There's a curious jolt in hearing a title like "Us Against The World" from an act called The Cockney Cowboy. The name itself is a glorious contradiction, a pairing of gritty East London reality with the wide-open romance of Nashville. You half expect a joke, but what Justin Vella delivers is a dead-serious, straight-shooting country ballad that smells less of hay bales and more...

Seven Shades of Nothing’s new single, “When The Lights Go Down,” offers an incredibly peculiar form of comfort—it’s a soundtrack for deciding, over your third cup of lukewarm coffee, that perhaps global, society-dissolving collapse might actually be a blessed relief. James Cole, the project’s architect, doesn't sound panicked about the approaching end; he sounds incredibly, beautifully bored by everything that led up to it. https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z5K652TNvuB9fpt9Amdut?si=_mevo7tcSGunNpswpfCSsQ This...