Worst Punchline is the debut single from Norfolk-raised, Manchester-based artist Lottie Gray. Lottie draws her musical inspiration from folk and Americana and, when she writes, she expresses her innermost thoughts and emotions.

Worst Punchline is a song that confronts guilt, fear and self-reflection with discerning directness. “When I wrote Worst Punchline, I didn’t play it to anyone for weeks,” Lottie explains. “I’d just listen back to the
voice note on trains, buses or walks. It felt different, like I’d been more honest with myself than ever before. I think I’d always avoided being that direct in my writing, but this song didn’t really give me a choice. When I finally brought it to the band, it felt like a turning point. It’s the most honest I’ve ever been and singing it live feels like letting go of something I’d been holding onto for a long time.”

The most striking feature of Worst Punchline is Lottie’s warm, endearing voice. She sings her lyrics: “I might be the worst punchline, but I still laugh about it…” with passion, soul and commitment. The sound is well-balanced and the contrast between Lottie’s strummed acoustic guitar and the full force of the band is remarkable. Worst Punchline is catchy and refreshing and is surely the harbinger of great things to come. Lottie Gray is a name to watch…

It’s always a pleasure when Italian/Australian folk performer Bity Booker comes a-knocking. Her songs – whether they spring from the fountain-head of her own imagination, or whether they’re taken from tradition and reworked in a way that only Bity understands – never fail to charm. Last year’s EP – The Frog, The Mouse, The Ship, The Cabin Boy was a 2025 highlight. And, now, Bity’s back.

New single, Love is Like a Swallow in the Spring, is Bity’s celebration of everyone’s favourite season. Inspired by the swallows that, every year, build a nest in the beams of Bity’s parents’ house in Umbria, it’s a song that only she could come up with. Her guitar is picked softly, but its tone sparkles and, as always, something magical seems to happen when her voice comes in. Bity’s lyrics compare the fickle, fleeting nature that love can often assume with the short duration of the visiting swallows’ stay: “It comes and goes like a swallow in the spring.” And the REALLY good news? Bity Booker will be releasing an album on 5th June. Now that will be something special – watch this space…

Sitting In The Dark is the second single from Hannah’s forthcoming EP, Threads (due 19th June). It follows Hannah’s March release, In Your Light – a song that thrilled us into describing it as: “A wonderful song – tender, poignant, melodic and beautifully sung.”

Written in 2022, Sitting in the Dark draws on Hannah’s experience of renting flats in London over a 15-year period. In particular, it homes in on the final two weeks she spent in her Ealing flat, when none of the lights were working, despite a six-figure annual rental she was paying.

She pulls no punches. There’s a justifiably sardonic tone to her voice as she sings lines like: “The rental system’s broken, as everybody knows, but London really knocks it our the park. Once they’ve taken half your income, no-one cares that it’s your home – that’s why I’m sitting in the dark.”

The music as brash and vibrant as Hannah’s lyrics, with guitars, bass and drums sparkling, and Hannah’s voice is clear and tell-it-like-it-is fresh. Another excellent song from Hannah Scott! Reflecting upon the release, Hannah expresses her hope that the song will resonate with those who have had to endure the same dilemma: “If sitting in the Dark adds even a small voice to the wider conversation about the cost and condition of renting in London, then it’s done something meaningful. These experiences are far from unique and they deserve to be heard.”

If it has been nigh on six years since any new from Massive Attack, and a good deal longer since Tom Waits has roused himself into recording, it thus a double whammy that this bumper collab should drop so suddenly and unexpectedly. OK, it seems the constituent parts have been knocking around the Bristol collective’s studio base for some time, with the vocals collected some years back, but, disregarding that, this is new, exciting and worth the wait.

In the shorter version, some typically dense percussion patterns open the proceedings before some funereal piano chords unravel slowly in the background. All of a sudden the unmistakeable gargle of Waits galumphs into a rhythmic hornpipe. The lyric clearly of reference, as is the tone, to current events, it is the sound of an army in a quick step march, Waits providing a propulsive chant to galvanise morale. It couldn’t really stray any further from the tried and tested Massive Attack MO, and, even f the piano strays a little close to the theme from Luther, so be it.

The 4 minute version comes also extended to near twice that, agitated breathing and found sound as bookends, and an extended dystopian sense of disarray at the centre, along with a disarming prolonged pause. A less easy listen, each exist to complement the other, not least as the intent is to, at least, cause alarm. Welcome back!

If you already thought Ghedi a dark and unnerving force beforehand, boy has he upped that sense of malevolent wyrd….. Black Metal is a genre we are familiar with, but here’s Black Folk, with all the death walks among you vibe you could ever scream for.

“I wanted to push the sound even more heavier, chaotic almost like capturing the sound of destruction, as things are collapsing around us“, says Ghedi, and this is a further missive from from the same sort of wasteland that informed his 2025 album of that name,

A translation of a German poem, The Procrastination Song, the lyric remains as prescient as it ever was, the story of a starving child, who’s pleading for food and told to wait until it’s too late. Thunderous backing and treated vocals take Ghedi’s vision of folk music deeper into the void, yet simultaneously retaining all the demands of a living tradition, if more brooding, darker and electronic than previously. One fears quite where he may tread next.