Weekly Discover 69 : Gravity in Four Acts

Rather than creeping in, this week explodes. Weekly Discover 69 hits like a live wire, collapsing the rock, pop, electronic, and instrumental worlds in one shared pulse. This is not a playlist, this is a current. You can feel it in your veins even before the first note lands.

The opening chords come raw, jagged guitar riffs scrape on your chest as if they were sparks on steel. Rock arrives first, wearing leather and uncompromisingly confident, with history behind it thick and loud from late nights and loud rooms. It is not just playing, it is claiming the space. You can smell the feedback and feel the heat of the amp against your shins. It is not neat and tidy; it is jagged and alive.

And then pop explodes in, glossy, contagious, a color pop amid the gritty world it has invaded, and unlike any of the synthetic "bubblegum" it think it resembles, it operates at the intersection of dull bruises and exploding glitter, ebullient and self-reflective. While chasing the light, melodies shimmer, but carry the scars of every iteration of itself that has ever existed before. The sound of resilience wears rhythm, and it sticks even after you have moved past the chorus.

And just when you think you’ve found your footing, the electronic current kicks in — pulsing synths, deep bass, a heartbeat made of pixels. It’s the city’s underbelly humming in your ears. Neon flickers. Shadows dance. Every drop feels like controlled chaos, where precision meets emotion in perfect imbalance.

Then the lights dim. The noise fades. What’s left is instrumental — bare, cinematic, and deliberate. It’s the soul of the session laid open, no words to hide behind. Piano echoes through static. Strings stretch between silence and storm. It’s the comedown after the chaos, the deep breath before the next riot.

Weekly Discover 69 isn’t about genre — it’s about gravity.

Each sound pulls you closer, layer by layer, until you forget where one style ends and another begins.

Plug in. Let it burn slowly.

Because sometimes, music doesn’t just play — it becomes you.

Rachel D: Powersuit – A Storage-Unit Coronation

Rachel D has always been the kind of artist who builds her own world first—then invites you in. Her new single Powersuit, released under her freshly minted label Mama’s Crib Records, doesn’t just mark a return. It feels like a reawakening. A low-lit room pulsing with electrostatic tension, a voice cutting through the haze—steady, deadpan, knowing. There’s confidence in that delivery, but also something raw: the residue of a thousand late nights spent behind decks, cables, and faders. It’s the sound of someone who’s lived every inch of the scene and still believes in its pulse.

The track sits somewhere between the neon grime of early 2000s London electroclash and the angular melancholy of Joy Division or The Cure. There’s grit under the gloss, bass wrapped around static, like beer spilled on concrete under flashing club lights. It’s music that remembers what it feels like to belong and to stand apart at the same time. Rachel’s voice moves through the mix with a casual defiance—cool, detached, but deeply human. The song celebrates female confidence without the glossed-over empowerment cliché; instead, it’s about real strength—the kind that comes from nights you almost gave up, the ones you danced through anyway.

For Rachel, Powersuit is not merely a single, but a transmission woven from a lifetime of sonic exploration and interacting sound waves. In her time bartending at Auckland's Cause Célèbre and absorbing jazz from behind the bar, to her rave days in London clutching her Atari and propelled by fervor, each note evokes rich historical moments. The memory of countryside parties hold sway, of having field dubplates pressed and having dreams tested, of long days at Capital Radio as a sound engineer, the faculties of her ears generated chaos just as much as creation. The phases collected layers of texture upon texure: the ash of post rock, the shimmer of ambient, the pulse of house.  

And there were brackets to the story, the harmonium in India, kirtan chants in Sydney, the art-party sand installations in Berlin—that each became part of the understanding of sound as a force of spiritual awakening. You can hear it in Powersuit : just because the beat is minimal does not mean that there is emptiness; it means that it is a place to meditate. Every kick drum feels implicated and earned, and every synth feels like a recollection. She doesn't produce like someone out to prove a point; she produces like someone who knows who she is.

The establishment of Mama’s Crib Records and Slice of Nice signifies a complete cycle for her. After servicing others for years in a behind-the-board capacity, Rachel built her own literal place to produce, a studio made from a storage unit, where her Twitch DJ sets turned into a community of loyal participants, there for something beyond just the music. They connected with the energy: the grit, the humor, the steadfast refusal to compromise and be anything other than herself. A world which was both DIY and deeply intentional; a place where garage MCs, house grooves, and indie spirits could exist without ego.

What you feel from Powersuit is not just the polish of a well-produced track; it's Rachel's voice as a narrator. Her voice slides in on the same rhythm of resistance we've been riding from jazz bars in Auckland, through public concrete rave floors in London, into parenthood, and ultimately finding rebirth in Aotearoa. The hook of the track feels sharp and hypnotic, deftly resembling a woman looking in the mirror for the first time in a long while and saying, “I could get used to this.” "It's about strength, the feminine, and that sentiment you get when you step into your own power,” she says. Not branding. That's a heartbeat.

And perhaps that is what makes Rachel D's comeback so important. Powersuit is not chasing trends; it is reclaiming a voice. It is the sonics of the artist who has engineered, mixed, lived, and re-engineered herself back to the center. Too often, in a music scene that rewards surface over substance, Rachel is a grounding presence—magnetic. Beer, static, concrete, ash—it is all in there. The textures of life, remixed into a song that doesn't need to be loud to be heard. It simply is, standing wild and brilliant under the flicker of a warehouse light—power suit on, a story intact.

Jane Marie — “It’s Been a Year”: A Song for the Silence After Goodbye

There is a particular kind of quietness that follows a death; it’s heavy; it’s static, like the air before rain. For Jane Marie, this silence became her studio. “It’s Been a Year” was composed after the unexpected funeral of her mother—not as an artistic statement, but as a lifeline. She didn’t intend to compose something other people would listen to; she wrote something down because she couldn’t not. And you can feel that in the song—sparse, fragile, human. The notes hang there in the air like breath in winter, the space suspended between what is lost and what remains.

The track begins with piano held together precariously, as if it is afraid that something it does might disturb the grief that accompanies it. There is space; not the empty kind, but full of all that used to be. Jane gives the notes room to breathe—and they do. They are slow, uneven, and tender in their hesitations. Jane’s voice becomes less like a voice singing a collection of words to a melody, and more like a voice remembering. There is no performance here; there is no control. Simply a host of honesty—the type that can’t be faked, the kind that breaks you, and builds you back at the same time.

"It's Been a Year" is not just about loss; it's also from the stillness that follows when everyone else moves on. The friends that stop calling. The kitchen is quiet. The cup of tea turned cold on the counter. Jane refers to the song as "grief at its most raw," and that feels very true — not the heartache of cinema, but the version that smells of hospital corridor and a faint hint of perfume on a well-worn scarf. It is the feeling of standing still while the world continues walking - a surreal world moving in motion and and ice like stillness.

This isn't a new space for Jane Marie - though this moment feels personal in a way that eclipses her long career. She has been writing for stage and screen for over 25 years - from the BBC to Channel 4, to a stage musical of A Tale of Two Cities. She has created lush, deliberate, grand scores for award-winning films like Othello. And yet in this piece she has stripped it all down to the emotional core. The experience shows - she knows when to simply let the silence carry the story, and when to allow a single note to say what dialogue could never.

When collaborating with vocalist Jessica Mia, Jane discovered a sort of reflection, someone to vocalize her musical expression of grief and resilience. Their collaboration, which was first heard on Songs of 2020, embodied a semblance of cinematic beauty amidst human fragility. "It's Been a Year" shares a familiar DNA — intimate yet orchestral, personal yet universal. It's there in the Mahler and Elgar evoked in the strings. It's there in the ache of Adele. It's here in the deliberate patience of McCartney's compositions. It is a conversation across time, across feeling, and between mother and daughter.

There is a visual texture to Jane's work, too, as if each song belongs in slow motion, with home video footage and dust floating in sunlight. "It's Been a Year" unfolds like memory itself: stuck, looping but also soft at the edges. The production is almost tactile: beer on a table, ash on the wind, concrete under bare feet. It's less about a corporeal sound, but rather presence. It is how music fills the room and becomes the air you are breathing.

When the last note from the piano vanishes into the air, you aren’t just listening to the music anymore; you are remembering something of your own. That’s Jane Marie’s subtle superpower. She doesn’t write songs to compartmentalize the experience of grief but to understand grief. And by doing that, she hands you — the listener — some thread — there’s just enough of it to be both thin and strong — that says, “You’re not alone in this.” As Jane Marie heads into 2026 with new jazz and ballad projects, this much is clear: Jane Marie’s music doesn’t just hold your emotion; it holds it safe. In a world that is fast to move on from any feeling, she holds space for us to stay still — for just a moment in time — and feel everything.

Sunset Rebellion’s “Secret Game”: A Midnight Riff That Locks the Door Behind You

A guitar trembles until it snaps into a riff that feels like it’s scraping your bones, and there’s a specific thrill that hits. Sunset Rebellion understands that thrill. In their latest single, "Secret Game," they've put that thrill into every note, every dirty cymbal crash, every gasp of breath between notes. It’s a song that makes no excuses for being raw, for being human, for whispering secrets that should stay secret.

As soon as you hit play, there's a feeling of motion, like two concrete boots wading through wet asphalt, or the buzzing static of neon on an empty city street at 2 AM. "Secret Game" does not hang around the border of the polished edges of mainstream rock; it gets into the friction, the tension the grit. It is heavy without being oppressive, melodic without losing its edge. Sunset Rebellion has always thrived in that space between the heart and the gut, and they tread it like tightrope performers with nothing to lose.

The song is intimate, alluring, and unapologetically human. It examines a secret universe of experiences shared between two people, a theater of trust and consent hidden from view. There is joy in secrecy, and Sunset Rebellion nails this—it is not shame, it is a shield, it is celebration. Each line is a brushstroke that fills this world with textures that you can feel. The burn of beer in your throat. The ash of cigarettes in a dark room. The static tension of waiting for everything to break loose.

Secret Game also shows a subtle evolution for the band. Their debut Exit Delay had youthful indignation and garage-fueled rawness that could not be missed, and this single leans intentionally into story-telling without losing a bite. There is a patience here; a knowing hand that leads you through the story with moments of silence before everything erupts like a concrete crack under your feet. Sunset Rebellion shows they can still kick down the door but also show you how to step inside.

What is interesting—and often unnoticed—is how this music carries over to performance. Sunset Rebellion from Orlando has a reputation in local clubs and DIY spaces for sets that feel like both conversation and confrontation. The audience is not just hearing the songs, they can feel the songs in their ribs, in the perspiration and chaos of shared energy. Secret Game will just be another band in rotation soon, but will present a recent moment when hands rise, voices join, and the room is pulsing together in acknowledgment of collective identity.

It is also worth considering the courage in their particular storytelling. In a genre that sometimes risks confusion with spectacle, Sunset Rebellion gets closer to connection. There is a tension present between the public and private self, between appetite and discretion. That tension gives character to the music; it gives it depth. And it’s the kind of depth that is difficult to put into words, yet is a kind of depth that fans—especially those bored with the spoon fed feel of commercial gloss—respond to even if instinctively.

By the time the last riff disappears, Secret Game has already lodged itself in your brain like a stubborn echo. Sunset Rebellion has not just released another single. They’ve brought their own little restless world into being. One that is dark, playful and alive. If you miss music that hits hard, music that is messy, that is real—take a chance on this. Let it draw you into the shadows, let it challenge you to play the secret game they’ve been waiting to reveal.

Soek’s “We Were Taller Then”: A Hushed Elegy for the Backyard That Slipped Away

There’s a quiet kind of nostalgia that hums beneath We Were Taller Then—the newest single from Soek, the project of Michigan-based composer Grant Borland. It’s not loud or sentimental; it feels lived-in, like the soft static of a home video replayed too many times. The song doesn’t tell a story in words—it breathes it through piano strikes and strings that feel like sunlight through dust. You can almost hear the echoes of running feet on concrete, the laughter of brothers in a backyard that doesn’t exist anymore. It’s the sound of remembering, and realizing how far away those days have drifted.

Borland—known for his cinematic work with Netflix, Apple TV, and Disney+—returns here to something smaller, something personal. Soek is his laboratory for emotion, free from client briefs and production deadlines. “We Were Taller Then” captures that rare balance between technical mastery and unfiltered humanity. Recorded across Michigan, Croatia, and Vancouver, it’s both intimate and global, stitched together by live strings from Martin Kutnar and Session Strings Studio. The collaboration gives the track its pulse—a human breath between every bow stroke, grounding the digital textures in something tangible, something like skin.

At its core, this song is about the myth of invincibility. The way childhood makes you believe the world can’t touch you, that your shadow will always stretch long across the summer grass. Soek translates that feeling into sound: the piano, both melodic and percussive, bounces like a skipping heartbeat; the synths shimmer in the distance, ghostly but warm. It’s music you don’t just hear—you remember it, the way you remember the weight of old bicycle handles or the smell of beer on your dad’s flannel when you were too young to understand the world he carried.

Borland calls the piece a reflection on growing up with three younger brothers—a theme that hums in the undercurrent of the arrangement. The song feels like a conversation between those four ghosts of youth, circling around each other in layers of harmony and echo. It’s restless yet patient. You can feel the tension between the carefree float of memory and the gravity of adulthood, that unavoidable ash of time that settles on every good thing we once thought would last forever.

Technically, the piece is a marvel of restraint. Piotr Wieczorek’s mix leaves enough air between each layer for emotion to live. Every frequency, from the low hum of the piano pedal to the bright breath of the violin, has its place. Nothing competes, yet everything aches. There’s minimalism in the arrangement, but a maximalist soul at work. Borland treated the piano like a living thing—both an instrument and a storyteller, percussive and human, like fingers tapping on a wooden table while the mind wanders back in time.

There’s no chorus, no lyrical hook, no neat resolution. But that’s the point. We Were Taller Then refuses to explain itself. Instead, it invites you into its space—a room filled with static light, half-remembered melodies, and the scent of dust on old books. It’s the sound of growing smaller in a world that once felt infinite, the sound of realizing that innocence was never about not knowing—it was about not needing to.

In an era obsessed with polish and immediacy, Soek’s latest work feels like an act of quiet rebellion. Borland’s gift is his ability to make the digital feel organic, to bridge continents and still land in your chest. We Were Taller Then isn’t just a song—it’s a mirror held up to the listener’s own lost years. And as the final note fades, leaving a soft hush like static after a broadcast, you’re left with that ache again. The one that says: we weren’t taller, really. The world was just closer then.

Justine On Green’s “Letter to the Industry”: A Neon-Soaked Manifesto from the Margins

There's a point in "Letter to the Industry" where the synths are popping like radio static—very sharp, possibly defiant—and Justine On Green exhales between lines. It's not a stylistic choice; it's a human choice. The first single from this Vancouver/LA artist doesn't feel like a song at all but rather like a confession scrawled in the margin of a contract she never signed. It's her saying: I'm here. I made it through the noise. Now listen.

Survival is not a metaphor for Justine. Blind, transgender, proudly lesbian, she has spent her entire life moving through rooms she was never meant to fit into and then reprogramming rooms by lighting them with sound and light. Justine's voice floats above a sea of shiny synths, shimmering and cinematic and unrepentantly pop, but the pulse underneath it has something heavier than that. There's undercurrents you can taste, smell the beer-soaked venues, the cement studios, the burnt rubber ash of the artists who had given too much and received too little. This song is for them too.

When she sings, “I wrote this for people like myself, who had to tap into that or lose everything,” she isn’t feeling sorry for herself, she is being strategic. She uses language as someone who has played the game from inside the system, crafting Top 40 songs for other artists but then ghost writing herself out of the credits. Letter to the Industry is a reclamation, that name in the bright green ink scrawled across the faceless machine that almost devoured her. There is a shimmer to the synths, a pulse to the beat but the words - those hit like static - pretty does not fit.

There is bravery in the flaws. The track does not chase the pop clean shine - there is breath. The chorus settles in like a wound - wide, raw, necessary - and by the time the last note dissipates it feels as if she has exhaled ten years of unnecessary truths. The lyric video has the same grain: flickers of light through rain-soaked glass, faces blurred, a skyline halved in neon. You watch and you do not see a marketing launch - you see a narrative reclaiming a voice.

What makes Justine magnetic is not simply her sound, it is her duality. She exists somewhere between two worlds: the anxious vibration of Los Angeles, the serene stillness of Vancouver. That tension resonates in her production. Every kick drum sounds like Los Angeles asphalt at midnight, every synth line glows like Pacific fog. Its an artist living at the intersection of chaos and clarity, of beer and static and beauty.

This debut is merely the first move. Letter to the Industry is the first of twelve singles that will eventually be released over the course of a year. It is an entire package vocals with release propelling us towards something more than simply recreating, there will be live shows, DJ sets, collaborations, but most importantly there will be honesty.

Justine is not merely building a catalog, but she is constructing a mirror for every artist who has ever felt invisible in an invisible structure.

And perhaps that is what makes Letter to the Industry so impactful, because it is not simply a song it is a manifesto disguised as melody, a love letter written in concrete and ash, to an industry that showed her how to disappear and finally to an audience who is ready to see her as she is.