ROCK

Mark Emsley is a UK singer-songwriter making melodic, guitar-driven rock and pop-rock built around big choruses and honest lyrics. A lifelong musician with a background working throughout the music industry, Mark returned his focus to writing and recording his own material after getting clean and sober in October 2024. Working…

Rusty Reid approaches Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now” with the kind of restraint that lets a beloved classic remain exactly what it was meant to be: joyful. Taken from Reid’s album Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters), his rendition resists the temptation to dramatically reinvent the song, instead…

The Bastas Project turns sleeplessness, pressure, and quiet endurance into something electrifying on Heavy Machinery, an eight-track melodic rock album released August 11, 2026. Its central image is brutally simple: an industrial press descending on something small that still manages to glow beneath it. That tension runs through the record,…

Sam Stokes’ The Tale of Gaia is an album about arriving, forgetting, hurting, laughing, forgiving, and eventually remembering. Across nine tracks, Stokes turns the relationship between humanity and Earth into something both cosmic and deeply intimate, following an innocent soul as it discovers the beauty and cruelty of being alive…

Mister Chorister turns an accusation into an inward confrontation with “You’re Not Listening,” a tense alternative-rock track that asks what happens when the voice we keep ignoring is our own. Released September 11, 2026, the third chapter in Christopher Scott Brammer’s project moves through frustration, fear and emotional suppression before…

Some albums are made to introduce an artist; others are made to keep someone’s memory alive. David Moore’s A Wink Is As Good As A Nod To A Blind Mule belongs firmly to the latter camp. Released August 24, 2026, the Knox City artist’s twelve-track album is an affectionate tribute…

Noah James Mass is the kind of independent artist who prefers the fingerprints of real rooms and real instruments over anything too polished for its own good. Writing, producing, and performing his own material from his self-owned studio, the alternative-rock songwriter builds around organic dynamics, analog grit, and arrangements that…

Edinburgh has long had a taste for music that can make darkness feel strangely alive, and Pray Silence seems more than happy to lean into that tradition. The Scottish rock outfit, formed around singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Marky Wildtype and singer, songwriter and multidisciplinary artist Sam Siggs, arrives with a…

I Plead Irony have spent roughly two decades making music together, but This Monologue Conversation is proof that some things take their sweet time. Ten years in the making, the trio’s third album arrives carrying plenty of heavy questions about humanity, conformity, fear and self-destruction, yet it never sounds like…

Last Night Watchman’s Old Blighty is the work of a songwriter looking backward. Shaped by reflections on mortality, history, human behavior, and the relentless movement of time, the EP finds something quietly profound in everyday existence. The project is primarily a solo endeavor, with former Noseflutes bandmate John Horton, aka…