Atwood Magazine is excited to share our Editor’s Picks column, written and curated by Editor-in-Chief Mitch Mosk. Every week, Mitch will share a collection of songs, albums, and artists who have caught his ears, eyes, and heart. There is so much incredible music out there just waiting to be heard, and all it takes from us is an open mind and a willingness to listen. Through our Editor’s Picks, we hope to shine a light on our own music discoveries and showcase a diverse array of new and recent releases.

This week’s Editor’s Picks features Grace Inspace, lucky break, Josaleigh Pollett, Mal Not Bad, Isaac Neilson, and Sybil Creek!

 follow EDITOR’S PICKS on Spotify

Sun-soaked, twangy, and deliriously inviting, “Blurry” drifts in like a heatwave with the windows down.

Crunchy, glistening guitars, a laid-back beat, and a loose lo-fi shimmer give the song its hypnotic sway, while Grace Inspace and JDM Global sing with the giddy ease of two people discovering that love can be safe, strange, funny, and completely transportive. Dreamy without floating away and heartfelt without losing its grin, “Blurry” has been one of the defining songs of my year – an intoxicating reverie that makes everything beyond its orbit disappear.

“I was staring at you like someone haunted / Couldn’t tear my eyes away, if I wanted,” Inspace sings, letting a trace of nerves flicker beneath the song’s ease. The chorus names the spell plainly: “Everyone gets blurry to me around you.”

Released in February via TODO Records, “Blurry” appears on Grace Inspace’s sophomore EP, Heavy Hair. Grace Inspace is not an invented moniker, but the artist’s real name – Grace Inspace Garner – and it suits the fantastical, lightly surreal world she creates. LA-born and London-bred, she grew up moving between places with her artist parents and developed a fascination with memory, movement, and the stories we impose upon ordinary life.

I was staring at you
like someone haunted
Couldn’t tear my eyes away, if I wanted
I didn’t know it could be easy, did you?
Now I’m constantly nervous,
I have something to lose

I’m in the backseat
singing loud with your mother
Do you wanna be best friends?
Every other day together

“I make music for people that stare into space and pull fantasy over their reality until everything feels suspended in reverie,” Inspace tells Atwood Magazine. “I want you to turn on my music and escape into my fantasy journalism. If you let me, I’d love to be the unreliable narrator in the soundtrack of your life – the one who romanticizes the small moments and turns them into something cinematic.”

“Blurry” is one of those small moments enlarged until it glows. Inspace wrote it during what she calls a “particularly golden summer,” while Josh Mehling – aka JDM Global, of indie pop band Shelly – was subletting a Los Feliz home with a pool. Her days blurred into writing, swimming, and sizzling beneath the California sun. Mehling sent her the groove that became the song’s backbone, and by the time she reached his place, nearly all the lyrics had arrived.

“We were both in similar places in our relationships – new enough to be giddy, but grounded enough to know it was real,” she explains. “It was the first time I’d experienced that kind of blissful ease – falling for someone I felt genuinely safe with. There wasn’t chaos or confusion. Just warmth.”

That warmth radiates through every second. “Blurry” feels relaxed, but never passive; its groove rolls forward with a lazy confidence, the guitars glowing and scuffing at the edges while the vocals lean into each other. The track carries the summery nonchalance of ’90s Beck and Sugar Ray, but Inspace and Mehling bend those touchstones into a world of their own – lightly psychedelic, gently country-flecked, and full of playful romantic tension.

Everyone gets blurry to me around you
Everyone gets blurry to me around you
I’ve been nervous to say it
But I’ve been sitting on love
You can give me your moods ’cause
Everyone gets blurry to me around you
Around you

Inspace had never written a love song before, and she refused to make one that drowned in sweetness. The slightly warped textures, conversational phrasing, and flashes of humor keep “Blurry” alive to the imperfections that make intimacy exciting.

“I’ve always loved juxtaposition in music,” she says. “That laid-back, lo-fi backdrop felt like the antidote to sentimentality. It keeps the sweetness from getting too polished. I think that’s what I admire so much about that early Beck music – he’s so good at mixing sweet and sour. Warm vocals against crunchy guitars, something tender sitting inside something slightly off-kilter.”

“That contrast felt right for ‘Blurry,’” she adds. “Because even in the dreamy softness of falling in love, there’s texture. There’s humor. There’s imperfection.”

The lyrics revel in that imperfect closeness. “I’m in the backseat singing loud with your mother / Do you wanna be best friends? / Every other day together,” Inspace sings, collapsing romance, friendship, family, and domestic ease into one charming rush. Mehling later answers from the other side of the story – “Made quite a show, I can be crazy ’round you / But you’ll take me as I am / I take you as you” – making the song feel communal rather than solitary, a shared celebration of being received without disguise.

(Josh)
I was running from you
like someone haunted
And returned from miles away
Like you wanted
Made quite a show,
I can be crazy ’round you
But you’ll take me as I am
I take you as you

This acceptance was transformative for Inspace. Before meeting her partner, she had assumed romance was meant to leave her anxious – that attraction came with frayed nerves, instability, and the need to brace for impact. Their first meeting stretched on until the coffee shop closed, but what stayed with her was not volatility. It was relief.

“My ‘Blurry’ experience felt like the edges of my life softening,” she reflects. “The logistics were still there – work, friends, responsibilities – but they lost their sharpness. Everything felt warmer, slower, like the world had been dipped in honey.”

“That’s the blur for me. Not losing myself, but relaxing into something that felt safe enough to stop squinting at.”

Come take the front seat
Screaming loud at your mother
Do you wanna be best friends?
Every other day together

This distinction gives “Blurry” its depth. This is not a song about disappearing into another person. It is about being loved so gently that the world no longer demands constant vigilance – about lowering your shoulders, loosening your grip, and letting joy take up space. The nerves remain because there is now something precious to lose, but they no longer overpower the pleasure of being there.

“I went straight to my partner’s house after writing the song and played it to him, as my low-stakes way of saying I loved him,” Inspace shares. “Cut to two years later, and he helped produce out the track.”

“‘Blurry’ is really a time capsule of that summer. Of safety. Of sunlight. Of that slightly surreal, glowing feeling when everything is new but nothing feels unstable.”

That glowing time capsule occupies the tender center of Heavy Hair, a six-song record shaped by love, upheaval, friendship, and survival. Its title reaches back to a drawing Inspace made at seven years old: a girl whose hair dragged along the floor, burdened by emotions too vast and dense for her body to carry. Decades later, that image returned as an invitation into the stories and accumulated weight she had been holding.

The record took on even greater significance while Inspace was finishing it. The Eaton Fire left her home uninhabitable, while long COVID radically changed her relationship to her body. What began as a focused creative chapter became shelter amid rupture – made alongside the people closest to her, including Mehling, Luna Li, and twin brothers Parker and Marshall Mulherin.

“This project became my port in a storm,” she says. “Making it with the people I love most – and finally releasing it into the world – feels cathartic and surreal and immeasurably joyful.”

Across Heavy Hair, Inspace moves between surreal humor, romantic longing, resentment, fear, and release. “Helium Balloon” hovers between demon and daydream; “Meteor” watches the sky from a borrowed windowsill; “Emergency Contact” stores resentment in heavy hair; and “Keeper,” completed during the fire evacuation, reaches for closeness while acknowledging the private darkness another person cannot enter.

“Blurry” provides the light – not as an escape from that weight, but as proof that softness can survive alongside it. Its sweetness is alert, knowing, and fully earned. Inspace understands the danger of mistaking cruelty for care, which is precisely why this song’s ease carries such force.

“With ‘Blurry,’ I hope people recognize that softness doesn’t mean naivety,” she says. “That falling in love can feel safe and effortless and still completely transportive.”

This is the magic coursing through “Blurry.” It makes safety sound seductive, ease feel exhilarating, and love resemble a summer afternoon suspended outside of time. Warm, wondrous, loose, and utterly enchanting, Grace Inspace’s sun-drenched reverie invites us to stop squinting and surrender to the glow.

Everyone gets blurry to me around you
Blurry
Everyone gets blurry to me around you
Blurry
I’ve been nervous to say it
But I’ve been sitting on love
You can give me your moods ’cause
Everyone gets blurry to me around you
Blurry around you

Twangy, sun-dazed, and utterly intoxicating, lucky break’s “Camp Song” has been a constant companion for months now, and a staple of my summer.

Its easy country sway is hypnotic – acoustic guitar and a warm, winding melody circling lyrics that tug between the restorative freedom of the woods and the harder person she believes she must become beyond them. Dreamy, stirring, and irresistibly catchy, it casts a spell without ever raising its voice.

When I leave this town
Gonna get real tough
All the things I said
That’ll be enough
Was a sweet young thing
Now it’s all grown up
When I leave this town
Gonna get real tough

Released earlier this year, “Camp Song” now appears on lucky break’s debut album, made it!, out now via Fire Records. lucky break is the musical project of singer/songwriter Emma Gerson, a San Francisco-via-New York artist who grew up between the Bay Area and New York and has been writing songs since her early teens. Created with friend and co-producer Elliott Woodbridge and mixed and mastered by Jessica Thompson, the eleven-track collection draws country and pop into the orbit of ‘90s alternative rock, reflecting the music Gerson grew up with while leaving ample room for her own instincts to roam.

made it! gathers songs written between the ages of 19 and 23 – a period of first love and heartbreak, relocation and return, new jobs and abrupt exits, friendships that endured and others that slipped away. Rather than forcing those years into one tidy coming-of-age story, lucky break preserves their uncertainty: The terror and exhilaration of realizing that life has opened up before you, even when you have no idea where to go.

“These songs are a little snapshot of how I navigated my ‘coming of age’ – my first time falling in love, moving to a new place, getting a job. Then ending that relationship, moving back home, quitting that job,” Gerson tells Atwood Magazine. “I think it introduces me as someone who was – and still is – doing everything they can to follow their inner compass, regardless of all the circumstances that might make that difficult.”

“Camp Song” looks back to one of the places that helped calibrate that compass. Written during a long walk in the Michigan woods while lucky break was working as a counselor, the track returns to the Midwestern summer camp she attended growing up – a place where nature and community offered another way of moving through the world.

When I leave these woods
Be a city rat
Don’t need no soil
No garden patch
Was a good light girl
Now there ain’t none of that
When I leave these woods
Be a city rat

“‘Camp Song’ is about a summer camp I grew up going to in the Midwest,” Gerson explains. “That place taught me that people are meant to be in community.”

The song begins by imagining departure as an act of hardening. “When I leave this town / gonna get real tough,” lucky break sings, later trading soil and garden patches for the life of a “city rat.” The transformation grows colder and more severe with every verse: dirty hands washed clean, the heart discarded, living reduced to “antiseptic eyes” and the mechanized distance of a bot. Her delivery remains light and lilting, but the lyrics carry real emotional stakes – the fear that surviving elsewhere may require abandoning the softness that made you whole.

The chorus makes that conflict deliciously strange: “I ain’t gonna take any of that sunshine with me / all it ever does is bring me down.” It sounds defiant, funny, and quietly heartbroken all at once. She insists she can leave the light behind, yet every repetition makes her attachment to it more obvious. “Camp Song” understands how often we rehearse toughness before crossing a threshold, trying to convince ourselves that what we love will only slow us down.

And I ain’t gonna take
any of that sunshine with me
All it ever does is bring me down
I ain’t gonna take
any of that sunshine with me
Just leave it here for now

“You know when you go somewhere in nature, maybe camping, or on a hike?” Gerson says. “And you’re like, ‘Wow, I don’t want to leave and go back to civilization.’ That feeling is what this song is about.”

The promise of return finally breaks through that armor: “When I get back / let it all melt off / be that little child / that I once was.” New beginnings may demand courage, but lucky break refuses the idea that growth must erase wonder. The woods remain a place of renewal – somewhere the performance of toughness can fall away and the younger self can step forward again.

That emotional push and pull comes wrapped in a sound that slips freely between country, Americana, alternative rock, and indie pop. Nothing about the combination feels calculated; the twang, dreamy atmosphere, and pop immediacy move together as naturally as sunlight passing through branches. That fluidity is central to lucky break’s vision for the project.

“I love music, and I want to – in some way – ‘give back’ to music as best I can,” she reflects. “I want to find a little gold nugget and share it with everyone who cares. I think this requires me to experiment, to play, to keep growing. So if the sky’s the limit, I’d like to go to space, hahaha.”

When I leave this land
Gonna get real hard
Wash my dirty hands
Throw away my heart
Antiseptic eyes
I could be a bot
When I leave this land
Gonna get real hard

And I ain’t gonna take
any of that sunshine with me
All it ever does is bring me down
I ain’t gonna take
any of that sunshine with me
Just leave it here for now

Across made it!, that spirit of experimentation accompanies a young songwriter steadily learning to trust herself. “Crush” translates burnout, consumerism, and romantic collapse into a heated emotional rush; “City Lights” offers a love letter to San Francisco’s literary culture; and “If People Could Fly” drifts through Los Angeles with breezy, free-associative charm. The record’s styles and moods shift, but its inner compass remains fixed on attention – listening closely enough to recognize what nourishes you, what diminishes you, and when it is time to move.

“It’s worth it to just feel everything,” lucky break says of the story running through the album. “And to really listen in, to pay attention to what those feelings are trying to tell you. In my experience, that’s the best way to figure out where you’re supposed to be.”

“Camp Song” makes that philosophy sound wonderfully inviting. It is a gentle anthem for anyone caught between the person the world asks them to become and the self that comes alive beneath open skies. Twangy, enchanting, and endlessly replayable, lucky break’s summer reverie leaves the sunshine exactly where it belongs – waiting for us whenever we find our way back.

When I get back
Let it all melt off
Be that little child
That I once was
But until then
Solid as a rock
When I leave this town
Gonna get real tough

Sweltering, smoldering, and soul-stirring, Josaleigh Pollett’s “The Witness” burns with the heat of a confession that can no longer stay private.

Drums churn beneath glowing guitars and electronic pressure, while Pollett’s voice surges with desperate, radiant force, transforming the need to be seen into a physical pull – a flare in the blood, a hand reaching through the dark. By the time they cry, Tell me I’m right / Tell me you like it, the song has stopped asking politely. It demands recognition.

Ask a complicated question of the witness –
I think that he is here with us
I keep feeling like I’m getting to the party
just when everyone is leaving

I don’t need an audience for every feeling,
But god I know this one I do
I can see why you are doing what you’re doing,
I can see a part of me in you

“The Witness” sits at the blazing center of Pollett’s fourth album, If I Let It Quiet, released July 24 via Audio Antihero and Lavender Vinyl. Written and performed with longtime creative partner Jordan Watko across Salt Lake City and Osaka, the twelve-track record stretches their well-established marriage of intimate songwriting, organic instrumentation, and electronic world-building into its most spacious and fully intertwined form yet.

For Pollett, songwriting begins with the hope that honesty might make the bewilderment of being alive a little easier to carry. “My music is an attempt at making sense of the world around us,” Pollett tells Atwood Magazine. “An attempt at an outstretched hand to make people feel a little less alone. In my own personal experience, being a human being is the most bonkers thing that will happen to any of us. It’s incredibly confusing, joyful, sticky, gross, hilarious, and absolutely devastating.”

Could it be that we arrived at truer places,
once we stopped following the map?
Couldn’t arrive at myself without you –
maybe you could feel like that?

That outstretched hand drives “The Witness.” Written several months after Watko relocated to Japan, the song emerged alongside sweeping changes in Pollett’s relationships, sense of self, and understanding of what connection could look like beyond familiar roles. Its central realization is simple but enormous: To be seen, held, and understood, we must learn to offer that same attention outward.

“I don’t need an audience for every feeling / But god I know this one I do,” Pollett sings, balancing self-awareness against an almost unbearable hunger for affirmation. The verses move through missed arrivals, emotional absence, and unstable identity, but the chorus erupts with naked directness: “Will you tell me that I am a good person / and take me out when I fight it?” The desire is not merely to be praised. Pollett wants someone close enough to witness the performance, recognize the resistance beneath it, and refuse to look away.

Tell me I’m right
Tell me you like it
Will you tell me that I am a good person,
and take me out when I fight it?

Say what you mean
To hide it is violent
All the people that I told all my secrets
now just stare at me in silence

“I had just deleted my Twitter account and ended a relationship where traditional gender roles were completely dismantled, and it really opened up so much for me and how I view myself and want to be perceived by other people,” Pollett explains. “I was leaning on platonic friendship so much and just reveling in the feeling of being loved by people who had seen and understood so many versions of me.”

“We all really need each other, and it took me a long time to figure that out.”

That need courses through the song’s arrangement. Ken Vallejos’ drums keep “The Witness” in a restless, rolling churn, while Watko’s production surrounds Pollett with a charged atmosphere that seems to contract and expand around every admission. The music smolders rather than explodes all at once, sustaining its pressure until vulnerability and intensity become inseparable. Pollett sounds pulled forward by the song even as every lyric circles the fear of arriving too late, changing too quickly, or disappearing without anyone there to notice.

At moments, “The Witness” recalls Death Cab for Cutie at their most emotionally exacting – not through imitation, but through the way Pollett pairs Ben Gibbard-like narrative precision with an arrangement that keeps tightening around every admission. The party, the small talk, the new dress: ordinary details become portals into loneliness and longing, while the song’s smoldering propulsion gives those scenes the same ache, urgency, and lift that define the band’s finest work.

The second verse cuts even deeper: “Sometimes I can go a week without feeling / I come to with a gasp during small talk.” Emotional numbness breaks without warning; tears arrive disguised as weather; time vanishes. Then Pollett locates the bottom of the spiral: “I think it’s when there’s no witness / No one to see you at the party with your hair long / Spinning in a new dress / And knowing it’s a new dress.”

Sometimes I can go a week without feeling,
I come to with a gasp during small talk
It’s not that I’m crying over weather,
It’s just that I don’t know where the time goes

I think I found what’s at the bottom of the spiral –
I think it’s when there’s no witness
No one to see you at the party with your hair long,
Spinning in a new dress
And knowing it’s a new dress

That last detail is devastating. Being seen means more than occupying another person’s field of vision. It means having someone understand what has changed, what it cost, and why the new dress matters. “The Witness” aches for the people who recognize our becoming – not merely the final version, but every revision along the way.

“I’ll tell you my name / when it’s in a new language,” Pollett sings later. “Will you tell me I’m your favorite version of me? / And then watch while I change it?” The question holds the song’s most profound challenge: Can love survive transformation without demanding permanence? Can another person celebrate who we are now while leaving room for whoever comes next?

I’ll tell you my name
When it’s in a new language
Will you tell me I’m your favorite version of me?
And then watch while I change it?

Blink twice for yes,
Swim out at high tide
All the people that we told all our secrets
they all cheer from other timelines

For Pollett, “The Witness” also establishes the emotional foundation of If I Let It Quiet. Distance runs through the album in countless forms – geographic, romantic, familial, platonic, psychological – but connection remains its counterforce. These songs repeatedly abandon maps, question fixed directions, and search for language expansive enough to hold change. “The Witness” sets that journey in motion by naming the primal need underneath every rupture and reunion: Someone must be there to know us, and we must be willing to know them in return.

“So many of the songs on If I Let It Quiet are explorations of distance – emotional and geographical – mainly around relationships of all kinds: familial, platonic, romantic,” Pollett says. “‘The Witness’ feels like setting the stage for why each of the other songs had to happen. The basis for any other conflict or connection is just needing to connect and feel seen.”

That theme expands across the full record. On “Cherry,” Pollett burns the map and discovers that north has become a sound. “Like a River” asks what remains when thought finally quiets, while “Bed of Quiet” turns sleepless doubt into a shadowy loop of choices made and remade. “Escape Routes” insists that the map is not the road; “We All Got It Right” imagines stories crossing through alternate lives; and closer “Tacit” tears the directions apart entirely, choosing motion over certainty.

If I Let It Quiet is full of spirals, currents, ghosts, restless bodies, and roads that refuse to stay fixed. Yet compared with 2023’s In the Garden, By the Weeds, it breathes. Pollett and Watko created the earlier album in pandemic-era isolation, with Watko carrying the overlapping roles of co-writer, producer, instrumentalist, engineer, and mixer. This time, Andrew Goldring’s involvement in additional production, mixing, and mastering allowed both artists to concentrate more deeply on their strongest instincts – and to leave open space for surprise.

“I love that record, but I think it’s f*ing intense,” Pollett says of In the Garden, By the Weeds. “There is so much there, and it really reflects an intensely isolated time for us both.”

“Bringing in Andrew Goldring to help produce and mix the record allowed Jordan to be more explorative with production, which in turn allowed him to push me further as a lyricist and songwriter and vocalist. It gave this project so much more room to explore that I think gives it a new spaciousness that In the Garden didn’t allow for.”

Distance did not merely shape the album’s themes; it entered the music itself. Pollett and Watko folded their separate environments into the recordings – grass crunching beneath Pollett’s feet, planes transformed into low drones, a parade outside Watko’s apartment in Japan, even the snoring of Pollett’s old dog. These sounds bridge eight thousand miles, allowing the rooms, streets, and lives surrounding each artist to meet inside the same songs.

“Due to the distance between us and the fact that we were creating something without physically being near to each other, it felt important to capture the sounds of our respective spaces and build them into the world of the record,” Pollett reflects. “I think it felt like a way for us to feel closer and more connected to each other at a great distance.”

That connection is the quiet miracle of If I Let It Quiet. The album never treats change as clean or painless; its maps burn, its timelines split, and its thoughts circle through the night. Yet these songs keep reaching outward. They make room for friendship, collaboration, reinvention, and the people who recognize us as we shift from one form into another.

“This album allowed me to loosen my death grip on the things that are dear to me,” Pollett says. “To know that everything changes, and the pain comes from believing that it won’t.”

“The Witness” carries that lesson in every feverish pulse. It is a brilliant, blazing song about the courage required to know another person and let yourself be known – to speak plainly, to remain present, and to love without demanding stillness. Pollett does not quiet the longing at its center. They turn up the heat until it glows.

Loose, lilting, and utterly enchanting, “WIDC” slips into the room on an intoxicating groove and stays there.

Mal Not Bad lets guitars, electronic textures, and a warped, pitched-down vocal move with an easy confidence, preserving the spark of a first idea instead of sanding it into submission. The result is as playful as it is effortlessly magnetic – a song that keeps revealing new details without ever breaking its spell.

I keep on shedding just like a cicada
Trying not to force it, try to let it happen
Guess that’s 27, 10 more years on
the insect I’m coming to the surface
Grow a pair of wings and dust
the dirt off from the bruises

Released June 3, “WIDC” is the second single off Mal Not Bad’s forthcoming album SOPHOMORE, out in 2027. The new record expands the Los Angeles-based artist, producer, and filmmaker’s already immersive creative world, carrying the introspection of 2024’s debut LP This Is Your New Life into a brighter, more mischievous space shaped by Catholic school imagery, fashion, movement, and play.

“This project especially feels like a record I would listen to as a fan of any project,” Mal Hauser tells Atwood Magazine. “I feel grateful that I got to make something that means a lot to me and can now mean something to anyone else who comes across it and connects with it.”

If This Is Your New Life emerged from grief, upheaval, and the hard work of becoming, SOPHOMORE arrives with more room to breathe. Hauser describes it as “the blossoming of spring after a darker winter,” and “WIDC” carries that renewal in its bones. Even when the lyrics bristle with hurt and frustration, the music refuses to become heavy-handed. It moves, smirks, and keeps dancing.

But you got me looking on the other side
You got me thinking
that I wish I didn’t care, no
And now I just feel tested
while I’m trying to focus
Been practicing my reverence
just like Michael and Kobe, RIP

Talk-talk-talk about staying committed
Always putting the work in
Don’t get too high from the wins and
Don’t get caught up on the losses

Everything on the track is essentially a first take or first idea, right down to the improvised low vocal that shadows Hauser’s lead. That spontaneity gives “WIDC” its personality: Nothing feels overworked, yet every odd little detail belongs. Hauser even named the individual tracks with gibberish to protect the session from becoming too serious.

“So much of the art I consume has that balance of levity and seriousness to the point where I think the best art holds both,” they explain. “It pulls you in closer and disarms you with humor to then drop a piece of wisdom in the midst of your walls being down. I think that mentality has also seeped into my creative practice because I find the work that comes out of me that I enjoy the most is the work I had the most fun making.”

Beneath the song’s playful surface, Hauser is trying to escape a comparison they never asked for. Someone from their past kept resurfacing through social media, friends, and strangers, creating the maddening sensation of being watched through the lens of another person’s life. “WIDC” became their refusal to let that presence hijack their own timeline.

“I felt constantly compared to them in a way that was largely out of my control,” Hauser says. “The approach to the song naturally became a response to that – I didn’t want that moment to deter me from my timeline and take away from the joy I have of getting to make music and create.”

“WIDC” stands for “Wish I Didn’t Care” – a phrase loaded with the frustration of realizing someone still has power over your attention long after you have decided they no longer deserve it. Hauser is caught between genuine growth and the bruised, stubborn part of the ego that keeps looking sideways, keeps checking, and keeps reacting. The title holds both impulses at once: The desire to rise above it, and the uncomfortable admission that they have not fully escaped it yet.

This inner tension animates the refrain: You got me thinking that I wish I didn’t care. Hauser wants detachment, but the harder they reach for it, the more clearly the bruise shows. Elsewhere, they sing, I keep on shedding just like a cicada, casting growth as an ongoing process rather than a clean break. Every new layer exposes another insecurity underneath.

But you got me looking on the other side
You got me thinking that I wish I didn’t care no
If time’s a healer then I’m practicing patience
Everyday I wait for you to say something

I don’t want to stress you out
I don’t want to stress you out
But you got me disappointed
Hope it was worth it

“No matter how much growth and shedding we do, we will always swing between feelings of self-doubt or wishing for something different,” Hauser reflects. “In fact, I think it’s in those exact moments of shedding we see all the things we don’t like in order to set ourselves up for the future version of ourselves we aim to become.”

The song’s Catholic school setting sharpens that push and pull. Uniformity offers safety, but it also threatens to flatten the self; keeping your head down may prevent confrontation, but it cannot erase the instinct to care how others see you. Hauser understands that contradiction without trying to solve it. “WIDC” lives inside the friction.

Its most surprising image arrives in the line “Been practicing my reverence just like Michael and Kobe,” inspired by basketball documentaries including The Last Dance. Hauser sees elite athletes as artists – people who surrender themselves to repetition, discipline, and microscopic improvement in service of a larger vision. Within “WIDC,” reverence becomes less about worship than devotion to the work.

“That surrendering to the bigger picture and practicing basketball almost like a religion is incredibly inspiring,” they explain, “and always reminds me that artists in the studio are no different with that mindset and ultimate offering to a greater practice.”

“WIDC” is Mal Not Bad at their most instinctive: Groovy, mischievous, emotionally tangled, and completely alive. It accepts that growth does not erase ego, hurt, or comparison; sometimes progress simply means protecting your joy while the noise continues around you. By choosing play over paralysis, Hauser turns unwanted attention into motion – and makes one of the year’s most enchanting songs in the process.

The manipulation did you get what you want
And if I’d scratch the surface and knew what’d happen
You got me looking on the other side
You got me thinking that I wish I didn’t care
You got me thinking that I wish I didn’t care

As catchy as it is cathartic, Isaac Neilson’s “Getting Better” starts with a glimmer and ends in a roar.

Atmospheric piano, driving drums, and guitar tones that glow like synths give the track an unmistakable ‘80s lift, while the artist sings with the charged, exposed intensity of someone trying to outrun his own doubt. He pours his heart out in a full-throated rush of devotion, and before we know it, the whole thing has blown wide open – euphoric, breathless, and impossible not to get swept up in.

live in the dreams of a dead god
Fade out what’s left of the laughter
Your plans slipping through my fingers
Made her laugh but now you’re leaving

daylight fades to hate my stupid restraint
Strange I met you in a place of this change
stride burned into my gaze
that beach beside the bay
Feel the tide make two lines embrace

Independently released June 19 as Neilson’s third single of the year, “Getting Better” arrived on day 170 of his extraordinary attempt to perform one gig every day for an entire year. Produced by Tayte Nickols and recorded at ARC Studios with engineer and vocal producer Matt Taylor, the track captures both the momentum and emotional exposure of that undertaking: A rising indie anthem built in real time by an artist pushing himself further with every show.

Neilson’s relentless 2026 schedule is part of a larger artistic gamble: A working-class musician from Buxton testing whether persistence, curiosity, and direct connection can still build a career without inherited access or an industry machine. The Nottingham-based singer/songwriter sees the music and the challenge as one continuous act of exploration, with “Getting Better” carrying the uncertainty, exposure, and possibility of the year inside its very shape.

“My music is synonymous with the journey I’m on this year,” Neilson tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s my exploration into uncharted waters. ‘Getting Better,’ as an arrangement, is something I’d never dared to do, in all its stripped-back intimacy before an explosive payoff. Much like the journey of a gig a day, being a warts-and-all tour diary which is wading through uncertainty in hope to find that the ultimate crescendo justifies the quiet start. Not knowing is the best part.”

“This track is the scariest release I’ve made to date,” he continues. “The vocals are so raw and upfront, with nothing to hide behind; it feels naked and exposed. I’ve never made anything like this, and that’s exactly why the risk of this song and its deliberate building intensity excite me.”

That leap reflects the standard Neilson has set for himself as an artist: Keep moving, keep risking, and never retreat into the safety of a sound that has already worked.

“Radiohead and Mac Miller are two definitive north stars,” he shares. “Both these artists continuously reinvented their sounds throughout their careers, never treading over the same ground twice. Continuously pushing the boundaries of their sound by making left turns and pushing into the unknown, rather than hiding in the commercial safety of familiarity. My mission as an artist is to do the same, explore new directions that excite my curiosity, while balancing on the tightrope of creating a cohesive artist aesthetic.”

Neilson’s voice begins close and declarative, carrying surreal snapshots of laughter fading, plans slipping away, and a fleeting encounter beside the water. The arrangement keeps gathering around him without crowding the words, letting each new instrument raise the emotional temperature. “See her light in motion / sealing my devotion / it’s gotta be getting better,” he sings, the refrain hovering between conviction and self-persuasion – a rush of hope repeated until it starts to sound believable.

See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
It’s gotta be getting better
See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
It’s gotta be getting better

The encounter itself was brief, but Neilson’s writing enlarges it into a screen for everything restless inside him. The unnamed person matters less as a fully drawn character than as the spark that throws his own hunger, fear, and ambition back at him.

“‘Getting Better’ was written about a fleeting infatuation, which never went further than an evening encounter,” he says. “The meaning behind that emotion felt more akin to the yearning to find the possibilities ahead of me, and forge my own path. It’s an emotional bubbling of opportunity, doubt, frustration, and the drive to overcome despite the self-doubt. The person it’s about being a mirror to my own internal reflections, more than the subject itself.”

“This song is unknowingly a microcosm of the year I’m experiencing so far with the gig-a-day challenge,” he adds. “I initially wrote this about a fleeting romantic moment, but the song gradually morphed and has become bizarrely analogous to everything I’m experiencing this year. In the last month I’ve had a series of unexpected wins, and just like the song, I’m in this limbo of disbelief as things seem to truly be getting better. And, still there, in the darker recesses of my mind, the self-doubt looms.”

Gotta be getting in my head
Missed opportunities energies bled
Lost in plans that never come to rest
so outta my depth
Retracing all my mis steps

This crush crushing me dead beneath the heavens
A piece of the sky fell tripping over my treasure
The echoes haunt me
You fill me up
Run through my veins
Into an open cut

The song’s optimism never settles into certainty. Each victory reveals another stretch of the climb, and every step forward raises the possibility that the mountain itself may have no end.

“It’s a contradiction of climbing a mountain which may not have a summit,” Neilson reflects. “Optimism pushed further by the doubts which reinvigorate further action. Growth challenging frustration.”

For Neilson, progress has come through repetition, exhaustion, and a stubborn refusal to wait for permission. The working-class artist from Buxton has spent 2026 performing wherever he can, documenting every journey and small victory while asking a pointed question: Can hard work still carry an independent musician through the door, or has access become inseparable from privilege? With no label or shortcut behind him, his gig-a-day challenge makes “Getting Better” land as more than an optimistic title. It becomes a wager placed on himself.

See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
It’s gotta be getting better

The song’s architecture was not there from the beginning. Neilson’s original demo brought the drums in immediately and followed a more conventional, guitar-led pop structure; the transformation came when he, Nickols, and Taylor stripped away that early certainty and trusted the delayed payoff instead.

“The original demo had the drums in from the off, guitar based and was a fairly typical pop structure,” Neilson explains. “We stripped that right back in studio to take a gamble on the emotional resonance, fully digging into where the song truly sat. The production serves everything else I spoke about. I didn’t have the confidence to take this leap by myself. Working with Tayte Nickols, and Matt Taylor is a huge part of how this song’s emotional arc was brought out with that level of raw clarity.”

Holding the drums back changes the song’s entire emotional physics. The opening leaves Neilson’s hope uncovered, allowing the uncertainty around it to breathe; when the arrangement finally erupts after “You fill me up / run through my veins / into an open cut,” the release lands with the force of everything he has been containing.

“The first half is sincere optimism, the quiet hopes exposed in raw form,” he says. “Cathartic and invigorating is precisely what the second half is. It’s a release of all the frustration and doubt, rejecting it, while quietly considering the contradiction. The bridge is the most exposing part of the song’s cynicism, a reframing before the ultimate chorus.”

The final stretch cashes in all that tension. Neilson’s measured phrases give way to frantic repetition as the drums press harder, the guitars flare, and his vocal tears free of restraint: “Every smile undressed, obsessed / dirty tricks I can’t reject.” When he roars “Oh, the searchers never rest,” infatuation, ambition, and anxiety collapse into the same surging release. The music rises toward triumph while the words keep doubt alive beneath it – the dark current that makes the brightness hit harder.

Oh the searchers never rest
Turning tethers in your chest
Every smile undressed obsessed
Dirty tricks I can’t reject

Oh the searchers never rest
Burning letters left unread
Every smile undressed obsessed
Oh paint a bullet in my head

That payoff has already proved its strength in the rooms where Neilson has tested it night after night. The song’s delayed eruption does more than reward patient listening; it gives an audience a melody they can absorb, anticipate, and eventually throw back at him.

“In live acoustic settings this song has a reaction like no other,” Neilson says. “I’m getting people singing it back hearing it for the first time, and then I catch people humming and whistling the melody outside after the gig. I’m really curious to see whether this response will match the reception I’ve been seeing live. The song is good, I have faith it will work.”

“Getting Better” captures the exhilaration of realizing your life may finally be moving forward before you have learned to trust the motion. Neilson never pretends the fear has disappeared; he sings directly through it, letting vulnerability swell into force. The result is a soaring, full-blooded indie anthem – one whose title begins as a hope, becomes a mantra, and ends sounding remarkably close to the truth.

See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
See her light in motion
Sealing my devotion
It’s gotta be getting better
It’s gotta be getting better

Sybil Creek’s “All True” has the kind of cool you can’t manufacture.

Tender, slinky, and enchanting, her second single prowls through moody guitars, whispered textures, and a groove that keeps drawing you closer, her voice landing somewhere between an intimate confession and a knowing smirk. Every detail feels loose and instinctive, yet perfectly placed – a spellbinding alternative pop song that catches the ear immediately and grows bolder, warmer, and more seductive with every listen.

Beneath that effortless poise, Sybil Creek’s Cassie Collins plays an exaggerated version of the person she most fears becoming: Arrogant, impulsive, and convinced her charm can carry her safely past accountability. “All True” lets that character strut before tightening the trap around her, turning obsessive introspection and lingering shame into a sly, self-lacerating reckoning with the damage we leave behind. The music glides while the consequences gather – and that tension makes the song as psychologically incisive as it is irresistibly cool.

Taste of my own medicine
Not so sweet going down, is it?
Of my thoughts I’m reticent
But I paint the loss unexpected
Woke up in a humming state
Forgot it wasn’t mine to take
Took it anyway

Released earlier this year as Sybil Creek’s second single (following 2025’s “Time, Anyway”), “All True” brings Collins’ years of musical searching into focus. The New York-based artist cut her teeth in the Boston and Denver DIY scenes, making grunge-inspired indie rock in basements before expanding toward the ethereal, brooding world she inhabits today. Her reference points stretch from Pavement, My Bloody Valentine, and Liz Phair to Slow Pulp and Dora Jar, but Sybil Creek’s songs move according to their own emotional logic – earnest heartache blurred into gray, introspection given texture, friction, and motion.

“I’ve been exploring my musical identity for years, and Sybil Creek is the most authentic form of my expression,” Collins tells Atwood Magazine. “It’s a quilt of my inspirations, experiences, and creative challenges stitched together over close to a decade. I’ve struggled with holding my writing very close to my chest for a long time. Embracing this project has allowed me to open myself up to collaboration and connection with the incredibly talented community that surrounds me.”

“All True” carries that intimacy through an arrangement that glides rather than announces itself. Fuzzy layers curl around Collins’ voice; the rhythm moves with low-lit confidence; whispers, flashes of distortion, and crooked little details keep unsettling the song’s polished surface. She opens by swallowing her own medicine – “Not so sweet going down, is it?” – before admitting she “forgot it wasn’t mine to take / took it anyway.” The language is smart, sly, and self-implicating, every line tightening the space between private judgment and public damage.

Sold her out on air last night
Held my wrist, ampersand
Red light, bowie knife
Ignorant plan

What a surprise
I’m cut loose from the losing side
Slithering below
Truisms I swear to know

“I think of ‘All True’ as a fun house mirror of my self-image,” Collins explains. “I spend the majority of my time in my own head, and I often find myself fixated on comparing how I see myself to how others see me through my actions. I have an obsessive habit of picking apart my every action to make sure I’m being a good person, because I’m terrified of acting selfishly.”

“‘All True’ is hyperbole for the push and pull of these perceptions. I wanted to create a character of myself that embodied all of my worst fears of how my actions are perceived. This person is arrogant, self-obsessed, and confident that her charm and intelligence can let her avoid being held accountable for any wrongdoing. In this world, though, my self-assuredness is absolutely delusional.”

Collins gives this character enough swagger to make her seductive. “So what if I’m an actor, then? / Easier when the truth is bent,” she sings, later declaring, “If I want it, I will get it!” The chorus slithers beneath that confidence, repeating “truisms I swear to know” as though certainty itself might provide an escape route. It never does. “All True” understands that self-knowledge has little value without accountability – and that endlessly analyzing your goodness can become a convenient distraction from the people affected by your choices.

So what if I’m an actor, then?
Easier when the truth is bent
Tricky is as tricky does
“It comes around when you’re hurting, huh?”
Yeah, it’s hurting some

I lay on my side tonight
Punch drunk, judgement call
If I want it, I will get it!
Aftermath, an afterthought

“I’ve spent the last few years being obsessively introspective,” Collins says. “I think healthy reflection is important for emotional growth and healing, but I have a habit of turning my looking inward into a weapon. I can be judgmental, envious, and selfish sometimes, just like everyone else can be. But I hold myself to a standard of emotional perfection that is impossible to achieve.”

“It all came to a head when I let my internal battles bleed into the real world, and I hurt other people. My worst fears came true. I hated myself, and I poured everything I felt into the song.”

Producer Thea Minster helped Collins push that inner battle outward, encouraging the weird sounds, whispers, and screams that flicker through the recording. Those details let “All True” stay playful without diluting its remorse; the song can grin, prowl, and luxuriate in its own cool while the structure steadily closes in on its narrator. By the final refrain, escape has become an illusion. True, all true when I’m gone by light repeats until the mask dissolves and only the damage remains.

What a surprise
I’m cut loose from the losing side
Slithering below
Truisms I swear to know

What a surprise
Comeuppance on the parting side
Leaving in stride
True, all true when I’m gone by light

“The shield of my inflated ego and arrogance washes away when the truth comes out,” Collins reflects. “‘True, all true when I’m gone by light’ represents how no matter how far I run away or avert my gaze from how I’ve hurt people, the damage still remains.”

Yet “All True” refuses to end in self-punishment. By embodying her most shameful traits as a whole person, Collins discovers room for compassion without absolving the harm – grace grounded in honesty rather than denial. That balance gives Sybil Creek’s second single its lasting power. “All True” is sleek, spellbinding alternative pop with a conscience: An intoxicating introduction to an artist brave enough to expose the ugliest voice in her head, cool enough to let it command the room, and wise enough to know it never gets the final word.

What a surprise! What a surprise.
Leaving in stride
True all true when I’m gone by light
What a surprise! What a surprise.
Leaving tonight
True all true, when I’m gone by light…

ALBUM

Credit goes to Spotify’s individually-curated “Tastebreakers” playlists for

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