Five songs rooted in real places and real stories: a garage in Adelaide, a kitchen in Melbourne, a late-night kitchen table in California, a teenage bedroom in BC, and a London living room. Folk music made with something to say.
Lyndo Jaco – All Over Again
Lyndo Jaco makes the kind of pub rock that doesn’t fuss over polish: All Over Again is distortion-soaked, purposeful, and built to be played loud
This is a song that knows exactly what it is. Built on a driving riff and live-room energy, “All Over Again” belongs to the tradition of pub rock that goes right for the heart, doesn’t fuss over production polish or clever conceits. It’s about life’s achievements and the satisfaction of grinding through: simple stakes, simply stated. The whole thing feels like it was recorded to be played loud in a room with a pint or two in your hand.
Lyndo Jaco describes himself as a rock recluse tinkering in his garage south of Adelaide with guitars and drum kits, streaming the results to the world from Happy Valley. That’s not a marketing angle, it’s just the truth of how this music gets made. There’s no label, no co-writer, no production committee. Just a top bloke in South Australia doing his thing, with decades of rock and roll in his system. It’s a great single, with a lot of heart, and we love it.
Paul Louis Villani – Two Hearts
Paul Louis Villani turns an accidental love song into something genuinely disarming: Two Hearts is raw, warm, and more honest than most songs that try to be
The riff at the centre of “Two Hearts” is one Paul Louis Villani had been playing for years without a proper song around it. It took his wife walking past his Melbourne studio and telling him to stop singing stupid lyrics to unlock what the riff actually wanted to be: a beautiful country-leaning, bluesy love song about the friction and staying power of long-term relationships. The track opens intimate and builds into a full-band arrangement with bass, drums and layered guitars, landing somewhere between Chris Stapleton and Jason Isbell. The chorus was built to be sung along to, and I know this because I couldn’t help doing so myself.
Villani is a Melbourne-based multi-instrumentalist and producer who works across blues, rock, folk and whatever else the song asks for. He’s unapologetically DIY: no fixed lane, no interest in staying in one. He describes his writing as starting the same way every time, guitar in hand, chasing a feeling. “Two Hearts” is what happens when that feeling turns out to be gratitude and honesty rather than tension and darkness. It’s a more vulnerable gear than he often uses, and it suits him. Check it out below.
Becca Stefanson – How I Feel
Becca Stefanson is 17 and How I Feel already sounds like someone who has been doing this for decades: precise, tender, and harder to shake than it has any right to be
“How I Feel” is the lead single from Becca Stefanson’s debut six-track EP, Going Forward, Looking Back, released in April 2026. It was her first serious exploration of fingerpicking, and the discipline shows: the track keeps its instrumentation deliberately spare, building the emotional weight entirely through lyrical detail and Stefanson’s wonderful vocal delivery. The song was inspired not by personal experience but by the collected heartbreak stories of others, imagined from the inside. That remove gives it a particular kind of tenderness, less raw than confessional, more like a careful reconstruction of how loss feels.
Stefanson is 17, from Pitt Meadows in British Columbia, and has been writing songs since she was nine. Her influences run from Jeff Buckley and Stevie Nicks through to Clairo, Lizzy McAlpine, and Gracie Abrams, which is a reasonable map of where folk and indie songwriting sits right now. She placed as runner-up in the 2025 Young Songwriter Competition run by Song Academy, and has been a regular on the open-mic circuit in BC. For a debut EP, Going Forward, Looking Back is remarkably focused in its emotional range. We really love it.
Jean Noir – Long For This World
Jean Noir makes Long For This World earn every one of its six minutes: lap steel, Depeche Mode drums, Roy Orbison harmonics, and a song recorded at a kitchen table with a newborn in the room
“Long For This World” runs six minutes and makes a case for every single one of them. The song was written a cappella over sleepless nights with a newborn daughter, the opening melody captured on a laptop at a kitchen table, and that original recording survived into the final mix. What built up around it is architecturally ambitious: four-on-the-floor drums, squelchy analog synths, lap steel, castanets, stacked harmonies, and the wide-screen quality Jonny Black describes as drawing on Ennio Morricone. It hints at an ending at the three-and-a-half-minute mark, pulls back, and builds again into a final and wonderful surrender.
Jean Noir is the solo project of Jonny Black, who spent his twenties fronting cult-adjacent indie punk bands Them Terribles and Dead Country before stepping off the stage entirely to rehab old buildings into creative spaces for other musicians and artists. Years of watching how other people work reshaped his own approach. Canyon Prince, the EP this leads, trades guitar-driven urgency for something more spacious: ambient textures, faded Americana, and the mythologies of lost California bohemia woven with Black’s own family history. It’s a genuinely compelling listen, and i’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this artist.
Dimitri Delakovias – Shaking Off the Lies
Dimitri Delakovias has been carrying Shaking Off the Lies since his younger days, and that wait shows: this is a wonderful ‘old man’s’ song in the best possible sense
“Shaking Off the Lies” arrives with a clear ideological brief: Delakovias wrote the lyrics some years ago, steeped in the folk-rock tradition of questioning and resistance, then updated them and used modern production to bring the track to life. The song’s DNA is the 1960s protest tradition, the era of folk music as a vehicle for politics, and its target is the decades since: the capture of idealism by power, the dumbing-down, the comfortable numbness. It’s a cranky old man’s song, which is exactly what he calls it, and that self-awareness gives it an edge.
Delakovias was born in Laconia, Greece in 1950, emigrated to Australia as a toddler and grew up in Sydney, where the 1960s musical explosion hit him hard. His career took him far from music: art direction for ad agencies in Sydney and Athens, then a pivot to the BBC in 1982 where he was among the first artists to work on the Quantel Paintbox, pioneering digital matte painting techniques for productions including Doctor Who. He was part of the VFX team that won the Oscar for Inception. He retired in 2018 and returned to the lyrics he’d been carrying around since his younger days. “Shaking Off the Lies” is the wonderful result, a great track.