Singles In Your Area: July 2026
Let’s dig into some of the best single releases from Scotland this month, including Redolent, Charm Of Finches, The Mirror Trap and more
Scotland’s hardly short of indie acts, but few are as innovative as Redolent’s bracing mix of electronica and pop. They made a welcome return this month, but there’s plenty more to enjoy below, whether you’re into soul, cut-up experimentation, satirical post-rock or old-school stadium rock.
If you’ve got a song you’d like to see featured in Singles In Your Area, share it with us at [email protected].
Redolent
‘ok wow’
The SAY Award winners return with their first ‘proper’ new material since Dinny Greet (excluding their livestreams, which have been a gold mine of jam sessions), a gut-punch portrait of an argument boiling over. Sparsely arranged with only ticking drums and piano, Robin Herbert’s reedy but soulful vocals are the centrepiece on ‘ok wow’, combining his rap-like flow with heart-on-sleeve melancholy. Discussing the single, Herbert said: 'The song is about going too far in a scrap with someone and being sat alone in silence with your wrongness in the aftermath.’
LOLA!
‘What Did You Expect?’
Lola Aluko’s silky vocals belie a lyrically terse call-out of toxic masculinity and the strain it places on every aspect of a relationship. Alternating between bafflement and anger, this is LOLA!’s first single, and it oozes with confidence.
Andrew Howie
‘Flower’
In the year of Inferno, it’s almost impossible to avoid comparing Howie’s latest with Boards Of Canada. It’s far more hopeful than anything from the godfathers of electronica, centring on the found sound snippet of a small child repeating: ‘Bees make honey, and it sure tastes good / Did you ever smell a flower? Well, it sure smells good.’ That same sweet-scented sentiment travels through the looping drum machines, sound samples and a slow ascent into the stratosphere. If you like The Books and their ilk, this one’s for you.
Dovetailed
‘Kethers Street’
The second single from Kim Grant and Simon Liddell’s new project is haunting, drawing from a similarly emotionally-wrought palette as bands such as Daughter, and featuring a rhythm and guitar section from Chvrches' own Jonny Scott. Grant said of the single: ‘After the opening line acknowledges a change and a growth the rest of the track is something like a patchwork of memory, a reflection on what’s been. The “it feels purple” line is actually about when I had to get anaesthesia as a child and I remember it was like all my senses became the colour purple. The song itself is probably our most live-band-sounding song. It was a lot of fun laying the layers of overdriven guitar in the bridge, where myself, Simon and Jonny all had a go at putting down a riff and ended up keeping them all in.’
Sulka
‘Carrot’
A simple meditation on life’s transience, there are echoes of Kurt Vile’s circuitous guitar playing here, teasing ideas out with an unhurried air. Sulka says of the track: ‘While on Bute I finished one of my walks in a pub and met an old couple who had retired there. They told me about their old lives in Glasgow and asked me questions about my life and what the city was like now. The wife had dementia and would repeat a lot of questions. I think this partly influenced my thinking in this song, which presents a picture of life as a whole and questions the direction I’m going in. The idea of the carrot dangling behind me suggests that I’m regressing or looking backwards too much, while holding onto the string too tightly is the idea that I’m not letting myself be guided by new opportunities.’
Birdvox
‘Almost And Re-Dos’
Barrelling through its runtime with palpable exuberance, Birdvox’s latest balances cynical lyrics with fun-loving dynamics. The band are a collaboration between plenty of known faces throughout the Scottish folk and indie scene: Sarah Hayes (co-founder of Admiral Fallow), Inge Thomson (regular collaborator with Karine Polwart), Jenny Sturgeon (member of Salt House), and Charlotte Printer (who’s performed with Altered Images, Joesef and Broken Chanter). There’ll be plenty more where that came from on their album Shamming The Drama, set for release on Friday 18 September via Hudson Records.
Neon Waltz
‘Send Me Down’
Their first material in more than three years, a stormy cloud of finality hangs over this indie-banger. Says frontman Jordan Shearer: ‘It’s about the fear of drawing a line under Neon Waltz but not knowing what I would do with my time. Being just a guy who ‘used to be in that band’ but ‘Send Me Down’ is me coming to the realisation that I’m not gonna give it up just because it’s been a rough journey.’ Moving with a relentless energy, its existential angst has done nothing to extinguish their anthemic flair.
Charm Of Finches
‘Bodysuit’
The Australian-born, Scotland-based duo are back at it with a moody, loping indie-folk number that hides the faintest hint of threat behind Mabel and Ivy Windred-Wornes’ airy vocals. Control and obsession beat at the heart of this spectral, ghostly piece.
Arab Strap
‘Glamour Magick’
Perhaps the funniest Aidan and Malc have been in quite a while, this doom-rocker finds Aidan attack the cult of beauty with a list of nips and tucks: highlights include a ‘scrotal lift’ and covering your ‘coupon in nightingale shit’. With a roar of ‘cultus vanitas’ and satanic drums, the Strap lads are heading back to the driech rock they perfected in the 1990s and 2000s.
Moffat says: ‘Time is our enemy, and we're all spending money on trying to fight it – it's just a question of how much we're willing to pay.’
The Mirror Trap
'A Painting Of A Building On Fire'
There’s a late-2000s flair to The Mirror Trap’s ode to ageing. It’s both a throwback and vibrantly fresh, favouring chunky synth hooks, swirling guitars, and Gary Moore’s powerhouse vocals, which sound like the wilting howl of a New Romantic heartthrob. In case you didn’t know, The Mirror Trap were on the verge of being a reasonably big deal on the indie scene, before imploding in the mid-2010s. This is taken from their upcoming EP All That Remains Is A Ghost, and marks a welcome return.
Susan Bear
‘Eternal Afternoon’
Mining a vein of optimism that seems to underpin her synthesiser project, these glimmers of old-school trance bear the air of nostalgia for anyone who binged the first wave of online lo-fi electronica in the early 2000s (I almost want to dig out my old copy of eJay to replicate it). Bear said: ‘A lot of my favourite songs have a space in them I like to go into, a weird liminal space, a nonlinear digital reverb that doesn’t exist in real life, my brain is trying to find what it reminds me of in real life, but it isn’t anywhere, so it’s like the magical unreal space.’
Main picture: Rosie Sco.