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...

With his new single "Grandmas Kitchen", Kainine doesn’t so much drop a track as he does release a scent. You hear it immediately—not a sound, but the olfactory ghost of chicken foot soup steaming up a windowpane, a warmth that seeps through the cracks of a brutally cold narrative. The East London artist has built a world here where the ambient comfort of a...