"Avalon" hits like someone opening the car window at midnight and turning the volume up before anyone asks permission. Red Light Factory have built a single that moves fast and knows where its hook is hiding. This is Manchester alternative music with a pulse you can feel in the chest: electronic drums snapping forward, guitar attitude cutting through the smoke, and a chorus-ready spirit made...

A crowded pavement can make cruelty look ordinary. DirtPhunks' "Subway Reflections" asks us to stop accepting that. The guitar-first single grew from a sight FH Baloo could not shake. As an Oslo student, he saw an older wheelchair user playing harmonica for money outside a downtown subway station near the old University. Passers-by mocked him. Instead of treating that scene as passing colour, the single asks...