(via Shutterstock)
I love music … but I don’t just love any music.
I want music with presence, the kind of music that strides forth with energised music, lyrics that don’t play cute and timid and produced by artists who want to say things in unforgettable ways.
These five artists manage that and then some, their songs creating arresting moments that can’t be missed and that once embraced change us forever for the better.
Listen and enjoy having yourself taken in these bursts of musical brilliance to places you thought you’d never go to, and now never want to leave …
“Have You Considered?” by Pattie Gonia & Imogen Heap
(courtesy YouTube)
Ever since I discovered Imogen Heap by way of Frou Frou (the artist plus long-time collaborator Guy Sigworth) through the brilliant soundtrack for Zach Braff’s brilliant 2004 indie rom com film, Garden State, I have loved her intense and idiosyncratic creativity.
She has a gift for taking ethereal vocals and emotionally rich music and crafting songs that create a superbly atmospheric sense of time and place, transporting you to somewhere quite escapist and not of this world and yet so familiar they feel like the home you never knew you needed.
Her collaboration with “American drag queen, environmental and LGBTQ+ activist, and community organizer [sic]” Pattie Gonia is a perfect example of her craft, a song so densely, emotively beautiful that your soul aches and soars in equal measure, sublime happiness and lingering melancholy equally at home in its rich and sprawling almost five-minute long musical world.
The song is an artfully arresting call for action by everyone who hears it on climate change, the short film that accompanies it bolstering the message quite powerfully, with the environmentally messaging and sound the product of a conversation between the two, courtesy of the song’s press release quoted on GoodGoodGood.
“When Pattie shared field recordings of glacial ice collapsing into the Arctic Sea, Heap immediately heard music in the destruction — finding rhythm in the cracking and crashing, building an early chorus in real time as viewers watched.
“What began as dialogue became composition. What felt like grief became momentum.”
“The Fool” by Qveen Herby & THOT Squad
In stark contrast to this reviewer’s long and happy listening relationship to the songs of Imogen Heap, Qveen Herby aka Amy Renee Heidemann Noonan, an American rapper-singer-songwriter-entrepreneur, is a relatively recent discovery courtesy of YouTube algorithms and the happy musical rabbit holes they beget.
Her song “The Fool”, featuring indie hip-hop artist THOT Squad, is quirky, musical, bouncy and lyrical clever, an entertaining song that goes off some very creative cliffs to emphatic and utterly listenable success.
The two artists bounce off each other brilliantly in a song that has attitude and absolute presence but which is playful and fun, its magnificent mix of rapping and singing combining to make a listening experience that you’ll want to return again and again.
It’s a standout track with tons of personality and is proof of the power of two to make something truly memorable and remarkable.
“Something Heavy” by Jacob Collier
(courtesy Genius)
Changing gears completely, and a chance to catch your breath from losing yourself to riotously dancing and fun, “Something Heavy” by “English singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, producer and educator” Jacob Collier is a soft and gentle hug of a song.
But don’t mistake its whimsically wafty musicality for a lack of emotional impact.
The song talks of how we build walls around us but how special people in our lives, whether close or far, can bring us “back to life” and it’s one of the absolutely unmissable tracks on his October 2025 release, The Light for Days.
The song though at its heart talks about letting of the heavy things that have been weighing us down and the redemptive power that comes from that and how it can change and remake us in quite beautiful ways.
It’s a joy, its clip is a transportive delight and it feels like healing set to music.
“Paracosm” by Absolutely
(courtesy Spotify)
Someone else who knows something about the magnificent ability of music to create worlds and senses of time and place is British singer-songwriter Abby-Lynn Keen aka Absolutely who keeps creating songs that feels like alive and emotionally rich entities you can inhabit with every fibre of her being.
Bringing together the melodic richness of Enya, the quirky pop sensibilities of Kate Bush and the escapist diverting sensibilities of Florence and the Machine’s expansive vocals, Absolutely feels like she has poured her whole heart and soul into the title track from her album Paracosm, released this month.
With lyrics that reference the smallness and bigness of life, “Paracosm” feels like a world in a world, a song so immersively rich and deep it feels like an endless beginning and ending that wraps itself around you, giving you chills and a sense that you are part of something superbly big and alive and intensely emotional.
It’s a masterful epic track that soars to the heavens, big in blockbuster size and scope in its musicality but which feels intimate and emotively honest in its lyrical approach, the two combining to create a song that feels hugely big and yet accessibly small all at once.
“Victim of Luck” by Metric
(courtesy SoundCloud)
Bands that play with emphatic presence are always the bands you want around you for the long term.
When a band presents with personality, you feel like they are infinitely worth listening to and that’s very much true of Canadian group, Metric, who formed in Ontario in 1998 and keep coming up with music that commands attention musically and lyrically and which is never going to simply fade into the background.
Their latest track, “Victim of Luck”, from upcoming album Romaticize the Dive, tracks their early days as a band says ACRN:
‘Victim Of Luck’ is a slow build. In the same vein as Metric’s gradual rise to fame, this single recounts the band’s early days through revisiting their struggle to take off. In an interview with The Daily Music Report, Haines states, “when we started out yes we were broke and we were playing to ten people and there was nothing for us to fall back on but we refused to give up.” Over an increasingly building guitar and ticking clock, Haines sings “I was a starving artist, but I was fearless,” which comes as a testament to the band’s resilience.
It’s enrapturing, musical alive and powerful, a song that confirms, if it needed confirmation and it likely doesn’t by now, that Metric is a band with something to say who consistently find intensely alive and memorable ways to say it to the eternal richness of fans.