With the release of the single "Play Me A Christmas Song", Stephen Dowd manages to bottle the very specific, blue-hued silence that falls over a living room once the wrapping paper has been cleared away. It is a curious thing, really, how a melody can act less like a sound wave and more like the smell of a candle that was blown out five...

Listening to TaniA Kyllikki’s new single, “I PROMISE (I'll Wait For You)”, is like stumbling upon a vow carved into the stone of a forgotten chapel. This is an epic power ballad, a genre that too often inflates emotion into melodrama, but Kyllikki, alongside producer Rynellton, constructs something with a different kind of gravity. It is an architectural feat, built from piano chords that...