Ezra Collective made history as the first jazz act ever to win the prestigious Mercury Prize — a milestone that says as much about their immediacy as it does about their musicianship. Few groups manage to feel this open, this welcoming, without sacrificing the complexity at the heart of jazz. Their music moves with a rare clarity of purpose: immediate, rhythmically generous, yet built on a deep understanding of groove, improvisation and collective interplay.

Few acts feel as completely of the moment as Fcuckers. This is New York distillated: cool, slightly aloof, a little bit indie sleaze, a little bit Y2K after-hours glow, all rooted in the edgy pulse of alt-dance. Their music feels like a party you’ve heard about all week but can’t quite find — a room humming somewhere downtown, a guest list at the door, the sense that something is already happening inside.

It’s fitting that her acclaimed 2025 EP is titled “Voyeur”, because listening to Alessi Rose often feels like being handed the keys to her diary, of being invited into her inner world. Set to graceful, alternative-leaning pop that moves with confidence, her songs balance intimacy with clarity: gentle hooks, diaristic detail and melodies that unfold with the same natural rhythm as conversation. And there’s a looseness to the arrangements, a softness that allows the words to lead without losing their musical pull. This summer, Alessi Rose brings that candid, magnetic world to Way Out West.

A generation raised in tandem with its screens has long since stopped pretending there’s a clear boundary between the digital and the intimate. Phones glow beside our beds, laptops hum through the night, and somewhere in that circuitry a new kind of emotional language has taken shape. Few artists have portrayed that relationship with as much romantic and erotic charge as Ninajirachi. It’s there in the title of her breakthrough album “I Love My Computer” (2025), and even more bluntly in tracks like “Fuck My Computer”, declarations that treat the machine not as a tool but as confidant, collaborator and object of affection.

In an era when patience is in short supply and immediacy is worshipped, Swedish artist Yaeger quietly demonstrates the power of not rushing – of waiting until you truly know what you want to say, and how you want to say it. After years of experimentation and self-discovery, she has arrived at that place, and it feels as though her time is only just beginning. What Yaeger has crafted is intensely contemporary emotional rave-pop, delivered with a bold theatricality that feels like a deconstructed pirate costume come to life: glitchy synths and tumbling percussion anchored in heartfelt, wide-open melody, all swaying somewhere between catharsis and ecstasy.

Σtella’s artistic vision has long been to bring the Greek pop she grew up with into the present. Not by preserving it in amber, but by letting it breathe in new air. Across her work, featherlight percussion, contemporary production and a gentle wave of psychedelia meet melodies that feel both familiar and slightly out of time, shaped by an instinct for atmosphere and restraint that has become a signature of her songwriting. Since her 2015 debut, she has steadily refined that vision, turning it into a distinctive musical language that has made her one of modern Greece’s most compelling exports.