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BEYOND THE TREND!

Cherine Abulwafa
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BEYOND THE TREND!

Music has a funny relationship with trends. We spend so much time trying to identify what is next that we sometimes forget that good music does not always care about timing. Krey Galin’s My Plan is an interesting example: written years before its K-pop associations became obvious, these songs managed to remain relevant without changing themselves to fit the conversation around them.

Released on 20 February 2026, My Plan arrives with years of history behind it. Originally conceived simply as a pop record, the project was written before K-pop became the global phenomenon it is today. As time passed, however, listeners began hearing K-pop sensibilities in the songs, giving the project an unexpected connection to a musical movement it was never deliberately trying to follow; and that is where My Plan becomes particularly interesting. The music existed first. The trend came later.

At the heart of the EP is “My Plan,” the track that started the journey, with key contributor Emerson helping shape its beginnings. Recorded in Georgia, the project has had an unusually long life, with the songs repeatedly catching people’s ears in the studio even as years passed; and as its creators put it, the songs never got old; they did.

That sense of time and patience becomes part of the project’s identity. Rather than rushing to release music while a particular sound was fashionable, My Plan was allowed to remain in development until it found its way into the world naturally. There is something refreshing about a project that does not seem desperate to prove its relevance.

The EP also takes its central idea across languages, moving through “Nae Gyehoek,” “Meus Planos,” “Mai Puran,” “Wo de Jihua,” and “Phlaen Khong Chan,” before returning to “My Plan” through a remix. This multilingual approach reinforces the project’s international character, fitting for an artist from Recife, Brazil, whose creative process has grown through cross-cultural collaboration and experiences beyond a single musical environment.

Still, the K-pop comparison is best understood as context rather than definition. The songs did not change; the world around them did. What was once simply pop could later be heard through a different musical vocabulary.

Krey Galin’s My Plan feels like a reminder that music does not always need to chase the moment. Sometimes it can wait, evolve, and find its relevance on its own terms. Because trends move on. But good songs actually stay!

A VOICE FOR WHAT WAS NEVER SAID..

Cherine Abulwafa
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A VOICE FOR WHAT WAS NEVER SAID..

We often meet people at the end of their story.

We see the decision, the consequence, the mistake, the sentence; but rarely the years that came before it. Roger K’s “Please Don’t Put It on Me” asks us to look backwards, towards the childhood pressures, instability, and fear that can shape a person long before they have the agency to understand what is happening to them. It doesn’t excuse what comes later. It simply asks: what if someone had listened sooner?

Written entirely from a child’s perspective but delivered through an adult voice, the song feels almost like an inner-child therapy session. Its central plea is simple: “Please don’t put it on me / Don’t you know I can’t breathe / All this weight controls me / Let my spirit be free.” There is exhaustion in those words, but also a quiet sense of hope, because finally saying what was once impossible to articulate can itself become a form of release.

Roger K surrounds that vulnerability with cinematic darkness. Ominous orchestration, spacious textures and soulful vocals meet alternative R&B, low synths and a restrained trap/drill-influenced rhythm. The half-time pulse gives the production a physical heaviness, while the wider choruses create space around the song’s desire for freedom. There are echoes of Labrinth’s theatrical scale and Jacob Banks’ atmospheric weight, but the track ultimately feels grounded in Roger K’s own genre-fluid approach.

The accompanying self-directed animated visualiser extends the narrative through imagery inspired by Banksy’s public work, moving through childhood, authority, conflict and displacement. It reinforces the song’s larger question: what happens when children are made to carry consequences created by adults?

Roger K wrote, arranged, performed, produced, mixed and mastered the entire record, giving “Please Don’t Put It on Me” a cohesive, personal quality.

“Please Don’t Put It on Me” is less interested in easy answers than in making an unheard voice audible. Roger K gives that voice room to breathe, and leaves us wondering who might have listened if it had spoken sooner..

Album: A Cup of Cordova by DJ CBee SUPREME

Abdelrahman Khaled
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Album: A Cup of Cordova by DJ CBee SUPREME

Memphis producer DJ CBee SUPREME, founder of Impeccable Taste Productions and a name behind work connected to GloRilla, La Chat and Harley-Davidson Canada, along with a 2024 Memphis Hip Hop Award for producing “Big Freak 4,” turns his attention to something much more local on his new eight-track instrumental album, A Cup of Cordova. Out September 8th, the project is built entirely around the growing coffee, café and bakery culture of Cordova and greater Memphis, with individual tracks pulling direct inspiration from real neighborhood spots like Belltower Coffee, Rollin Café, Shipley Do-Nuts, Sweet Eye Coffee, and BIGGBY Coffee. It’s a genuinely specific concept for an instrumental record, less a generic lo-fi mood board than a musical map of an actual community, blending lo-fi hip-hop warmth with Memphis jazz and West Coast-leaning production throughout.

My three favorite tracks on the album are, incidentally, three songs in a row in the middle of the record. “Oh, Dessert!” is an incredible beat; the wah guitar line dances back and forth against a huge sub bass, and it’s so bouncy it’s genuinely addictive to listen to. “Sweet Eyes in Cordova” has a lovely melody that feels like a Michael Jackson song in how vocal it is, with those repeated notes; if you imagine MJ singing this melody, it clicks immediately, and the harmony is so smooth that it fits perfectly with the idea of falling for a pair of sweet eyes. “Big Beans at Biggby” carries an incredibly soulful melody that’s reminiscent of something familiar without being able to place exactly what, but it will absolutely get you moving.

That run through the middle of the album is a good showcase of what CBee SUPREME is doing across the whole project, taking a concept that could easily have stayed surface-level, coffee shop as vibe, and giving each track enough of its own identity that the businesses behind them feel like genuine inspiration rather than a marketing gimmick tacked onto beats that would exist anyway. The instrumentation stays warm and unhurried throughout without ever feeling static, which tracks with an artist whose catalogue already spans hundreds of tracks and work across film, TV and advertising, someone clearly comfortable building mood rather than chasing hooks.

A Cup of Cordova succeeds as exactly what it sets out to be, a snapshot of a specific place and its specific rituals, translated into music that works whether or not a listener has ever set foot in Cordova, Tennessee. For an instrumental record built around something as everyday as a coffee run, it’s remarkable how much personality CBee SUPREME manages to pack into eight tracks, and the album stands as a strong argument that local culture, treated with this much care, can carry a project just as well as any bigger concept could.

Like A Villain by KahMenCents

Abdelrahman Khaled
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Like A Villain by KahMenCents

Tulsa’s KahMenCents, who goes by “The VibeMaster,” built “Like A Villain” around a beat by Wayne Brain he stumbled across on BeatStars, one that pulled up a memory of a cinematic late-night conversation with a woman from California, the kind of moment he compares to Ice Cube’s “Today Was A Good Day.” The title itself comes from his grandfather, known on CB radio as “The Dream Master,” whose go-to line whenever they’d talk on the phone was that he was “chilling like a villain.” Recorded at The Vibe Lab DFW with producer Al-B, the song leans hard into the West Coast hip-hop sound that shaped KahMenCents while he keeps one foot planted in his Texas roots.

The instrumental is doing most of the work here, and it’s real vibey, built around a soulful bassline rooted in old-school melodicism rather than just stacking hard-hitting 808s and calling it a day. That choice pays off. The beat carries enough warmth on its own that it’s easy to just lay back and let the good vibes the song is going for actually land, rather than needing the vocal to do all the heavy lifting. KahMenCents calls his whole approach “musical cannabis,” music meant to relax and uplift a listener whether they partake in anything or not, and on the strength of this instrumental alone, that pitch tracks.

That laid-back mood pairs with a message about faith and staying grounded through hard times: the idea that rain signals growth rather than setback, delivered in lyrics that are intentionally simple rather than reaching for complexity. It’s an approach built for accessibility over technical showing-off, and between the smooth production and the sincerity behind the concept, “Like A Villain” comes across as exactly the mood-elevating listen KahMenCents set out to make.

Tensions by Hans T

Abdelrahman Khaled
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Tensions by Hans T

Estonian-born, Perth-based producer Hans T drops “Tensions” on September 10th, a track he’s described as his most experimental to date. He went in without a time limit or any self-imposed rules, chasing whatever felt right in the moment, drawing on Sub Focus, Kanine and the Australian drum and bass scene that’s shaped him since relocating. Despite the dubstep tag attached to this one, it sits closer to that Australian dnb lineage in practice, built around a metallic, driving bassline running underneath heavy but euphoric leads, moving quickly from its opening into a tight, compact build.

There’s no way to sit through this without getting pulled along. The track pushes forward with real momentum, the pacing is sharp throughout, and the sound selection is genuinely excellent- the kind of choices that make a track feel intentional rather than assembled from whatever was lying around the sample folder. That intention comes through sonically too. Hans has said his goal is to make music people scream along to, just as other artists’ work has carried him through hard moments, and that desire to give listeners a sense of freedom is audible in the way the track is put together. It’s a wholesome aim, and one that resonates with me personally.

At 22, with 14 years of DJing and eight years of production behind him, plus time in the military that he credits with the discipline to keep pushing on his own terms, Hans T has clearly put in the work to back up the ambition. “Tensions” reads as a genuine statement of where he’s at as a producer right now, unrestrained and confident enough to follow an idea wherever it goes, and it’s easy to see this one connecting with a lot of people beyond just the dnb crowd he’s speaking to directly.

ROMANCE IN CHROME!

Cherine Abulwafa
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ROMANCE IN CHROME!

Genre boundaries become increasingly meaningless when an artist is more interested in building an atmosphere than fitting neatly inside a category. SPACE3GHXSTX’s “RX78 Type” is a good example of that instinct: part Dark Wave, part Hybrid Trap, part Alternative R&B, and entirely committed to its own futuristic mythology. The track takes the weight of trap, the sensuality of R&B, and the visual language of cyberpunk and lets them collide around one central fixation: desire for something impossibly perfect.

“Stay awhile… Your eyes shine so bright” immediately introduces a surprisingly human vulnerability into the track’s otherwise futuristic world. Beneath the glossy production and mechanical imagery is attraction, fascination, and the simple desire for someone to stay. Yet SPACE3GHXSTX refuses to express that feeling conventionally. Instead, the object of desire becomes a “heavy metal goddess,” a “lethal 78 model,” a Porsche 911 GT R-type, a perfect hologram.

“You R my type, RX-Type” becomes the natural culmination of that obsession: catchy, repetitive, and almost programmed into the listener. Hypnotic 808s give the track its physical weight, while cinematic synths create the feeling of moving through some neon-lit, futuristic city long after midnight.

More than anything, the song’s strength lies in the consistency of its world-building. The cyberpunk aesthetic isn’t simply decoration layered over a trap beat; it shapes the song’s language, metaphors, and emotional logic. Desire becomes machinery. Beauty becomes engineering. Attraction becomes something almost technological.

Between the coldness of the production and the intensity of the longing, SPACE3GHXSTX finds its sweet spot. “RX78 Type” isn’t simply genre-blending. It is a carefully constructed transmission from a world where romance has been rewritten in chrome!

EVERYTHING THAT’S LEARNED, SOMEWHERE NEW!

Cherine Abulwafa
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EVERYTHING THAT’S LEARNED, SOMEWHERE NEW!

There is a strange kind of freedom that comes with starting again; not from nothing, but from everything you’ve already learned. Brannen’s “Tulips (Original Mix)” carries some of that feeling. As the first release under the Brannen name, it represents a new chapter for a musician whose relationship with music began long before electronic production, through years of playing drums, singing, performing, and experimenting with sound.

That history is audible in the track’s relationship with rhythm. Rather than treating the beat as a technical foundation, Brannen gives it room to breathe and move, bringing the instincts of a live musician into a melodic-house setting. Deep grooves sit beneath warm synths, atmospheric textures, and gradually unfolding melodies, creating something that feels polished without losing its human pulse.

“Tulips” doesn’t rush towards an obvious payoff. Instead, it builds through accumulation, allowing each layer to quietly reshape the atmosphere. Influences from the likes of Ben Böhmer, Marsh, Lane 8, and Yotto place the track within the deeper, more emotive side of contemporary house, but Brannen’s musical background gives those familiar textures a personal grounding. The result feels equally suited to an immersive DJ set or a late-night headphone listen.

There is something fitting about that patience. After years of performing and developing his electronic production, this isn’t really a beginning from scratch; it is the point where different parts of a musical identity finally begin to converge.

Maybe that is what makes Brannen’s “Tulips (Original Mix)” feel less like an introduction and more like an opening door. The track doesn’t claim to have arrived at a final destination. It simply offers a glimpse of what happens when everything you’ve learned is given somewhere new to grow; and sometimes, that is where the most interesting music begins..

The Inheritance by Keesha Blair

Abdelrahman Khaled
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The Inheritance by Keesha Blair

Keesha Blair‘s “The Inheritance,” out August 20th through her own Divine Purpose Music, started as a song of gratitude for her mother and grandmother before widening into something bigger: a meditation on what gets passed down between people that has nothing to do with money. Love, wisdom, strength, compassion, the way someone chooses to live- all of it counts as inheritance here, and the recurring line “we all add to the pot” sums up the idea plainly: everyone receives something, contributes something, and leaves something behind for people they may never meet.

It’s worth noting up front that the vocals on this track are AI-generated, which Blair states plainly in her own credits rather than leaving it to be discovered. This genre is built so heavily on live human feeling, soulful, gospel-rooted R&B, and the voice usually carries the weight of the message, so for me this is a bit of a difficult pill to swallow. Setting that tension aside for a moment, the song itself holds up. Blair’s musical direction is strong, the harmonies land exactly where the song needs them, and the arrangement supports lyrics that take gratitude seriously as something people have to actively practice rather than just feel. It’s polished enough that listeners who don’t share the same reservations about AI vocals in this kind of material with me will likely find plenty to connect with here.

Whatever side of that debate a listener falls on, “The Inheritance” is clearly a considered piece of songwriting, built around an idea worth sitting with rather than a hook chasing a trend. Blair’s broader work through Divine Purpose Music centers healing and emotional honesty, and this one fits that mission clearly, even if the method behind the voice is still something the genre as a whole is working out how to feel about.

she’s COSMIC light by M & J

Abdelrahman Khaled
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she’s COSMIC light by M & J

Bondi duo M & J are known for a chilled, acoustic, lyric-driven sound built around the Australian coastline they call home, so “she’s COSMIC light,” out August 1st, marks a real departure: a full dance anthem where they’ve usually leaned acoustic.

The song’s origin is as personal as anything in their catalogue: on New Year’s Day in Bondi, one half of the duo watched his girlfriend Beatrice take in a sunrise over the ocean and call it “cosmic light,” and the phrase stuck as both the title and the subject, an ode to the kind of person who feels like they’ve arrived from somewhere else entirely. The cover art, shot by the duo themselves as always, captures that exact sunrise.

The vocal treatment is what stands out first, carrying a texture reminiscent of Monolink, filling up a good amount of sonic space while still sitting forward and clear in the mix. That works especially well here given how sparse the rest of the arrangement is; there’s no crowd of competing instruments to fight through, so the vocal has room to actually do its job. The result is a genuinely well-crafted feel-good track, the kind that works in a lot of different settings: a drive with friends, a low-key party, really just about anytime you want something warm and easy without it feeling throwaway.

For a duo stepping outside their usual lane, “she’s COSMIC light” doesn’t feel like a stretch so much as a natural extension of what they already do well: personal storytelling wrapped in a genuinely infectious package. It’s a strong sign that M & J can move between moods without losing what makes their songwriting connect in the first place.

Interview with cae

Mena Ezzat
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Interview with cae

Birmingham, Alabama’s cae is carving out a lane entirely his own. The experimental rap and bedroom pop artist — already boasting over 50,000 listeners across platforms and 15 million plays on breakout track “Crave You” — returns with “Alt Girl Encounters”, released February 23rd, 2026. A deeply personal, lo-fi, psychedelic journey through heartbreak, dissociation, and sonic reinvention, the nine-track EP was born from a period of transition, a breakup, and an obsessive deep-dive into electronic and rock influences that pushed cae’s production and vocals into bold new territory. Raw, futuristic, and willfully abstract, this is music that moves like a big cat through tall grass — and it’s just the beginning. We sat down with cae to talk about the EP, the process, and where he goes from here.

  • “Alt Girl Encounters” was made during a breakup and a deliberate break from releasing music — you turned to skating, new electronic and rock influences, and production experimentation to get through it. Looking back now, do you think the album could only have been made in that specific headspace, or do you think you could have arrived here another way?
That’s a great question, I’m not really sure id like to think I’m some mega brain songwriting god that can create perspective and emotion from nothing but realistically no I don’t think i could’ve I think going through stuff while you’re in the moment unlocks something for us in our brains
  • You’ve described this EP as the first of many releases incorporating a more raw rock-rap style — blending the fluidity and expression-driven quality of rock vocals with your rap foundation. What specifically did you hear in the rock and electronic music you were absorbing that made you want to bring it into your own sound?
I think the way people react to a hard bar or like a crazy flow in rap is how i react to some things in electronic music, the artist just does something and theres just like an inexplicable feeling thats just like hmm in your stomach. the main reason i started incorporating it into my personal music though was just to add more stuff that i liked into my diet and also im a producer first so i produce a bunch of genres already but rarely get to use them
  • The tracklist — “b4u”, “dreamt abt u”, “ur my fav artist”, “r u ai”, “ihu” — reads almost like a stream-of-consciousness text thread. How much of the album’s emotional and stylistic language comes from the way this generation actually communicates, and is that intentional as part of the aesthetic?
 Yes it is intentional, in my head theres an entire universe around this album and me being from this generation its obviously gonna be very modern and gen-z coded or whatever you will call it, but its definitely meant to tap into a more childlike state of myself while still talking about things that im going through 
  • You write, produce, and perform everything yourself. When you’re building a track that blends lo-fi textures, electronic soundscapes, melodic vocals, and whispers all at once, where does a song typically start — and how do you know when it’s finished?
People who’ve been watching my live streams for a while probably have seen the huge folder full of samples i want to try to use, typically it starts there. i listen to a bunch of music from different genres and whenever i hear something catchy and sampleable i just have like a song playing in my head of how i want to use it and add it to the folder sometimes i try to record voice memos and write notes just so i dont forget the ideas
  • You have 15 million plays on “Crave You” and a growing platform — but “Alt Girl Encounters” feels like a deliberate artistic step sideways rather than a calculated follow-up. How do you think about the relationship between what your existing audience expects and where your creative instincts are taking you?
i agree there is definitely some whiplash there, i dont usually think about the relationship that much i believe it kind of all connects in a more fractal way. my music hasnt always tried to sound like this but the lyricals, style, voice, influences, etc have always been there even crave you follows the “text thread” like language that you mention and that was years before and it also talks about love and romance etc but it definitely does that in a much different way so i do see the point i just trust that the supporters can learn to appreciate that kind of thing and can connect the dots
  • You’ve mentioned a deluxe edition with more polished versions of this style coming later this year. What does “more polished” mean to you in the context of music that thrives on rawness — and what else is in the creative pipeline for cae in 2026?
For me more polished means better mixing lol, im terrible at mixing and mastering my own projects its just something i’ve neglected so i want to get better at that and deliver the music how it deserves to be heard. im also working on music videos and still making more music for the next release album. thanks so much for the interview these were great questions.

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