Jawdropped formed in 2024 from the wreckage of multiple LA DIY-scene runs — all four members are on their second, third, or fourth go-around with this band thing. That experience shows not in polish but in efficiency: co-vocalists Kyra Morling and Roman Zangari tumbled into slacker harmony almost immediately on the 2025 Just Fantasy EP, and Secret to Spare, their debut album (out 18 September), sounds like a band that knows exactly what it wants to be and has stopped apologizing for the scale of it. The album's subject matter is aggressively unglamorous: day jobs, house shows, routine disappointments, keeping your head above water. The Line delivers the righteous jangle of peak Lemonheads with enough force to make plate-spinning feel triumphant. Monday's snaking melodies ride gnarly power chord scuzz in the Bob Mould/Sugar tradition — not imitation, but genuine fluency in a grammar. Split Lip's lilting chorus lands the album's thesis line: 'Sign us all to a major label / It doesn't always work out.' It doesn't. The record doesn't pretend otherwise. The rest of this week's playlist covers considerable ground. Shygirl's Alyse combines Bat for Lashes' crystal-ball balladry with cybergoth club production at Madonna's William Orbit-era scope — a genuine tonal surprise from the south Londoner. Fontaines DC's Marianne continues Grian Chatten's run of cinematic gloom, the chorus ('I can help you disappear') dangerously alluring rather than merely moody. Wild Pink's Still Coming Down lands in the Jason Molina Americana tradition that apparently has significant purchase among alt rock's current leading lights. Actress's Withending builds around a synth refrain that undulates like kelp in deep water, grounded by kick drum and haunted by vocal sprites — intricate and genuinely strange. Heavens to Betsy's unearthed demo Ain't Never Goin' Back features a teenaged Corin Tucker, future Sleater-Kinney, in a Modern Lovers-adjacent recording that the newly reunited riot grrrl legends are surfacing now. Lover1k's On My Own delivers exactly what its description promises: club music in the 'withering woman sounds deathly unimpressed by you over crude beats' tradition. Teenage Fanclub's There Was You is Norman Blake doing what Norman Blake does — gently baroque, wistfully melodic, a tribute to those people who always offer a port in a storm. The playlist runs the full distance from sun-bleached LA powerpop to baroque Scottish pop in eight tracks, which is the point.
