Lick of Paint – Kenton Hall & The Necessary Measures

With ‘Lick of Paint’, Kenton Hall & The Necessary Measures deliver a baroquely playful, razor-sharp blow against those circles of power that hide their brutality behind a veneer of etiquette. The song sounds like a polite reception, yet beneath the velvet simmers a system that makes deals, exercises control and makes critics disappear. The irony of having nothing to hide becomes a running gag of an apparatus that appears all the more corrupt the more innocent it pretends to be. The eponymous ‘coat of paint’ is no whitewashing, but pure cosmetics: a thin veneer over moral rot. Musically, the track shimmers between indie-pop wit, baroque exaggeration and precise observation. A song like a polite smile that doesn’t quite hide the teeth.

Around – Throes NYC

With ‘Around’, Throes NYC carve a rougher path through the night: a track that doesn’t seek to shine, but rather to smoulder. The late-night club hours aren’t romanticised here, but presented as a vibrant state of emergency – flashes of light cutting into the face, bodies losing themselves, a head spinning far too fast. The figure at the centre stumbles through this frenzy, yet finds their strange footing precisely there. Nothing is clean, nothing is smooth: only flickering memories, a room that tilts, thoughts that warp. And yet this state draws you in, like a dark magnet. Between the throbbing bass and the dim light, a longing grows for a place where mistakes briefly vanish and only the tender moments remain. Around is not a polished club track, but a pulsating interstice – raw, vulnerable, full of restless energy.

Rain – Forgotten Garden

‘Rain’ draws its darkness directly from the music: a track that, rather than telling a story, conveys the sensation of how a person slowly crumbles under the weight of their own misjudgement following a break-up. Mel D’s bass – heavy, oppressive, almost physical – sets the tone and keeps the song in a constant, suffocating pull. Danny layers guitars and dark synth veils over it, which feel like a dense sky offering no escape. Inês Rebelo anchors the emotional core: in the verses, she feels her way cautiously through the wetness; in the chorus, her voice becomes more urgent, almost ghostly, as if capturing the moment when it becomes clear that the man in the song has overestimated himself. Here, the rain is not a metaphor, but a state that permeates every note.