Gentle Riley: Oxford’s Soft-Volume Visionary Who Keeps Accidentally Reinventing Regret
Vince Cheetam rarely introduces himself as Vince Cheetam. He prefers Gentle Riley, a stage name he once described as “a warning not to expect anything robust from me.” He says it with a straight face, which makes it funnier, and possibly truer, than intended. Oxford has always produced its share of overthinkers, and Riley is delighted to continue the tradition.
Laid Nerfon: The Quiet Beatmaker of Weed Who Hears Weather Systems in His Sleep
If you take the I-5 north until the billboards thin out and the pines get tall enough to blot out half the sky, you reach Weed. It is a small Californian town that has learned to live with the jokes, the T-shirts, and the road-trippers who stop for photos then flee. Laid Nerfon did not flee. He arrived. He stayed. And somewhere between the rumble of the freight trains and the sawmill dust drifting over toward Mount Shasta, he found the sound that has now made him the internet’s favourite introvert.
Savage Dalliance: The Manchester Mystic Who Brought Trance Back From the Brink
For all the sunsets, influencers, and sachets of powdered disappointment that clog Ibiza’s arteries every summer, there are still a few artists who keep the island weird. Savage Dalliance is one of them, and she seems faintly irritated by the fact. She moved here a decade ago, chasing the usual house gigs, the all-nighters, the off-season hustle. It was supposed to be temporary. Nothing lasts longer than something that was supposed to be temporary.
Quiet Ruin: Reading’s Fast-Talking Merchants of Beautiful Gloom
Quiet Ruin should not work. On paper they are a contradiction wrapped in a fog machine: a Reading-based trip hop collective who make downtempo elegies full of movie dialogue, deteriorated vinyl hiss, and synth lines that sound like they drifted through a dream and got lost on the way out. Yet the band themselves behave like a comedy troupe who have been accidentally assigned to soundtrack global heartbreak.
The Gentleman Futurist: Inside Julien Mercier's Mind
DAVOS, SWITZERLAND — Julien Mercier is apologizing for the coffee. Not because it's bad—we're in a private salon at the Steigenberger Grandhotel Belvédère, and the coffee is excellent—but because he's noticed I've nearly finished my cup and he hasn't offered a refill. "I'm terrible at this," he says, already signaling to the attendant. "My mother would be horrified. She always said Americans think the French are rude because we forget the small kindnesses."