“i am a water polo instructor and a horse rider / i’m a duplicator and a sex addict / i am an architect and a dog sitter.” So opens ‘water polo instructor’, the latest single from kids on coke by Swedish artist and poet daniel d. hedin. You might know Hedin as the force behind Le Days, which put out its own album Are You Here? back in February, but while that release offered a shadowy, almost orchestral style of melancholy, this is very different. ‘water polo instructor’ is a bare spoken word track which plays like something between a surprise voicemail and oral short story. The monologue of a character which not only digs deep into their personal identity but also their relationship with a significant other, as odd as it is lonely and packed with the kind of strange details which evoke a far wider story in the margins.

i am a wine drinker
a recovering consumerist
and a clown maker
i am a tv conductor
and a manuscript writer
i am a feet enthusiast
and a cat whisperer

Eliza Noxon – You

Songwriter Eliza Noxon has been working towards debut full-length Monsters With Bad Habits for a number of years, having last put out the EP Save Your Breath back in 2017. What began as an attempt to chart a fairly typical experience of growing up and leaving home soon became something else entirely, when the sudden loss of her brother completely changed her life. Written a little over a year after this bereavement, single ‘You’ finds Noxon still in the dark depths of loss, isolated by grief and unable to move beyond it. But it also represents the first steps towards that goal. “In writing this song, I found a way to scream and kick and channel all the rage and fear and loss that I felt into something I could use to connect with people,” she explains. “But, I think the song really came alive in the studio, with the addition of Jake Reed’s gorgeous, driving drums, and Pierre de Reeder’s masterful production. When I play or listen to the song today, It feels like a mass catharsis—I hear the voices of everyone who’s ever lost their person and had to figure out how to keep living with that hole in their heart.”

Hank Bee – Corner

The project of Liverpool-based Hannah Brown, Hank Bee is an outlet for a distinctive brand of indie rock that is very much influenced by folk and country traditions. “I liked the idea of an androgynous queer woman going by Hank,” Brown explains of the project’s name. “It harks back to male country singers of a certain era, but I’m not a man and I don’t make traditional country music. It makes me giggle to think of someone seeing the name and expecting a fella in a cowboy hat.” In January Hank Bee will release a sudden hankering, a five-song EP on Memorials of Distinction that promises to be the wider world’s introduction to an act that’s already well established in its hometown. Lead single ‘Corner’ is our first taste, what Brown says is about “that point of transition—being at the corner of something, at a crossroads,” but still sounds warm and welcoming to my ears.

Jeffrey Martin – 1519

“The climate is collapsing, diseases rising, robots striving to take over the globe, and still there’s not enough money for the people who actually need it,” we wrote of Jeffrey Martin‘s Thank God We Left The Garden back in 2023, and while his latest single ‘1519’ sets its sights on a different era entirely, it still looks to evoke something of the politics of the present day. Inspired by Buddy Levy’s book Conquistador about Hernán Cortés, the track looks to both occupy the mind of its colonial subject in all of its faults and folly, and draw lines to the forces of exceptionalism and greed which mark the present day. “From his own letters [Cortés] seemed blindly certain that his mission, no matter how brutal to the people he met in the Americas, was a righteous one,” Martin explains. “That with God and Spain on his side he was infallible. It made me wonder what we are blind to today that future historians might look back on in disbelief and disgust. ‘1519’ is an attempt to place myself on the boat, to stand next to Cortés, to feel him as a man instead of some unreachable, towering, historical figure.” The track is part of Alive July 25, 2025, new live album coming early next year on Fluff & Gravy Records.

Major Murphy – Like A Wrecking Ball

Following on from the success of 2024 mini album Fallout, Grand Rapids outfit Major Murphy have returned with brand new single ‘Like A Wrecking Ball’ on Winspear. The band have always been hard to pin down, Fallout, as we put it in our review, “stitching together a patchwork of styles into a cohesive album,” and the new track sees them lean closer than ever to folk and alt country. A bright if wistful acoustic number not afraid to take its time, slowly drawing the audience in with an easygoing rhythm before packing its emotional punch. And, clocking well over seven minutes, the track is certainly immersive, core members Jacob Bullard (vocals, guitar), Jacki Warren (vocals, bass) and Chad Houseman (drums) joined by Mark Lavengood (steel guitar, mandolin, percussion) and Dutcher Snedeker (piano, organ) to lift the sound towards its full richness.

Mol Sullivan – Dog

We featured Mol Sullivan numerous times last year, with album GOOSE landing itself a place among among our favourites of 2024. A record which “serves as a portrait of a person within the arc of great change […] written in the aftermath of a relationship and during a nascent sobriety,” as we wrote. “An artist moving forwards and looking back, reflecting on who they were and who they want to be, reaching beyond stories of love and addiction for a more nuanced picture of life.” Of course, such personal change rarely comes without support from others, and new single ‘Dog’ is an ode to one such crutch amid an otherwise tragic time. “This song is a love song to my dog who came into my life in the last year of severe alcoholism and was with me through the bitter days of early sobriety,” as Sullivan describes of the Americana-tinged track. “In May of this year, there was a horrific fire in my home on the same day as my mother’s funeral and we lost my partner’s dog to it. My partner and I had been working on my next record but decided to throw ourselves into the recording and release it early as a way to process our grief.”

Robber Robber – Talkback

Burlington, Vermont quartet Robber Robber made a splash in 2024 with the release of their debut record Wild Guess, Nina Cates, Zack James, Will Krulak and Carney Hemler rejecting genre conventions for something looser, instinctive and curious. Post-punk by way of art rock and a few other styles besides, the songs felt delivered straight from the central nervous system, all reaction and twitch and pure feeling. Having recently signed with Fire Talk, Robber Robber have shared new track ‘Talkback’ in celebration. A song which doubles down on the spontaneous, impulsive style of the previous record, Cates’s vocals spiralling over the wiry rhythm like the contents of a racing mind blown up and projected onto a wall.

Oops I thought you wouldn’t see this
Start into it
Think twice look again
If I had come to this, to this
It would’ve been the perfect talkback, perfect quip
Stand clap from all around,
Gold win
So quick, hard stop, land flat, good talkback,
Clever, quick, the double threat, I win

Watch the video directed and filmed by James and Cates themselves below:

Talkback is out now via Fire Talk and available from Bandcamp.

Zoya Zafar – Strange Heaven

We’ve followed the Lahore-born, Orlando-based songwriter Zoya Zafar for a number of years, applauding how she uses “a controlled, unadorned style to communicate a considerable depth of feeling.” Latest track ‘Strange Heaven’ is both another lesson in the power of minimalism, and proof that restraint need not sound austere or stark. “I wrote ‘Strange Heaven’ from the liminal place where grief turns memories into dreams and dreams into memories,” Zafar explains. “After losing my father, I dreamt of him in soft cinematic flashes that were pulled from both real life and invented by my mind.”

‘Strange Heaven’ is out now and available from the usual places.

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