The week’s essential new singles, also including Gem Stark, Vegetable and Friendly Fires.

Los Bitchos – ‘Holding Cell (with Ambrose Kenny-Smith)’

Tasking themselves with ensuring that the sunny times remain, even through the rainy seasons, London-based outfit Los Bitchos are back with new single ‘Holding Cell’, which heralds the November release of their third full-length record ‘Los Bitchos & Friends Vol 1’. A psychedelic odyssey intertwined with soundscapes from the Mega Drive-era – side-scrolling through 16-bit lands, storming castles and battling sword-wielding skeletons and ghouls – the track is a fuzzy, riff-loaded affair. It also features guest vocals from one of the busiest people in music, Ambrose Kenny-Smith of Murlocs and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard fame. His signature raspberry whiskey-soaked croon is a glorious serenade for this psychedelic-battle anthem. Quite the pivot from the breezy, cumbia beach flavours Los Bitchos are mostly known for, but a magnificent one all the same. Long live Los Bitchos! (Brad Sked)

Sarah Meth – ‘Don’t touch me you’re my hero’

Sarah Meth announces her eagerly awaited debut album with new single ‘Don’t touch me you’re my hero’. The track combines some of Meth’s key hallmarks: candour, intimate delivery and a deceptive impression of pop effortlessness. Lyrics confront the power dynamics women are forced to navigate within the workplace, as intensified by the context of relationship-based creative industries. Meth subverts the discomfort and constriction she has felt within this paradigm by calling out particular examples and, as in the case of the titular case, turning them into playful and catchy refrains. As says of the song, ‘Women are told not to make a song and dance of these things… I guess this is me saying ‘Why not!?’ (Lloyd Bolton)

Stanley Welch – ‘The Future of My Heart’

Stanley Welch, the Glasgow-based, Cornwall-raised, London-frequenting piano-toting baroque-pop troubadour has been grafting away for some time now. His first release appeared in early 2022 opening up that year’s Slow Dance Compilation. There’s been EPs, singles, and even an album since, plus a quick google reveals he even has his own Cafe Oto artist page (perhaps the coolest thing anyone could put on a dating profile). He’s also opened for the likes of Truthpaste and Black Country, New Road, and latest single ‘The Future of My Heart’ definitely belongs in that orchestral/indie world where ornate arrangements and whimsical lyricism vye with catchy, stuck-in-your-head indie-pop splendour. Lyrically dense, while keeping light and breezy like an automatic door, Stanley’s return also looks like a case of making up for lost time too. He’s about to release a double album in December called ‘Songs For Women’, and one half of it is a musical. (Elvis Thirlwell)

Gem Stark – ‘Penguin Random House’

London-based songwriter Gem Stark has been steadily building up a reputation for intricately written songs elevated by transportive vocal delivery. ‘Penguin Random House’ makes for a thematically appropriate debut single for an independent artist, weighing as it does the fate of the rich imagery enumerated in the verses. Could this work destined be for somewhere in the order of the titular publishing company or only ‘the rats in my wall’, and is the difference really of any importance? Fans of Stark’s live sets will recognise the fingerpicked core of the song, which is here complemented by tastefully restrained accentuations on fiddle, melodica and banjo. The single comes ahead of the release of debut EP ‘A Dog Called Indifference’, due out this October. (Lloyd Bolton)

Vegtable – ‘Stay’

Tuned into the lucid ruminations of the small hours, headphones blasting in a fortress of home comforts as the vastness of human feeling somehow squeezes into the tiny confines of your bedroom, Vegtable’s ‘Stay’ is a masterclass in the understated magic of less-is-more. Hailing from Singapore, some say the emerging trio are the best slowcore band in the whole country (although that might be due to the genre’s scarcity in the small island nation’s incredibly close-knit indie scene). Their new single ‘Stay’ – released this week via unlikely Yorkshire imprint Field Work Recordings – strikes the perfect balance between clean, angsty guitar aloofness and wonky harmonic dissonance that hits you right in the guts (in a very good way). A rain-on-the-windows, arms-folded, hoodie-up banger. (Hazel Blacher)

Friendly Fires – ‘Lose All Your Friends’

Not succumbing to the washed up, half-baked, 80th-studio-album integrity death that has claimed so many 21st century heritage acts, Friendly Fires have thoroughly restored our faith in the staying power of our formative late-noughties favourites on their stone cold heater of a return single ‘Lose All Your Friends’. Drawing on the baggy psychedelic grooves of artists like Primal Scream or Happy Mondays – a sound that has been making a bit of a resurgence of late – on the duo’s first single in nearly 8 years, they lead us into the sweaty throng of the crowd towards euphoric release and uplifting synthesis in the company of strangers. Commenting on their return, the band says: “Sometimes you have to lose everything to start again. Embrace the chaos. Take a chance. Don’t be afraid of change.” (Hazel Blacher)