A lot of new releases have landed over the last few weeks that deserve more than a passing scroll. Here’s what’s worth your time.
Newport – ‘Fickle’
Newport is a singer, songwriter and producer out of Perth, Western Australia, and ‘Fickle’ is a bittersweet, nostalgia-soaked reflection on a messy past relationship, the kind of song that holds onto good memories even when the relationship itself wasn’t. Newport has said the track came together almost by accident, in a single sitting: ‘I was watching YouTube with my guitar plugged into the amp, just playing around with chords, until I landed on something that felt really good.’ He’s described finishing it as feeling like a reward for taking the time to actually work on himself. The accompanying video leans into a warm, late-afternoon beach setting that suits the song’s mood perfectly.
Sasha Alex Sloan – ‘Fun’
Sasha Alex Sloan has spent years as one of pop’s go-to voices for brutal honesty, from her breakout writing and feature work (including Kygo’s ‘I’ll Wait’) through to her own run of confessional albums about depression and heartbreak, most recently 2024’s independently released Me Again. ‘Fun’ is the latest in a steady stream of standalone singles she’s been putting out this year, following July’s ‘Glitter’ and August’s ‘Empty’, both made with her regular collaborator and husband, King Henry.
Knox – ‘Better Than Me’
Knox is an alternative singer-songwriter from New Carlisle, Ohio, drawing on the kind of 2000s emo-pop lineage that runs through Fall Out Boy and The All-American Rejects. ‘Better Than Me’ is a defiant post-breakup anthem aimed at an ex who took his love for granted, built on the idea that they’ll eventually realise what they lost. It’s the lead-in to his sophomore album, My Midwest Best, out 2 October, which Knox has described as ‘the culmination of all the music I grew up listening to and all the music I learned how to make along the way… a representation of where I’m from and what it sounded like growing up in the middle of nowhere, Ohio.’ Fittingly, the video was shot back home in a backyard jam session with friends.
JP Saxe – ‘Someday’
JP Saxe first broke through with 2019’s ‘If the World Was Ending’, his duet with Julia Michaels, and has spent the years since building a genuinely independent career, including publicly crediting a cancelled tour with relaunching things on his own terms rather than derailing them. ‘Someday’ is the newest addition to that stretch, arriving a little over a year on from his two-part album era, which kicked off with Articulate Excuses.
ashe – ‘Funeral’
Ashe is a pop artist whose sound leans on classic songwriting touchstones, from The Beatles to Queen, and who’s just coming off her biggest solo opening yet with ‘Stop the Wedding!’. ‘Funeral’ takes the opposite emotional angle: a love song that finds comfort rather than fear in mortality, framing a partner as someone who’ll be there right to the very end, the one who ‘will be the last speech at my funeral.’ It’s set to feature on her upcoming album, The Girl of Your Dreams, out 16 October.
Jamie Miller – ‘Baby Doll’ feat. Antonio Cipriano
Welsh singer-songwriter Jamie Miller is back with ‘Babydoll’, his first new material in around two years, and it’s already taken off: the track has driven a TikTok dance trend picked up by the likes of Jennifer Love Hewitt, Julianne Hough and Lucy Hale. It’s a song about the vulnerability of actually letting someone in, co-written with two of his closest collaborators. ‘I wrote this with two of my best friends who always saw something in me that I didn’t see in myself,’ Miller said of the session. The featured vocal comes from Antonio Cipriano, the US actor and singer who originated Phoenix in Broadway’s Jagged Little Pill.
Juna – ‘Missing You (All of the Time)’
Closer to home, Wellington four-piece Juna are less than a year into their career and already closing out their debut EP with ‘Missing You (All of the Time)’, a song about the messy, no-one’s-really-to-blame aftermath of a first breakup. Told from two perspectives within the band, it was inspired by drummer Hayden Lam’s own split. ‘We wanted to capture the feeling that sometimes there is no right or wrong,’ the band said. ‘Sometimes you are just not right for each other, or sometimes you outgrow somebody.’
DYLAN – ‘to love and to lose’
UK pop artist DYLAN returns with her first new music of 2026, a track she’s described as sitting somewhere other than the usual heartbreak song. ‘Not about heartbreak or rage, but something quieter and more unsettling,’ she said, explaining it was written ‘at 2am in a cab home from a party when I couldn’t find a song quick enough that matched the emotion I needed to heighten’ – the emotional numbness that can follow real pain and loss. It arrives ahead of her forthcoming debut album.
Jack Gray – ‘Swimming in Jeans’
Queensland-raised, LA-based Jack Gray has spent the past few years touring with Tate McRae, Maren Morris and Jeremy Zucker, and ‘Swimming in Jeans’ is the title track of his debut album, out now via Island Records Australia. The title works as a metaphor for staying afloat through hard nights, more about emotional survival than anything literal.
Florence Road – ‘7563’
Irish four-piece Florence Road, shortlisted for BBC Radio 1’s Sound Of 2026 and fresh off an Irish Airplay Chart No. 1 with ‘Hanging Out to Dry’, have released ‘7563’, a soaring track about feeling estranged from yourself. ‘This song means the world to us,’ the band said. ‘For anyone with the strange feeling of becoming a stranger to yourself.’
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