Hello world,
It’s time for our FP Picks update again and we’ve got a host of great trx fm Dermot Henry, The Itch, pyncher & lots more. If you like what you hear please follow and share this playlist, it helps us keep doing our thing by getting the algorithms on our side. Also please support the artists featured in any way you can!
Until next week
Helen (Futureproof) x
Petra – I Am God
Slovakian-born, London-based alt-pop artist Petra explores faith and self-perception on the new single I Am God. “I am disgustingly convinced I am something more than a human,” Petra says. “Here behind these closed doors I am God. Until this manic leaves and I’m just a girl wasting her life away by always being miserable.” The track moves into more maximalist territory, reckoning with faith and self-perception through bursts of instrumentation that shift between catharsis and destruction. It marks a sharp change in scale from the sparse setting of previous ballad Zeppelin, while continuing Petra’s interest in the less tidy corners of interior life.
The Healing Power of Horses – xstick_xstick
East Anglian duo The Healing Power of Horses have revealed plans for their upcoming EP, 8725, and shared new single xstick_xstick. “Number 8725 is ‘Ithpeal’ or ‘Imperfect’ in the Brown-Driver-Briggs Hebrew & English Bible Lexicon and it is also the amount of songs we have left on a Samsung T5 1GB Portable SSD,” the pair say. “This time we spent summer outdoors, but not in the way you think. Time is so short, Autumn has drawn in and we’re beside ourselves with laughter. These songs are an angel gift to you the listener. Won’t someone buy us a Tiffany lamp?”
pyncher – The Eight Legged Band
pyncher have shared new single The Eight Legged Band, the title-track of their forthcoming album, accompanied by an “offbeat agriculturally” centred music video. Vocalist Sam Blakeley stated: “A couple of years ago I started recording with more drum machines and weird synths. My friend Tasmin (TTSSFU) let me use her Casio that she got for cheap from a charity shop and it became a bit of inspiration for the project. I should probably give it back to her now … The Eight Legged Band is about wanting to be someone different and being too afraid to take a leap of faith. There’s a relationship running through it, too, but ultimately, it’s about a wider existential anxiety around growing up, the things you leave unsaid, and whether you’re making the most of the time you’ve got.”
Heartworms – Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark
Heartworms (aka Jojo Orme) recently shared a new single which pairs popping 00s indie basslines and jerking post-punk angles with a hypnotic, chant-led refrain. Offering a more danceable side to Jojo Orme’s gothic sound, the track explores the fears and insecurities that can take hold when we’re left alone with our thoughts. Orme explained: “Guess I’m Stuck In The Dark is about how our minds begin to deceive us when we’re left in the dark, conjuring up fears that only appear in moments of insecurity. But also leaning into that, and trying to party alongside it.” Orme has called it a misleading track, and she’s right: it promises release at every turn, and never pays up. That’s exactly what makes it so good.
The Itch – Planned Obsolescence
A cornerstone of The Itch’s live set for some time now, the single Planned Obsolescence sees capitalism-induced existentialism exorcised over a fusion of big beat and electroclash influences. “The song itself is about things being designed to break and the feeling that we’re all being built to wear out too; eventually we all become as replaceable as our gadgets,” Simon and Georgia say of the track. “But in the meantime, we can make pretend, have fun until time’s up. It’s a song for people always saying ‘One day…’ but that day never comes.” Released in April 2026, debut album It’s The Hope That Kills You finds The Itch embracing the tension between optimism and pessimism, pairing undulating dancefloor fillers with disenchanted pop songwriting.
Tooth – Take Me As I Am
London indie-emo quartet Tooth recently shared the single Take Me As I Am, which followed the band’s debut EP, Restless in Bloom. The band’s Tom Pollock said the track “represents a big development in our songwriting from what we did on Restless In Bloom both lyrically and instrumentally. On the EP, I’d written lyrics exploring coming of age, young romance and other typical teenage tropes. However, with this song I turned to focus on ideas of identity within my experience of being in a band, where people perhaps feel they know or understand me, despite often feeling like I don’t even know or understand myself. The lyrics are conversational, ebbing and flowing between both a desperation to be accepted, and a resentment toward expectations of what or who I should be.”
Keo – Be Happy
Keo have steadily cultivated a fanbase desperate to hear what a debut, full-length LP from the London based four-piece would sound like and, finally, with Put a Smile On for Me, they have an answer: it sounds brilliantly brutal. There’s not a moment when frontman Finn Keogh shies away from scathing introspection. The title of the opening track Be Happy writes a cheque the lyrical content elects not to cash. Over sailing guitars and crashing symbols, Finn professes: “I wanna be happy, if that stuff’s true, I wanna be happy, just like you.” Come the end of the song, a whisper turns to more of a desperate yelp: “Never mind, never mind, never mind.” That’s as uplifting as the record gets.
Lauren Auder – Flags
Lauren Auder has never sounded like a singer waiting to be filed under indie. Flags, taken from the Need Jolts Loose EP, is two minutes fifty of woodblock, distorted 808 and a voice that would rather rhyme than confess. It is gothy without the candles, pop without the chorus-as-therapy. After this spring’s The Whole World as Vigil, the new EP is short and deliberately unsoothing. Neith and Temple open the door; Flags is the room where she talks too fast on purpose. The 170bpm clip is not dance music so much as argument. You keep up or you don’t. What she is arguing about is less a slogan than a posture. Flags, in this register, are identities you pick up and put down, not inheritances. The vocal sits on the kick as if it were furniture.
Bricknasty – bobinov
Back in July, Dublin collective Bricknasty dropped the single bobinov, their first release of 2026, following the success of last year’s acclaimed EP BLACKS LAW. Produced by Cillian McCauley, the track builds on the band’s genre-blurring sound, weaving together indie, soul and alternative influences with groove-driven production. Lyrically, bobinov explores themes of connection, distance and longing, delivered through frontman Fatboy’s distinctive vocal style – “This song comes from our time touring overseas just wanting to inject more energy into the live show and show case tight song writing that blasts angst and feeling out of it so we can rock the shop and give people that buzz when we’re all in the room.”
Dermot Henry – Pilots Licence
Wiltshire-born singer-songwriter Dermot Henry has shared his uplifting new single Pilots Licence, taken from the forthcoming debut album Bad Throw, Good Catch. Premiering on BBC 6 Music, the track builds from skittering percussion into a clattering finale, all driven by his blistering vocals and intricate layers. On the track, Dermot shares: “Pilots Licence was the first song I wrote when I moved to Paris. It for me is the marking point of the start of the bunch of songs that have made up the album and the last 2 years of my life. I was thinking of my friends and how our relationships have changed over the years and everyone starting down their diverging paths.”
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