Here is the thing about ‘Sex Sold Politics’: it should not work as a pop single, at least not by conventional metrics. It blends contemporary pop with tribal rhythms and healing frequencies and shamanic soundscapes and a central argument about feminine power and softness as strength. On paper that sounds like a lot to hold. In practice it holds everything with remarkable ease, and the result is one of the more genuinely distinctive releases of the year so far. German artist L

UK country music has spent years trying to find its footing, torn between reverence for the Nashville blueprint and the desire to be something distinctly its own… London-based singer-songwriter Marta is one of the artists quietly solving that problem, and ‘In Another Life’, her latest single, is a convincing demonstration of exactly how she is doing it. Facebook | Instagram | YouTube The song started with one line: “you were the love of my life in another life.” From there, M

With England back on the world stage tonight, the timing couldn’t be better for Impact Sound Lab’s new track ‘Rise Up England (We Shall Never Surrender).’ It’s a proper football anthem: big guitars, thunderous drums, soaring chorus… the sort of thing that sounds like it was built for a stadium full of fans in full voice. Behind the project are David Matheson and Norm Sabourin, two producers and songwriters with serious combined experience across pop, rock, country and hip-hop

The title of Gab Gordon’s latest single functions as both description and instruction, and the track delivers on both counts with a discipline and atmospheric intelligence that marks it as one of the more fully realised dream-pop releases of recent months. Instagram, Website, Spotify Featured on her EP The Pretty Bazaar, ‘Slowburn’ is exactly what it claims to be: a track built from restraint and patience, trading instant gratification for the kind of emotional weight that on

The melodic and progressive house space has developed a sophisticated vocabulary for a particular kind of emotional experience: the late-night feeling of existing between states, where nostalgia and presence occupy the same moment and stillness and movement are somehow indistinguishable. Danish producer FAVNA has been developing his own contribution to that vocabulary across a catalogue that has accumulated over 700,000 streams and earned support from respected artists and in

There is a version of French pop that exists purely as aesthetic: the beret, the cigarette, the existential shrug, the whole studied apparatus of cool deployed in service of not very much. And then there is the real thing, rooted in the chanson tradition, where the song is a vessel for actual thought and actual feeling and the lyric carries genuine weight. Sylvain Zebo belongs emphatically to the second category, and ‘Test’, his latest single, is another demonstration of why.

Virginia-based post-punk quintet Dayfiction have been building toward something with considerable purposefulness, and Divine Intermission, their new EP, arrives as the fullest and most urgent expression yet of what that something is. Recorded in the days immediately preceding vocalist Evan Solomon’s temporary relocation to London, the project carries the specific weight of a record made at a threshold: the particular clarity and desperation that arrives when you know somethin