Superfuzz

Petrozavodsk's Forest Fire has three tracks and behaves like three different machines left running in the same burning warehouse. Porto and Barcelona-based "heavy drone trio" refuses the usual album-shape civility and somehow gets more exciting because of it. "Forest I" throws Container, aka Ren Schofield, into the amp-room and lets him boil the guitars down into rave-sludge locomotion, hot and rubbery and grossly alive, like a basement PA developing amphibian lungs. Then "Forest II" changes the weather completely: blackened guitar hanging there like damp iron, low thrusts repeating until the room starts to list, a snare apparently being hit from the far side of a valley or the bottom of a municipal well. "Fire" is the long drone collapse that feels architectural. Three approaches, one blaze.

Unity's "3 Weeks" is Oakland DIY heart-force cut into hooky, anthemic 90s indie rock, Jeff Cheung's skate-crew cartoon tenderness suddenly standing at the mic with everybody yelling back. First taste from the group's second album for Smoking Room, it hits like curb-scuffed community electricity: bright guitars, gang vocals, feelings big enough to make the halfpipe look like a church basement.

Death Kneel's Remembering Well has Max Klebanoff (who's also the drummer in Tomb Mold), dragging his solo practice into a huge, hyper-detailed stereo chamber where the smallest scrape feels like it has been granted architectural permission to bleed. Built from impromptu recordings, handheld devices seemingly either carried in the change pockets or thrown through empty parking lots, and binaural microphones catching the rooms breathing back, this is high-definition damage music: not lo-fi confession but spatial autopsy, every crack and shift pinned in place like evidence. The wide stereo field is the killer here, a head-worn panic theatre where near-contact rustle, electrical bruise and distant concrete weather keep swapping scale until the whole thing starts to feel like surveillance footage developing a nervous system. There is a sick tenderness inside it too, the kind that makes the violence feel less performed than discovered, as if Klebanoff has found some private corridor between body-noise collapse and after-hours urban dread and decided to leave the door open. Remembering Well is intimate in the worst/best way, a record that gets close enough to fog the glass, then reveals the glass was inside your skull all along.

Regina Collage's Horizont is bedroom pop from Bristol by way of Kharkiv, Ukraine, an underground signal pulled through borrowed studios, bass wire, guitar scraps and an exposed voice that refuses the soft-focus exit. The standout is "Vpiznavaty", where the thing gets brutally plain: post-punk bass walking in the dark, voice close enough to fog the glass, carrying that same severe spell as Carla Dal Forno's "I'm Going Out" - minimal, unshowy, completely possessed. Elsewhere the songs sag into cloudy dissonance and tender shame, like a bedsit radio developing border-static homesickness. The title's horizon sits there as a cruel line, never arriving, sky and earth withholding contact. Horizont hurts because it stays open.

The Chutes' self-titled debut catches Kenneth Turner of San Francisco punk legends Fentanyl and his wife Erika flipping the hardcore basement inside out into seven cuts of bright, bruised jangle-pop. All C86 nerve, Sarah Records ache and Slumberland fizz, it treats romance, nostalgia and dismay like a sugar bowl full of broken glass - twee as matrimonial emergency lighting, glowing sweetly while the walls fail.

god of war is Douglas Dulgarian of They Are Gutting A Body of Water and members of Hooky sliding out of the blown shoegaze wreckage and into something softer, lazier, weirder, still wired to the same pleasure-centre prank. Pop songs and melancholy instrumentals are turned into glitchy mid-2000s bedroom drift, all MTV afterglow and console-menu heartache. It has that odd catchy TAGABOW thing, but with the drop-tuned concrete and Slint worship removed, leaving pure Y2K carpet-fuzz euphoria. Little melodies loiter like they forgot why they came in. A sweet, busted, electronic slacker-pop side, grinning through the loading screen.