writing
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Our Rating: 10/10 “I Like Her” is built on instinct. You can hear that immediately. There’s a looseness to it that comes from its origin as a freestyle. The melody sits naturally, the hook is simple but effective, and the rhythm carries that familiar Afrobeat pulse that makes the track easy to fall into. It’s…
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Our Rating: 7/10 “Battle Chatter” positions itself as a moment of reclamation, not collapse. That much is clear from the first listen. Built on a dark pop foundation with trip-hop undercurrents, the track moves with a slow, deliberate pulse. It doesn’t rush. It doesn’t explode. Instead, it builds a kind of controlled intensity that mirrors…
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Our Rating: 7/10 There’s a quiet confidence to “Homegirl” that doesn’t shout for attention, and that’s both its strength and its limitation. Built around warm acoustic guitar, soft harmonies and that lightly percussive xylophone line, the track leans fully into a kind of storybook folk aesthetic. It’s gentle, melodic, and intentionally small in scale. You…
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Linda Coogan Byrne is a leading publicist, DEI strategist, and author. She also is the founder of Why Not Her?, a gender equity campaign aiming to challenge systemic bias in media and the music industry. In a new Frontiers in Communication article that presents an analysis of gender-based exclusion in the Irish and UK music industries between 2018 and…
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New data from the European Audiovisual Observatory offers a fairly unvarnished view of where cinema sits across Europe right now, and it does not support the idea of a clean post-pandemic recovery. Cinema admissions fell by 5.5% in 2025, declining from 843 million to 796 million. That drop tells its own story, but what sits…
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I recently watched Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere and honestly, it’s less a documentary and more an autopsy, not of masculinity, but of what happens when insecurity gets monetised and handed a microphone. It lays bare the social rot that parts of the internet have become, not chaotic but corrosive, engineered even, a space where…
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A new UK Music report titled “Black Music Means Business” quantifies what has long been understood but rarely measured: Black music is not a category within the UK industry; it is the foundation of it. The data now makes that impossible to ignore. This report proves that Black music isn’t just a category—it accounts for…
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Our Rating: 10/10 From the opening line, “Take a look at the world today; we have got to find a better way,” this track lands exactly where it needs to. It is as emotional as it is liberating. And when that line keeps coming back, it doesn’t feel repetitive; it feels absolutely necessary. Because we…
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Our Rating 8/10 Some songs arrive loudly. Others move quietly, like someone stepping into a room and simply standing there until everyone notices. “Grace”, the new single from Irish alt-pop artist Chubby Cat, belongs firmly in the second category. Built around a sparse electronic foundation, the track leans into atmosphere rather than immediacy. Soft synth…
The Industry Review 