Weaving through an anxious person’s mind, trying to cope with intense thoughts, is what this song sounds like – and I know what that sounds like because this is how it sounds in my head when I’m trying to process thoughts that keep replaying. The sound design reflects that brilliantly. There is no single sound that surprised me or that I haven’t heard before, but the combination is so musical that it creates a genuinely mesmerizing atmosphere, especially when halfway through, there are space rock guitar lines merging seamlessly with the electronic cloud of sound.

The three-phase emotional structure – panic, reflection, recovery – gives the song a shape that you feel before you consciously register it, which is the mark of a well-constructed piece. The influences are honest ones: Neil Young in the guitar work, Pet Shop Boys and Kate Bush in the synths, Beach House in the haze. Bishop absorbed them and made something that sits in that tradition without simply replicating it. Worth revisiting when it drops at the end of May.

The main sound and texture of the song is rebellion, and like so many greats before them, Mute TV chose a sizzling drum sound paired with a borderline mangled, fuzzy guitar signal – the kind of fuzz that would make Jack White proud. It’s abrasive without losing the melodic thread underneath, which is the difficult balance that separates noise pop that works from noise pop that just exhausts you. Tim James, Joe Mountain, and Ade Poole are three seasoned musicians, and it shows – the live recording format doesn’t flatter the underprepared, and “Drag Me Down” holds up under that pressure without breaking a sweat.

There’s a particular kind of band that chooses to record live on their debut not because it’s the easier path but because they know the song only fully exists in that format – where the mistakes are features and the tension is real rather than constructed in post. Mute TV is clearly that kind of band. The decision to release through Medical Grade Music and to track inside Real World Studios also suggests a team around them that takes the project seriously, which tends to matter at this stage. The live dates across April and May in the South West give them a circuit to build on, and if “Drag Me Down” is representative of where their catalogue is heading, there’s a lot of room to grow into.

That tension isn’t just a mood, it’s built into the sound itself. The jagged, choppy guitars feel restless rather than driving, circling instead of landing. Beneath them, a dense, fuzzed-out bass and flickering electronics create a sense of pressure, like the track is constantly pushing against its own limits. Nothing fully settles, and that’s exactly the point.

Alan Grice leans into contrast with precision. Bright melodic hooks and layered vocals offer moments of lift, almost euphoric in their clarity, but they’re never allowed to feel secure. There’s always a distortion at the edges, a subtle imbalance that keeps pulling the listener back into uncertainty. Even the unexpected key change feels like a risk: slightly disorienting, yet strangely inevitable.

Both lyrically and emotionally, the song traces something more fragile: the slow erosion of love and trust. Not a dramatic collapse, but a quiet unraveling that happens over time. That idea mirrors the arrangement: the way elements stack, stretch, and strain without fully breaking.

Fierce Friend’s “Blood Red Hills” resists resolution. It builds toward a euphoric, almost overwhelming outro, but instead of release, it feels like suspension; like the fall hasn’t happened yet, only delayed!

The song feels less like a linear composition and more like a carefully built atmosphere. The guitars don’t simply carry chords, they breathe, layered with tape saturation and subtle degradation that give the sound a tactile, almost physical presence. Melody is still there, but it doesn’t dominate; instead, it dissolves into the surrounding textures, becoming part of a wider sonic landscape rather than sitting at the forefront.

This is where the analog approach becomes essential, not decorative. The use of reel-to-reel machines and cassette recording doesn’t just add warmth, it introduces instability, softness, and depth. The slight imperfections, the blurred edges, the gentle warping of tone all contribute to a listening experience that feels alive, shifting. It’s a sound that resists digital sharpness in favor of something more human, more fragile.

Beneath this textured surface, “Let Us In” carries a weight that contrasts its sonic lightness. Lyrically, it reflects on how quickly we categorize others, especially those navigating mental health struggles, and how that instinct to label creates distance rather than understanding. There’s a quiet tension here: the music opens outward, expansive and almost uplifting, while the message turns inward, asking for reflection.

What stands out most is how naturally The Shrubs hold these contrasts together. The track never feels overloaded, despite its density. Instead, it moves with a kind of quiet confidence, each layer serving a purpose, each sonic choice reinforcing the emotional core. Miguel and Sophie treat texture not as background, but as narrative itself.

“Let Us In” by The Shrubs indeed feels like a subtle but important evolution. Not louder, not bigger, but clearer in intention; a deeper commitment to a sound that exists somewhere between memory and immediacy, between clarity and blur. It provides a soundscape that is unresolved, gently pressing, and difficult to fully shake!

Built on a foundation of restraint, the song moves with careful intention. A steady rhythm holds everything in place while the bassline, subtle yet decisive, gives the track its grounding pulse. Around it, guitars stretch and dissolve in soft, luminous layers, brushing against shoegaze textures without losing clarity. The piano, introduced with precision, doesn’t simply decorate the arrangement; it anchors its emotional core, adding a warmth that lingers beneath every phrase.

What stands out most is the balance. There’s weight here, but it never feels heavy-handed. The arrangement breathes, allowing each element to arrive naturally, to exist without urgency. Even in its fuller moments, the track resists excess, choosing instead to remain composed, almost meditative.

The vocal delivery mirrors this sensibility. It’s intimate without being confessional, reflective without becoming distant. The lyrics circle around a fleeting image, something seen, half-understood, and deeply felt. Rather than explaining it, the song lets it remain open, suspended somewhere between memory and meaning.

That openness becomes its defining quality. The track doesn’t resolve; it resonates. It lingers in that liminal space where certainty isn’t required, where feeling itself is enough. There’s a quiet confidence in that choice, an understanding that not everything needs to be fully grasped to be fully experienced.

In many ways, it’s through “picking at grass” that Yasu Cub begin to articulate their artistic voice. They lean into subtlety, make room for silence, and reveal how intensity can unfold without ever needing to be loud; how the most affecting moments often arrive unannounced..

The opening is deceptively gentle. A gliding slide guitar and steady acoustic rhythm create a sense of ease, like stepping back into a familiar summer memory. There’s warmth here, but it’s not indulgent. It feels curated, almost fragile, like something that could slip away at any moment. As the arrangement unfolds, that softness begins to shift, not through dramatic changes, but through subtle emotional erosion.

Ivory Snow’s voice carries this tension beautifully. There’s a striking consistency in the vocal tone between verses, as if past and present are being sung from the same emotional space. Yet beneath that steadiness, something unsettled grows. When the chorus arrives, it doesn’t explode, it sinks. What we hear is not a breaking point, but a quiet surrender to the weight of time.

The lyrics move with a kind of understated precision. Childhood fragments, corner shops, and late-night television are placed against images of adult stagnation: office routines, sleeplessness, unfulfilled ambition. The repetition of “dug around / pulling me down / right about now” lands like a looped thought, intrusive and persistent, mirroring the mental cycles that keep us in place.

Then comes the shift. The bridge doesn’t offer comfort; it offers clarity. “There are boneyards full of people who thought they’d make it out” is delivered without dramatics, which makes it hit even harder. It reframes the entire song, not as a nostalgic reflection, but as a confrontation. Time is not waiting. It never was.

The music video deepens this emotional landscape. Rooted in real locations tied to Snow’s upbringing, it moves between memory and motion with striking intentionality. Water becomes a central motif: fluid, reflective, and freeing; contrasted with the rigidity of adult routine. The dual ending is particularly effective: one version suspends the protagonist in a moment of stillness, floating in the past, while the other propels them forward, lifted by the energy of a live crowd. Neither cancels the other. They coexist, just like the song’s central tension.

What SUNGAZE achieve here is a kind of emotional restraint that feels rare. They don’t dramatize the struggle, they sit with it, allowing its weight to unfold naturally. Drawing from shoegaze textures and Midwest emo sensibilities, I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights feels expansive yet intimate, polished yet deeply human.

By the time the song fades, SUNGAZE leave us not with resolution, but with awareness. I’m No Longer Afraid of Heights doesn’t promise that things will change, but it reminds us, with quiet urgency, that they must..

John Beckmann continues to treat Mortal Prophets less as a fixed band and more as a shifting framework, and here that flexibility becomes an aesthetic principle. The album moves with dream-logic: scenes bleed into one another, moods recur in altered forms, and nothing fully resolves. Psychedelic dream-pop, art rock, shoegaze haze, and noir-pop gestures circulate freely, but never harden into genre exercise. Everything feels provisional, in motion, slightly unstable.

Sonically, the record favors suspension over impact. Guitars blur into color fields rather than riffs, synths ripple like distant signals, and rhythms often feel implied instead of asserted. Vocals drift in layered states; intimate one moment, vaporous the next, creating the sensation of listening through glass or memory. It’s an album that resists forward momentum, choosing instead to hover, loop, and quietly deepen.

What gives Hide Inside The Moon its pull is how carefully it balances atmosphere with emotional weight. For all its softness, there’s tension here: longing that never fully names itself, time folding back on itself, identities doubling and slipping. The songs don’t explain these feelings; they enact them. You’re not guided through a narrative so much as placed inside a mental weather system that slowly alters your sense of scale.

There’s also a cinematic awareness running beneath the surface. Not in a grand, orchestral sense, but in how each track behaves like a scene: lit, staged, and then allowed to fade before overstaying its welcome. Silence, restraint, and negative space do as much work as melody. The album trusts mood over message, suggestion over declaration.

By the end, Hide Inside The Moon hasn’t snapped back into focus, and that’s precisely the point. Mortal Prophets leave you suspended, slightly off-center, attuned to subtleties you might otherwise miss. It’s an album that doesn’t demand attention so much as quietly recalibrate it.

In that sense, Mortal Prophets’ Hide Inside The Moon succeeds by staying out of sync; inviting the listener to linger in that off-phase state, where feeling precedes clarity, and drifting becomes its own kind of destination..

Separation Team is the title of Siren Section’s latest album. The duo is composed of James Cumberland and John Dowling, two prolific songwriters who have been collaborating for more than 20 years, with a sound that blends post punk, dream pop, shoegaze, and electronica for a quite eclectic set of results.

We can witness the whole broadband within the span of this record’s first 15 minutes. After a pair of relentless electronic anthems, ‘Construct’ and ‘Bullet Train’, the duo quite efficiently pull back the brakes for the soft and airy ‘Solidarity’, bringing to their listeners the shoegaze part of the formula. The lengthy and winding 4th cut ‘Medicine’ also lies in the second category with ‘Solidarity’. With a sound that recalls iconic shoegazers Cocteau Twins and Slowdive, this long winding song is an achievement that blends the electronic elements very neatly with the duo’s trademark soft and murky songwriting.

‘Flinch’ is a showstopping piece of IDM that takes a sharp left turn. Presenting threatening synth stabs and unstoppable 808 beats on top of throbbing and droning sub bass, ‘Flinch’ is a classic sound whose lovers can just not get enough of. Brilliant. There is little variation along the piece’s 5 minute runtime, a trademark of dance music that lends the piece a very hypnotic feel. ‘Marker’ comes after a short, cloudy interlude, giving the album’s softest and plushiest offering up til this point. With its open-ended chord sequences and free time feel, ‘Marker’ is a precious point of respite in Separation Team’s relentless marathon.

Rock tendencies show up in the following ‘Dangerous To Know’. With its steady beat and more discernible melodies, the duo pull back on the shoegaze haziness for something that’s more direct and sweet. The massive and cinematic pairing of ‘Tritagonist’ 1 and 2 are massive and immersive electronic rock offerings that balance electronic mayhem with acoustic gentleness, with the second part being led by the album’s first acoustic guitar offering till this point in its runtime, just past its midpoint. The second part is properly progressive, gaining weight and momentum as it goes along, until it ends with a soft, patient climax that summons to mind the involved compositions of My Bloody Valentine.

12th cut ‘Deer Hunter’ is a showstopping and gentle, piano ballad that softens the punch of the earlier, battering ‘Minotaur’, and paves the way for ‘Glass Cannon’ of the album’s lead singles. This cut manages to remind me of Pink Floyd’s Division Bell-era compositions. Especially with its hushed baritone singing and optimistic chord sequences that are injected with a dose of potent melancholy. ‘Timeghost’ is perhaps the album’s most experimental cut to this point. With its hollered vocals and chromatic movements, this piece offers some of the album’s eeriest atmospheres.

Entering the album’s final legs with the syrupy and floating ‘Ritual’, Siren Section still manage to show new facets of their songwriting talents, this time with a pop-inspired chord progression, and a syncopated groove that prods the song along at a very leisurely and enjoyable pace. One of the album’s more accessible cuts. The duo follows with one more heartfelt piano ballad. The enigmatically titled ‘Some of this Means Everything’ has a cliche, moving chord progression, a slow and methodic pace, and prominent voice to accompany the shimmering piano chords. The album’s longest cut, the penultimate ‘Carry Through’, does a wonderful job just blending it all together. With stirring chord sequences, a present groove, prominent vocals with gripping melodies, and a lot of electronic wizardry in the mix, ‘Carry Through’ is an engaging and exciting offering that showcases the duo at the top of their game.

Closing the lengthy and eccentric journey of Separation Team with the lovely and melodic ‘Five Fifty Five’, Siren Section brings the journey to a bittersweet conclusion that leaves a lasting mark. Siren Section’s music and smart lyrical content display a pair of gifted artists whose visions coincide quite neatly on one another, bringing in harmony a litany of musical ideas that should normally not work together. But not only do Siren Section make it work, they also make from it something quite unique, personal, and unforgettable.

Hearing a voice note as profound as the one that bisects ‘You Couldn’t’ could not have moved me more. This is a sentimental and absolutely beautiful new single from Mohammed, a Saudi artist whose indie pop is lush and dreamy, expansive with reverb and droning with its slow and steady beat.

‘You Couldn’t” is a song born out of a personal struggle TwentySixth Soul went through. A long distance connection marred with confusion and mixed signals. The slow and brooding vocal melody is sad and expressive, and the rich guitar arpeggios make this mix one of the nicest and most mellow and immersive I’ve come across for months. Mohammed’s music is unquestionably similar to that of dream pop icons Cigarettes After Sex, but he manages to distill the essence of that group and twist it into something personal and unique. The voice note he incorporated in the mid section, originally sent to a friend, is a moment of stark beauty and honestly, it was absolutely mesmerizing.

‘You Couldn’t’ cannot be simpler in musical terms, but its expressive value is beyond that which I can describe. This is a moving and sensitive piece of music, loaded with an artists’s honest reflections on one thing that is universally relatable, a connection lost in the mess of life.