The moment the jaunty guitar kicks in on John Smyths’ new single, "Now I'm Wiser", you feel a familiar, comfortable warmth. It’s the sound of a good chair in a bar where the floor is sticky with spilled truths. And then the story starts, a classic yarn of a hard-living past yielding to a peaceful present. Smyths, a Dutch ex-metalhead singing country out of...

Margate-based “Hyper-Country” artist Jack Goldstein navigates systemic erasure on his staggering new single, "Falling Off The Earth." Sifting through the wreckage of the 1980s American farming crisis and recalling trips to his sister’s farm, Goldstein constructs a narrative around the brutal collapse of traditional rural livelihoods. It traces a devastating line from physical displacement to a sprawling, cosmic detachment, leaving its subjects abandoned to...