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Viktoria Kaufman Found Her Pulse in Folkloric Frequencies with the Electronica Debut ‘Heartbeat’

Heartbeat is the novelistic debut Viktoria Kaufman was destined to open with. The singer-songwriter found her sound in the intersections of electronica and folk; there, in the reverie of the uncharted territory, she planted the seeds to orchestrate her authentic brand of florescence. Paradoxically blossoming through synthesised melodies that carry all the naturalism and etherealism of traditional folk, complete with hypnotic oscillations and pulses of transcendent reverb, Heartbeat is a livable, breathable abstraction from the torn fabric of reality.

Her voice effortlessly aids escapism, but it’s her songwriting that turns every progression into revelation. Every chapter of this panoramic vignette tells a story forged in the tension of separation, belonging, and loyalty that beats louder in absence. There is no hollow performance here, only sincerity set to a celestial score. Kaufman set the bar high by wearing her heartstrings on her synths, but it would be foolish to expect anything but a triumphant return to mythic form with her sophomore single.

Born in Russia and now based in the UK, Kaufman used Heartbeat to preserve the emotional anchors she left behind. Slavic folk-inspired vocal layering underpins the devotion to her roots, while cinematic production shapes the sonic monument to soulmates distanced by time and fate. As her voice rises above the frostbitten ambient textures, she gives warmth to what the world often renders numb.

Heartbeat is now available to stream on all major platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mavi Veloso Queered the Pulse of the Club Scene ith ‘DLites’

Mavi Veloso smeared the club scene in erotic self-reclamation with DLites, taken from the seminal EP Her Blossoming Delights. After a glitchy intro that shakes you right out of your comfort zone, the dancefloor-ready revelation of mind-altering mantras versed through bilingual vocals starts to take hold around the experimental time signatures that ensnare you in the volatile rhythms.

Nothing is safe in DLites, and the innovative siren made that so much more than a design flaw. It’s a thematic device developed to disjoint the dancefloor as she embraces the cultivated chaos of a production that keeps the momentum pulsing through beats sharp enough to make trip-hop rhythms seem on an even keel.

As an anthem of liberation, DLites sensually caresses all the right spots while ticking every box expected from a voice as viscerally ungovernable and ideologically potent as Mavi Veloso. The club aesthetics become entangled with deeper cartographies of transfeminine desire and resistance, conjuring a mythos rooted in personal power and mythic decadence as DLites unravels.

Pulling threads of influence from Brazilian trans icon Cláudia Wonder and reworking her immersive performance art project Her Delights into a sonic manifesto, the Netherlands-based Brazilian polymath made DLites a space for both radical disorientation and rooted liberation. From the deconstructed vocals to the layered glitches and baile funk ruptures, Veloso makes you question where your body begins and the beat ends.

DLites is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Falc1 Transformed Romantic Reverence into a Desert-Born Swell of Emo-Folk in Desert Tears

Falc1 delivered a duskily dreamy indie folk serenade with Desert Tears, a reverie-wrapped love letter that lays it all on the line. With a clever and measured integration of 80s-esque reverb in a future-forward and genre-fluid arrangement, the track transcends style. It finds its definition in the resonance that reverberates between the acoustic and emotional architecture of the single.

The lyrics move like an impassioned swarm of poetry through the synchronicity of piano and acoustic guitars, amassing visceralism with every progression until the crescendo of amplified emotion. As that wave crests, it stings like a heartbreak vignette, but nothing is lost in the swell. The reprising admission of “I love that you’re mine” becomes a primal mid-western emo cry, soaking every syllable with soul and all the contradictions that come with love held tight through doubt and clarity.

Based in Toronto, Falc1 is no stranger to breaking moulds. With over 60 tracks to his name and a loyal audience built from the ground up through TikTok, he’s become a vital voice for the fans who live between genres and crave substance more than spectacle. Desert Tears proves he’s not trying to fit into a movement. He’s making his own. With new tracks landing monthly and momentum only building, Falc1 is an artist not just to keep on your radar, but to keep in your headphones on repeat.

Desert Tears is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

GISKE Cast Stillness in Soft Light Through the Nostalgic Lilt of ‘Light Upon the Water’

Light Upon the Water is an invitation to float with the melodious flotsam of an emotive indie folk serenade. With this radio-ready release, GISKE envelop you in a nostalgic approach to production, where every instrumental and vocal note resonates with intention. The arrangement rushes nothing. Everything arrives exactly when it needs to, lifting you from the weight you didn’t realise you were carrying.

This one is for the dreamers. The ones who strive to find beauty in the periphery, but especially within the worlds that affection and connection open. Light Upon the Water draws from classic 70s singer-songwriter introspection to hold a mirror to what’s missing in your world, filling that space with layered harmonies that lull you into a soft-focus, psychotropic trance.

Born from the lifelong collaboration between Rune Berg and Alex Rinde, GISKE carries the spirit of a shared past on the remote Norwegian island they both called home. Their bond, rooted in bike rides and first songs, evolved through the years and musical incarnations, culminating in their second album, Ten Visits, Ten Songs. Each track was shaped during visits between Oslo and the island, becoming a testament to endurance, loyalty and the kind of connection that time doesn’t dilute.

Light Upon the Water captures that unspoken language between people who have never stopped creating together. It holds space for stillness without letting silence take over.

Light Upon the Water is now available to stream on all major platforms, including YouTube.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Megan Wheeler Held a Mirror to the Price of Connection in the Shoegazey Pop Reverie of ‘Acceptance of You’

Megan Wheeler is on a home run of hit singles in 2025, and Acceptance of You proves she’s not ready to slow the momentum. After turning heads with Now That I’m Gone, she put her own stamp on a contemporary pop ballad shaped by trip-hop-esque beats and shoegazey dream pop guitars, raising the bar for innovation in the indie pop arena. With space carved out for experimentation in the instrumental arrangement, her glassy diaphanous vocal register consoles with classic indie pop grace, ethereal in all the right places, longingly impassioned in all the rest.

Wheeler paid justice to the emotional architecture of the track, which explores how acceptance often arrives as a bittersweet revelation. One that gifts us freedom and loss in the same breath. As messy as the dynamics between two imperfectly entangled people, yet as clean cut as a diamond in the rough, Acceptance of You is a profound account of the cost of connection and the resilience needed to live with the fallout.

Originally from St. Petersburg, Florida, Wheeler’s roots stretch from Nashville to Ireland, and her writing has carried emotional weight since her 2020 debut, Replaced. Now in full control of her creative direction, she continues to forge an authentic path as a singer-songwriter who values emotional candour over surface-level sentiment. Acceptance of Yo umarks a striking high point in her evolution, driven by maturity, clarity and a refusal to compromise.

Acceptance of You is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Ben Withers Poured Lyrical Grace into the Pressure Cooker of Modern Life with ‘Take It Easy’

The latest lyrical outpouring from Ben Withers takes the 00s indie pop rock aesthetic and translates it into an emotionally augmented ballad for the contemporary airwaves. With endless depth and weight, Take It Easy is literally and figuratively a force to be reckoned with. Beneath the euphonic arrangement of diaphanous orchestral notes and a grounding rhythm section lies a plea for softness; for the grace of pacing. This isn’t about nostalgia or superficial sentimentality. It’s about hitting the wall and needing the world to pause.

The lyrical underpinnings tear into the pain of being pushed by your limit, and honestly, that speaks to the collective emotional bandwidth of just about everyone right now. Brighton-based Ben Withers knew exactly where to strike. With a sound sculpted by influences that stretch from Celtic mysticism to cinematic folk to alternative rock’s rawer roots, he builds a space where escapism meets confrontation. His atmospheric touches bring levity without glossing over the emotional wreckage beneath.

Originally from Witney, Oxfordshire, Withers channels the introspective edge of folk with the expansive energy of pop rock and the intimacy of acoustic storytelling. He has crafted a sonic signature that isn’t interested in fleeting hooks. Take It Easy is built to linger, to pull you back in long after the final chord has faded.

Ben Withers may not be the most popular Withers the industry has seen… yet… but he has all the potential to be.

Take It Easy is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Mahathi Malladi Threaded Longing Through Orchestral RnB Pop Tension in ‘Say It’

With her debut single Say It, Mahathi Malladi didn’t need to obliterate the mould to command attention. She took the familiar structure of a pop ballad and redefined it with precision, poise and a quietly devastating emotional undercurrent. By weaving orchestral motifs into a contemporary RnB-pop soundscape, she carved a delicate, resonant tension that carries the weight of unanswered questions and unvoiced desires. Her vocal agility and lyrical candour ensure that every note lands with intent, never falling into decorative excess.

Raised in New Jersey after being born in India, Malladi channels the duality of first-generation experience into her music without resorting to overexplanation. Her voice alone holds enough force to skate across any beat, but she refuses to coast. She shows her hand as a triple threat by keeping the songwriting honest and the delivery emotionally immersive without crossing into indulgence. The push and pull within Say It is not only written into the lyrics but lives in the sonic fabric of the track. From the layered production to the poised progression, nothing feels accidental.

Malladi’s return to music after a period spent exploring identity and mental health gives this release weight. There’s a reason this debut hits differently — it doesn’t posture or overreach. It holds space for the ambiguity of affection and the ache for clarity with self-awareness and maturity. Say It captures a specific emotional stasis with a tone that guides rather than overwhelms, offering a rare example of sincerity sharpened into something commercially viable without compromise.

Say It is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

High-Beta Scattered Lo-Fi Stardust Across Existential Desolation in ‘Sky in the Absence of Ground’

High-Beta

High-Beta, the solo moniker of Manchester-Leeds-based producer James Bebbington, poured celestial introspection into lo-fi electronica with Sky in the Absence of Ground. Lifted from the newly released LP Under Streetlights, which officially landed on June 6th, the track threads retro textures into a spatial meditation that defies weight and structure, both sonically and thematically.

The title alone reads like a line stripped from a Sylvia Plath verse, but the weight of the sentiment doesn’t drift unanchored. Bebbington instils meaning with every progression. His decision to forgo emotive restraint results in a vocal performance that invites the listener into the raw nerve of the track’s core. The harmonies hang in a state of arrest, teetering between the comfort of familiarity and the disorientation of cosmic detachment.

With High-Beta’s signature minimalism acting as an emotional accelerant, the lo-fi aesthetic never overshadows the intent. Instead, it creates a porous membrane through which vulnerability seeps, saturating the keys with aching sincerity. There’s a nostalgic ache in the melodic resolve, yet it avoids indulgence.

High-Beta offers more than sound; this is a broadcast from a psychological and emotional elsewhere, an aural artefact transmitting what remains in the air when the certainties of gravity collapse.

Discover High-Beta on Bandcamp and Instagram.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Through the Noise by Kaleita Scored the Fractured Frequencies of Modern Life into Sonic Clarity

Kaleita

The inaugural strike from Kaleita, the solo alias of the UK-based, Italian-born guitarist and composer Filippo Faustini, refuses to skim the surface of sonic expression. Through the Noise creates its own altitude above generic genre lines, dissecting the post-rock landscape with a methodical precision and a deft hand in ambient experimentation. Faustini’s disquieting guitar tone smoulders through a brooding cinematic prelude before spiralling into a controlled implosion of texture, timbre, and tonal grief.

The composition stays emotionally articulate as it decays and reforms with haunting clarity. The cello work from Maya Mc Court adds weight to the gravity Kaleita generates by tuning the strings of existential dread into something that doesn’t buckle under its own contemplation. Each instrumentalist works in service of the storm; nothing feels self-serving, every element is meticulously placed to hold space for the commentary within.

Underneath the cultivated composition lies a thematic excavation of contemporary disorientation. Climate anxiety and digital dissonance ripple through the accompanying visual narrative, but Through the Noise never drowns itself in abstraction. Instead, it filters the chaos through a lens of raw human sensitivity. In doing so, Faustini doesn’t just score for the now, he sets a new standard for what experimentalism can evoke when anchored by intent and executed without ego.

The track’s crescendo reaches beyond sound design into cinematic emotionality, inviting those who still listen closely to embrace the signal within the interference.

Through the Noise is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Bandcamp.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Inamorata Refracted Unspoken Reverence Through a Prism of Power Pop in ‘Rainbow’

True to its title, Inamorata’s latest single, Rainbow, is a kaleidoscope of colour, filtered through the prism of power pop nostalgia. Echoes of the Psychedelic Furs ripple through the verses before the choruses erupt in vibrant guitar-driven fervour. Even with its lo-fi aesthetic, nothing gets lost in translation. The textures may be frayed at the edges, but everything within the mix rings with clarity, framing singer-songwriter Ramses Bulsara as one of the most affectingly uplifting evocateurs of his generation. If your world is lacking colour, you know exactly where to find it with this release.

Beneath the punchy chords and fluorescent hues lies an emotional nucleus few would expect. Rainbow is not a romantic confession, it’s a secret sent out into the ether. A love letter without a name, written in solitude, addressed to Daniela Villarreal of The Warning. The admiration lives in the subtext, buried in the late-night recordings and the soaring refrains. Bulsara never dared to send her a message. Instead, he gave the world this track, hoping it might drift into the right ears.

It’s a bridge built between continents. A sonic thread stretched between Jakarta and Monterrey, wrapped in admiration and vulnerability, but never veering into self-indulgence. His longing never asks for reciprocation. It simply asks to be heard.

Rainbow is now available to stream on all major platforms, including Spotify. Connect with the artist and find your preferred way to listen on Instagram.  

Review by Amelia Vandergast