiencing different realities in their lives,” Tarves explains. “Michael being told by Shelly that she doesn’t love him any longer, John winning the lottery with his daughter’s birthday as his numbers, Damien being let go from his company but continuing to do what he loves. These people are all experiencing their own beautiful stories.” Watch the video directed by Zachary Vague & Drew Tarves below:

New Entertainment will be released on the 6th November via Nettwerk and you can pre-order it now.

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To celebrate the 25th anniversary of the EP, ON AIR LIBRARY have decided to make the release available on streaming services for the first time alongside a brand new vinyl edition, not only reintroducing themselves as a pioneering outfit but also hinting towards new material that will soon be unveiled. For the who might have missed things the first time around, single ‘A Word From Benjamin Spock is an ideal place to dive in. A sound at once richly crafted and cryptically opaque which pairs layers of guitars and feeback to envelope the listener, though it is up to interpretation whether this ethereal space is undergoing a process of blooming or decay.

ON AIR LIBRARY can be found at the usual places.

Photo by Dan Mazikowski

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Featuring Dora Noonan, Nat Cimino, Zara Roy and Noah Kelley, Queens-based indie rock outfit blankette combine the irreverence and mischief of twee music with something altogether more cathartic and raw. The result is an unapologetically singular sound able to communicate the full spectrum of emotions. New album doll puts this to good use, exploring knotty ideas of identity, depression and self-actualisation with a decidedly unguarded air, displaying courage in its vulnerability and embracing the communal power of a band. Single ‘after’ shows the kind of mood to expect, a song all about the misplaced suspicion that a simple change might fix your life. It starts out with something like hesitant hope and culminates in a something of an exorcism.

after i stop drinking i’ll feel better
after i stop overthinking i’ll feel better
after i start running i’ll feel better
after i make more money i’ll feel better
after i feel better i’ll feel better

Brimheim – My Collection

“Writing new music had felt like swimming in molasses for months until ‘My Collection’ arrived,” explains Danish songwriter Brimheim of her latest single, a track she considers something of a paradigm shift. “The jazzy direction was surprising to both me and Søren [Buhl Lassen]. It’s a musical tradition I haven’t explored before. Yet somehow, it immediately revealed itself as the most enchanting path we could take. It felt like receiving a gift from the universe.” Where her previous album RATKING sought clarity within the fraught, confusing experience of personal identity, ‘My Collection’ moves in a more ambiguous direction, swapping out the brightness and rhythm in favour of something more fictional and oblique. The story of a perhaps eccentric woman who collects objects discarded by others, valuing the hidden beauty within that which has been rejected, and guarding her prized possessions with an almost maternal instinct.

Watch the video directed by Stine Emil and produced by Monster Crotch below:

‘My Collection’ is out now via Tambourhinoceros and available from Bandcamp.

Caoilfhionn Rose – Horizon

“Some of the lyrics talk about becoming ‘lost inside your own imagination’ and how ‘dreams can seem so real’,” explains Manchester songwriter Caoilfhionn Rose of her fourth full-length, Draw Out Your World, coming early next year on Lost Map Records. “To me, this album is about building a life for yourself, stepping out of daydreams and carving out a path towards a happier future.” Made with husband and collaborator Rich Williams in the years of pregnancy and early parenthood, Draw Out Your World finds Rose working through a tumultuous period with both resilience and curiosity, resulting in a sound that is marked with compassion and always reaching for some brighter, calmer territory. Lead single ‘Horizon’ gives a flavour of what to expect, not least the impact of Danish duo Svaneborg Kardyb (Nikolaj Svaneborg and Jonas Kardyb) who lend their talents to the release and leaven the sound with their ethereal electronics. 

Hank Tree x Peter Broderick – You Can Thrive

Led by Fergus MacDonald (formerly of State Broadcasters), Glasgow‘s Hank Tree first caught our ears back in 2023 with album The Big North. “Hank Tree take folk sensibilities and elevate them into something truly atmospheric with a mixture of field recordings and distortion,” as we wrote, “but amid their invention and subversion of genre, Hank Tree hark back to folk’s best roots, positioning themselves in the long lineage of artists using the form to write about social history and labour movements.” Latest album Care 1 is every bit as thematically challenging and emotionally urgent, a record crafted around MacDonald’s experience working with people with profound learning difficulties and mental health problems. It delves into what it means to care and be cared for within a society which too often seems willing to disregard any semblance of responsibility. This time MacDonald is joined by Clarissa Cheong and Peter Broderick and together the trio conjure a sound that intimate, compassionate and subtly unflinching, as single ‘You Can Thrive’ suggests.

Karen y los Remedios – Mayahuel

Fronted by Mexico City-born, Guanajuato-raised artist and researcher Ana Karen G. Barajas and featuring Z.A.M.P.A. (Guillermo Berbeyer) on guitars and Mexico City producer Jiony (Jonathan Muriel), Karen y los Remedios is a shapeshifting project rooted in cumbia yet fluid and mysterious enough to bring its own mythologies to life. Latest album Bestiaria fulls like the most pure embodiment of the act to date, evoking a series of legendary women from across the world to celebrate femininity in all its desire, sorrow and power. Single ‘Mayahuel’ is a perfect example, “a hypnotic, low-tempo cumbia rebajada that dives into Mexica mythology,” as Barajas explains. “I was deeply moved by her story in the ancient codices—her escape to be with Quetzalcoatl, turning into maguey plants, and the sacred legend of the Four Hundred Rabbits.”

Watch the video directed by Barajas herself below:

Bestiaria is out now via ZZK Records and available from Bandcamp.

LAPêCHE – Parallel Park

“Drawing on shoegaze and post-punk, they make indie rock songs that are both shadowy and catchy, centering on a sense of considered patience that the band says is born from ‘a shared language of healing, honesty and presence’.” So we wrote of Brooklyn‘s LAPêCHE back in July, with single ‘Phantom of Cinder’ introducing the tone of their new album Autotelic on Tiny Engines. With singer and guitarist Krista Diem supported by with Dave Diem (bass), Drew DeMaio (guitar) and Colin Brooks (drums), the entire album channels a nineties sensibility without ever descending to cheap nostalgia, not least thanks to the committed, complex style in which they work. Take ‘Parallel Park’, a song about the end of a relationship which favours emotional honesty over poetic gesture, and thus recognising how any project, be it personal or artistic, relies on a kind of tenacious imperfection in order to move forwards.

Party Dozen – Full Powers

Australian duo Kirsty Tickle (saxophone, vocals) and Jonathan Boulet (drums, loops, production) have recorded under the Party Dozen moniker for near on a decade now, pushing an inventive style of psych rock which leans on improvision. But new Party Dozen album 21 Bum Salute, coming next month via City Slang, finds the band in their purest form, Tickle and Boulet dropping whatever pretenses which might have persisted in their work in order to fully embrace their idiosyncratic vision. Latest single ‘Full Powers’ indicates the raucous abandon of the result, not to mention the ambiguity of record which swings between swaggering confidence and something more volatile, almost dangerous. “There’s ‘Full Powers’ good and there’s ‘Full Powers’ bad,” they explain. “The good is when you’re personally becoming too powerful, an angel pisses on you, everything is going very well and suddenly you’re gliding down the street like King Swinging Dick. The bad is when one side has all the power and more is not enough. Powerlust, greedmongering, gluttonous fiends. This track switches between the two.”

Watch the video below, made with help from John-Henry Pajak and Jos Eastwood:

21 Bum Salute will be released via City Slang on the 6th November and you can pre-order it now.

Samjo – Franconia

Brooklyn born, Lille-based songwriter Sam Rueckert, AKA Samjo, works between folk, indie rock and punk to create songs at once emotive and energetic, as highlighted by 2025 album Barely Even Something. With a new extended edition of the album recently released, Samjo have returned with a video for single ‘Franconia’ to further the life of the record, and the track is the ideal introduction for those who missed the album the first time around. With a slow building and detailed style, the track is a lesson in slow burn, its determined indie rock chug slowly blooming outwards as cinematic strings widen the frame of the arrangement. The style is keyed into the thematic concerns too, the song moving from the doldrums of a particularly bad day towards some appreciation of the universality of misfortune, and in doing so emerging with compassion and solace.

Barely Even Something (Extended) is out now and available from Bandcamp.

Tough Old Bird – Tall Summer Clouds

Tough Old Bird continue their steady stream of new singles with ‘Tall Summer Clouds’. Following on from predecessor ‘Come Back, Come Back‘, a track we described as a poetic narrative that’s at once brooding and compassionate and little world weary too,” the new song again delves into a bittersweet headspace, specifically the strange blend of joy and sorrow which accompanies the passing of time. Written in the weeks before lead Nick Corrigan welcomed his first child into the world, there’s a tension between new beginnings and the inevitable loss which will follow, Tough Old Bird confronting mortality and deciding that life lies not in grand gestures but small moments. Perhaps the humbles snatches of calm are the best life can get.

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You only have to look at the artwork to get an idea of the tone of the single. Avery Friedman grasps the moment with force, even if it means getting her hands dirty. The result is decisive, tactile and loaded with a newfound purpose, as though having cleared the ground with the previous release, she is now ready and willing to grab at whatever life might throw at her next. “’You Move’ is about savoring the unexpected fruits that reveal themselves amid times of uprootedness,” Friedman explains. “It is a song about putting trust in the glimmer of new love, and carefully sowing the seeds for it to sustain. Both thematically and sonically, it’s about searching, surrendering and allowing yourself to relish. My hope is that ‘You Move’ invites people into the world of my soon-to-be-finished sophomore album – a world that encompasses a full-swing of emotionality, and lets loss and pleasure dance together.”

Watch the video directed by Dylan Friese-Greene below:

‘You Move’ is out now via Audio Antihero and available from Bandcamp. You can catch Avery Friedman on tour in the coming months, so check the dates below:

Oct 4th – Cassette, Queens, NY – w/ Mallory Hawk
Oct 8th – Antics Magazine Fundraiser @ Life World, Brooklyn, NY – w/ Lex Walton & Native Sun
Oct 31st – London Calling Festival, Amsterdam, NL
Nov 4th – The Elephant’s Head, London, UK
Nov 5th – Sidney & Matilda, Sheffield, UK
Nov 7th – Simple Things Festival, Bristol, UK
Nov 9th – Fulford Arms, York, UK
Nov 15th – Neue Zukunft, Berlin, DE

Photo by Keegan Burckhard

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What emerged was several things simultaneously—both mood piece and narrative, a lesson in sonic experimentation and taut linear pull—and felt every bit the sound of a songwriter who had come to transcend the lingering weight of his influences to create something truly his own. An achievement made possible not least thanks to Birnbaum’s trust in his collaborators, and in turn the trust he’d earned from them. As we continued:

The result, made possible by both a band now experienced in working together and a label in Western Vinyl willing to trust them, swaps the sleek psych and goodtime rock sensibilities of its predecessor for something altogether more stark and lonely, less a house party than a late-night wander through unfamiliar streets. Which is not to suggest minimalism, the sound owing much to experimental and alt-jazz forebears, but rather the presiding mood. One indebted to the shadow and subtle desperation of noir cinema, the perfect soundtrack as Birnbaum’s worldweary narrator flits between bars and hospital rooms while nursing concerns both trivial and existential.

Fast forward a year and Birnbaum and co. are preparing to release Smoking the Bunny, the second part of the trilogy which picks up where its predecessor left off and follows its protagonist into the darkest depths of the night. After the trials and tribulations of The Streets Like Beds Still Warm, you might be unsurprised to hear the next leg of the character’s journey descends into the near total abyss of inebriation, the city reduced to an illogical maze as he stumbles lost between (and occasionally even within) hotel rooms with the kind of abstract purpose only a drunk man might possess. Because far from a blacked out void, his experience of the night is actually something like consciousness expanded, his state upending the normal flow of time so that memories and future hopes are shuffled into the deck of the present.

In this way, Smoking the Bunny feels very much a middle part, embodying a neither here nor there sensation, looking forward and back simultaneously. A metaphysical midlife record where time feels maddeningly finite, where every hope is matched by an attendant regret, and desires are still present yet shadowed by their own failure to precipitate. “I see it as an inevitable correction for the infinity that is a part of young life,” Birnbaum explains of the mood. “One can’t be disappointed without having first hoped for everything.” The juxtaposition between the fragmentary and the linear is central to this atmosphere, the protagonist subject to two streams of experience just like everyone else. The rude pull of mortal time and an endless mosaic of memory.

The effect was in part achieved by the very structure of the recording process. Birnbaum and his wide cast of supporting musicians started with improvisational sessions which were then honed and curated. Core members Nick Jost, Sean Mullins and Adam Brisbin returned, as did long-term partner Katie Von Schleicher, alongside guest turns from Chuck Johnson, Joseph Shabason, Cole Kamen-Green, Kitba (bec el-saleh), Will Shore, Levy Lorenzo and Macie Stewart, collaborators who worked across multiple sessions to not so much create the songs themselves as the clay from which they would be moulded. And mould Birnbaum did, taking this plethora of (semi)raw material and retreating to solitude in order to cut, shape and reassemble with an array of tape machines, pedals and computers. A method strangely reflective of the headspace of his protagonist, where an ostensible patchwork of moods and past experience swirl into a unified, urgent whole.

Latest single ‘Dim Bars, Delusions of Grandeur (Room 17)’ and its instrumental b-side ‘Lone Firefly Over the Domino Game’ show both how sonically varied and thematically coherent the resulting record proves to be. Each track is very different yet dialled into the same beguilingly ambiguous mood. Take the former, a song elevated by Chuck Johnson’s pedal steel which glimmers like some burnished object glimpsed in low light, or the slightly ominous latter which plays with the unnerving dazzle of some fairground attraction cranked in an empty lot. The deranged depths of night, suggests Smoking the Bunny, surely hold their fair share of doom and regret, yet there is magic to be found there too. Even if it only even glitters at the edges of vision, and will inevitably collapse into unreliable snatches of memory should dawn finally break.

Smoking the Bunny will be released on the 6th November via Western Vinyl and you can pre-order it from the Wilder Maker Bandcamp page.

Photo by Keegan Grandbois, cover art by Gabriel Birnbaum

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Having now signed with Winspear, Awning have returned with ‘Little Green Book’, their first new music since since their debut, which builds upon the foundations it set out. Again spontaneity feels like a big part of the track, as Dimick pairs soft pop textures with sharp post-punk edges. The bittersweet result is marked with a twitchy energy that feels reflexive in an almost literal sense, as though we’re listening to the track unspooling before us for the very first time. The song is “cryptic in its lyrical imagery,” Dimick expands. “I like the way children write poetry. This song is about taking the perspective of my childhood self from a lyrical space and watching someone struggle with grief. But this is not necessarily for the audience to understand. They can pull what they want from it.”

Watch the video directed and edited by Damin McCabe below:

‘Little Green Book’ is out now via Winspear and available from the Awning Bandcamp page.

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Hayden has been releasing an emotionally rich and thematically deep style of folk music for the past three decades, mining the ostensibly ordinary moments of life for all of the implicit beauty and meaning. His recently announced tenth album The Recent Past promises to be a worthy contribution to this oeuvre. Lead single ‘Time Has Been More Kind’ gives a hint as to what to expect, a song which took inspiration from musical royalty to become what might be the most country-adjacent Hayden song to date. “One of my favourite concerts was country legend Ray Price opening for Willie Nelson at Massey Hall in 2009,” he explains. “He played with a classic old-school ensemble including pedal steel and double fiddles. It was perfection. To match the regretful, longing, rosy retrospection of the song’s narrative, I tried to channel that feeling and atmosphere on this recording.” Adam Hindle (brushed drums), Miranda Mulholland (fiddles), Matt Kelly (pedal steel) and Ben Whitely (upright bass) also lend their talents, and the result is every bit as rich and wistful as its title suggests.

His His – Carousel

The recording project started by Toronto-based songwriter Aidan Belo upon moving out to his family hobby farm, His His has spent the past few years crafting an unguarded style of folk that blends nostalgia, fondness and warmth into a bucolic present. The 2025 single ‘Hardcore Band‘ sound “His His at its most fuzzy and intimate,” as we wrote, “maintaining the earnest tone which has long marked the project and dialling up the closeness through a gauze of DIY texture,” and new single ‘Carousel’ builds upon these ideas. A track recorded to tape at home and possessing all the heart such a homespun practice entails, and still retaining enough rough edges to lend an emotional authenticity too.

Hour – Sky is Blue

“Nothing is hurried, yet there is nevertheless an urgency to the poignant, curious sound. The level of detail is striking but there is no ounce of ostentation. Lesser acts might be overwhelmed if tasked with exploring concepts of loss and mortality, prone to slipping into maudlin excess, but with a unique blend of compassion and abstraction, it seems Hour are up to the task.” So we wrote in a feature on the project’s new full-length Ghost Bridge back in August, Michael Cormier-O’Leary assembling a talented, diverse team of musicians to explore ideas which might overwhelm the average songwriter or band. Following on from the title track and ‘Pearls‘, Hour are teasing the full release with new song ‘Sky is Blue’ and the track is every bit as poignant and aspiring. A reversal of the typical song about grief, the piece is written from the perspective of the departed rather than the survivor, Heeyoon Won (Boosegumps, 22º Halo) adding vocals which are gentle yet weighted with the responsibility of reassurance. It is often tempting to infantalise the dead, imagine them poor souls succumbed to something final and unexpected, but here the whole concept of mortality is flipped on its head. What if it is us here on earth who are naive, yet to fully appreciate the path we must eventually follow? What if the deceased mourn our confusion and pain?

You will travel the same way
with astonishing speed
like so many have done before

Watch the film by Cormier-O’Leary (though be warned, there are flashing lights):

Ghost Bridge will be released on the 9th October via Dear Life Records and you can pre-0rder it from the Hour Bandcamp page.

Karl Mattar – Light Gleams

After spending the best part of a decade recording under the moniker Interbellum, releasing albums like Our House Is Very Beautiful at Night (which offered a “fluid, collage-like style,” we wrote, “[which] feels at once haunted by the past and permeable to the outside world”), Lebanese songwriter Karl Mattar is reverting to his own name for forthcoming full-length The Weather of the World. Recorded in Beirut amid Israel’s war on Lebanon, the album came to life within the chaotic, cruel centre of our historical moment, and the fundamental uncertainty of Mattar’s position sees him turn to personal emotion in order to evoke the shared grief of the region. Lead single ‘Light Gleams’ is the ideal introduction, a track which details the end of a relationship within a contemporary Beirut marked by bombs and pounding rain.

Light gleams
Across the water
And I’m a stranger
Don’t you know me?
Thunderous and blinding-bright
Explosions in the night
And I’ve been listening to the rain again

Ken Wohlrob – Snowdrift

Back in December we wrote about ‘William‘, a song by musician and composer Ken Wohlrob which showed a more instinctive, meditative side to an artist principally known for work with acts like End of Hope, Swarm of Flies, Northern Heretic and Eternal Black. “A track,” as wrote, “which seemed to repel all attempts to develop it beyond its core guitar riff.” Wohlrob’s new album Forgotten Music doubles down on this style, embracing intuition over laboured craft to evoke a sound analogous to the subconscious. One which might seem mysterious or ambiguous, yet retains a sense of deeper order, as though meaning might be found if only we are prepared to delve far enough into its depths. Take the mantra-like new single ‘Snowdrift’, an ostensibly simple song which creates richness not through intricate musicianship but rather making space for contemplation.

Kyla Marlena – Bit the Bullet

“Marlena explores themes of memory and time in a manner which subverts expectations, forgoing the hazy dreaminess which so often accompanies such ideas in favour of something more immediate, scrappy and raw.” So we wrote of ’21’, the opening track from Kyla Marlena‘s forthcoming album Hold Time back in September, the Toronto-based songwriter introducing an album charged with dynamism and a sense of life. With the record coming next month via idée fixe, Marlena has now shared new single ‘Bit the Bullet’ to further establish the tone. The song embraces a slightly less mature take on the end of a relationship to harness the energies which stem from immediate reactions. “A lyric like ‘guess that I’m the winner / I had the final say’ is not a real belief I hold. There are no winners and losers,” Marlena explains. “But it felt liberating to express ‘forbidden’ thoughts. The energy in the studio was especially high for this one and it felt important to keep in idiosyncratic moments captured in the recording. Playful moments caught by room mics, for example, felt integral to the song by the end.”

Max Bien Kahn – List II

With a couple of recent singles, Max Bien Kahn has introduced his forthcoming new album Baby Green, “a record which,” as we wrote in a preview, “takes a big swing in order to capture the full spectrum of human experience as witnessed from one person’s perspective.” The result takes mundane encounters and makes them into something poignant, be that something as simple as conversing with a neighbour (‘Neighbours‘) or something even more incidental (‘Skipping Stones‘). Latest track ‘List II’ is no exception to this style, using a shopping list as a starting point to sketch a relationship and the longing which underpins it, painting a picture that is fond and romantic yet shaded by something else too. As though every magical thing is haunted by the possibility of its eventual loss.

partygirl – scars

With lead by Pagona Kytzidis supported by Francesca Pastore’s (guitar), Jonathan Ashley (drums), Claire Lin Jenkins (violin), Andrew Jordan’s (bass), and Jenna Love (sax), it is fair to say Brooklyn’s partygirl is a maximalist affair. Having won a fanbase with a striking live show, the six-piece are now preparing to release their debut full-length, and the album promises to possess every bit of the bombast and catharsis that has made their sets so special. Never one to pull any punches, Kytzidis uses the record to confront the tumultuous in all of its violence, injustice and strangeness, and soaring single ‘scars’ embodies the energy and weight with which partygirl commit to the mission. Watch the video directed and edited by Jenna Love below:

‘scars’ is out now via streaming services.

Robbie Bennett – Sister b/w The Light on Your Face

You might know Robbie Bennett as the keyboardist and multi-instrumentalist for rock royalty The War on Drugs, though in 2020 he set off on a solo career too. Self-released debut Permanent World introduced a rich and personal style of composition, and this December, Bennett is following up with not one but two new full-lengths on American Dreams. Both albums are crafted from layered arrangements of piano and various keyboards and synths which sound decidedly curious in their approach, designed, as he puts it, to feel like you are “walking through an unfamiliar place you want to keep exploring and never have to circle back to where you started.” A sense of progression and discovery exists between the records themselves, with Steloken offering warm and fond soundscapes before Circulation pushes deeper into a more improvised, abstract state, the twin releases playing like a real statement of intent from an artist looking to wide the frame of their work. Listen to singles ‘Sister’ and ‘The Light on Your Face’ now:

Steloken and Circulation will both be released on the 11th December via American Dreams. Pre-order both from the Robbie Bennett Bandcamp page.

This Frontier Needs Heroes – Cadaques Cowboy

Brooklyn-born, Barcelona-based songwriter Bradley Lauretti, better known as This Frontier Needs Heroes, has made a name over the last fifteen years with a diverse and unapologetically DIY style of folk that champions both storytelling and emotional authenticity. Latest album Homage to Catalonia promises to further this body of work, as highlighted by new single and album opener ‘Cadaques Cowboy’. It’s a song about Salvador Dalí’s alleged encounter with a UFO on the Costa Brava which paints its central character as something between Don Quixote and a hero from a Spaghetti Western. A man in search of metaphysical possibility within the legends of Cadaqués, though finding more confusion than anything else.

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This month will see the release of 2 Women, a brand new EP released with Dots Per Inch Music which builds upon its predecessor and sees Amiture Music bloom into something even more inventive and challenging. Again built in the spirit of collective creation, each of the four members bring their own quirks and sensibilities to the sound, though all work towards a common goal. The result, like all the best collaborations, feels larger than the sum of its parts and seems to operate according to some higher logic. Experimentation not as some effort in grandstanding or novelty for novelty’s sake, but rather in order to delve further into psychological experience.

The release’s first single, ‘Idela’, is a testament to the power of such cooperation. Initially composed as an instrumental piece, Whitescarver and co. decided to invite New York-based songwriter and pianist Eliana Glass to sing on the track, allowing Glass listen to the song and write her own lyrics in response. A widening of the Amiture Music project to include a fifth member who was given the freedom to work with the same instinctiveness and cohesion as the core group. “The process was magical and it only made sense to attempt to replicate it with the video,” Whitescarver explains. “Eliana and I started with an image of a woman swimming in an indoor pool and worked backwards. I liked how many uncomfortable places you could get with a camera as small as a GoPro. It was cathartic to bring such a satisfying collaboration to life through image.”

2 Women will be released on the 30th via Dots Per Inch Music and you can pre-order it now from the Amiture Music Bandcamp page.

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The style offers the listener a more active role than most records, Bessel not so much showing the soundscape he created as inviting us to chart our own path through it. “An effort to conjure a sense of place which goes beyond traditional world-building,” as we continued, “working to not merely create something new but evoke the sense of revealing something which has always been present, waiting for someone with the patience and attention to bring them to light.” What results is an album crafted in the lineage of William Basinski and The Caretaker, where the borders between landscape, memory and fiction blur into an encompassing whole.

The album is now a month away from release via Lore City Music, and Eric Angelo Bessel has shared brand new single ‘Book of Astrology’. With the cryptic connotations of its esoteric title held aloft, the song is a perfect example of duality’s at the heart of the project. A sound brought to life with ambient textures that might be primal or futuristic, and one which utilises the tension between the withheld and the apparent to keep the audience engaged. Illusion of an Inland Ocean is a record that’s as capable of enveloping a listener as it is demanding their attention, and promises to be the most mysterious and thrilling release of Bessel’s career to date.

Illusion of an Inland Ocean will be released on the 30th October via Lore City Music and you can pre-order it now.

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