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...

Golden Alliance's new single, "Cruise," lands with the kind of revving immediacy that makes you instinctively check if you’ve left the car keys somewhere obvious. This Sussex-based studio artist isn't just plotting a holiday; "Cruise" maps out a profound, almost spiritual, desire to get under the skin of Route 66 – to understand its faded glories, those sun-bleached fragments of chrome and neon, its...