Jonah Holliday

Sponsored It’s just past midnight, and I’m sitting in my dimly lit living room, feet propped up on—fittingly—a couch cushion. A record should be spinning, but instead, The Couch Cushion EP by Olivia Valentine is running through my headphones. A glass of something sits sweating on the table, half-forgotten. Outside, the wind rattles the trees, and for the first time in a while, I feel like I’m hearing something that wasn’t made to fit neatly into the machine.

Sponsored Breakups are rarely as clean as we’d like them to be. We tell ourselves we’re fine, that we’re happier than ever, but in the quiet moments—when a song plays, when we see their name pop up, when the past creeps in uninvited—it’s harder to believe. Holden.’s debut EP, Happier Without Me, wrestles with this exact contradiction: the need to move on, the fear that someone else is doing it better, and the uneasy truth that closure isn’t always a neat, linear process.

Sponsored Some albums capture a moment. Others feel like they’ve been waiting to be heard for years. Crises of Willpower, the debut album from San Diego-based band Simians, is one of those rare records that carries the weight of both time and experience. Written by songwriter Simon Breen in his early twenties, these songs sat on the shelf while life pulled him in different directions—across continents, through the Peace Corps, into environmental work, and away from music entirely.