Rebecca Helen's new single, "Patterns In The Sky," landed in my inbox, and honestly, I wasn't expecting... this. This rising star from Cape Town – indie-pop, they say – has bottled something raw, something that spills out of the speakers and pools around your feet. https://open.spotify.com/track/2kIeEcxZK3GDPsuNXH4k70?si=vPJievz0R-u2_DumdjfUsA The theme? Grief. But not the movie version, with artfully placed single tears. This is the messy, inconvenient, "why did...

If the Pac-Man arcade cabinet at the corner of a musty Scottish pub could talk, it might recount something akin to Rok's self-titled odyssey. Nigel Dunn, the one-man conductor behind this electrified locomotive, paints in phosphorescent streaks of emotion while clutching an aesthetic pulled straight from the neon abyss of ’84. Yet, “Rok” isn’t content with cosplay. No, this album doesn’t merely wear the...