Red Hector – All Malled Out

This is another AI cover I tried out with Suno, based on some older music of mine.

Back in 2013, I had a live instrument setup running through my DAW that let me improvise on multiple instruments at a time, plus voice, and make up songs on the spot. The next song I was about to do was going to be "staying up too late." I started the track and was about to start singing on that topic when my girlfriend at the time texted me. She was at a shopping mall with her young daughter, treating her to a day out — but she had gotten really tired of it and wanted to go home, while her daughter wanted to keep going. She was texting me her frustration at being a mother.

I looked over at my phone as the recording was going, and I just started singing her text messages as they came in. That went on for the next few minutes, and I think it turned out amazing. So I guess you could say she wrote the lyrics.

In 2025 I fed it into Suno and gave it a heavier track, and a female voice instead of mine, which was more appropriate. For the video, a mother and daughter at a shopping mall: at first they are really happy and the shots are distinct and clear, but as time goes along the images get more and more abstract and psychedelic and blurry, to show her getting more and more frustrated — until she breaks, and they leave the mall.

— Red Hector

PinkPantheress – Illegal

PinkPantheress — British singer, songwriter, and producer Victoria Walker — opens her second mixtape Fancy That (May 9, 2025) with "Illegal," released as its third single on June 6, 2025. It reintroduces her in its first line — "My name is Pink and I'm really glad to meet you" — over a sample of Underworld's "Dark & Long (Dark Train)," with a 2-step garage / dance-pop pulse underneath. The full track story is in the Wikipedia entry for the song.

It sounds like a secret love song, and that is the trick. As she explained to Capital FM after Fancy That came out, it is actually about buying weed and the paranoia that follows — she had first imagined a song about hiring a male escort, a situation she had not lived, so she rewrote it around an encounter she could make real.

"Illegal" then outran the mixtape: a TikTok handshake trend, her second Billboard Hot 100 entry (one week at #96), a Grammy nomination for Best Dance Pop Recording, and NME naming it its Song of the Year. She told NME she did not think it would be "the one" — "I think the power of the beat itself is what people really like about it."

I had heard the name PinkPantheress, but I just assumed it was somebody like Nicki Minaj or Doja Cat. But then I heard her viral music on TikTok and checked her out, and I was pleasantly surprised that she was doing old school British drum and bass and adding vocals to it. It's an amazing combination, and I'm not surprised at her appeal and the success that followed.

— Red Hector

Luci – Don't Stay Too Late

Luci is Luciana Mancari, a 24-year-old Los Angeles performer — that is how she introduces herself in this video's own description, posted February 16, 2026, with the StageGirl contest hashtags #ImTheNextStagegirl and #StageGirl26Contest. It is a small, direct upload: a singer putting a song out there herself.

Live, the song has already made an impression. In a Highwire Daze live review of the We Found New Music Almost Acoustic Showcase at Bar Lubitsch in West Hollywood on April 27, 2026, Luci opened her set with "Don't Stay Too Late," and the reviewer called her "an unexpected treasure" with a powerhouse, theatrical voice — "Barbra Streisand meets Lady Gaga," with a flair entirely her own. The rest of her set moved through humor, heartbreak, and LGBTQ+ experience.

— Red Hector

Anna hisbbuR – You Forgot One Thing

Anna hisbbuR is a self-produced Hong Kong singer-songwriter and producer who taught herself everything. That is literally in the name — as she explained in a City Writer interview, "hisbbuR" is "rubbish" spelled backwards, a name she chose because she did not feel professional when she started. She debuted in 2020 with the album 404 not found, followed by Now You See Me in 2022, and she thinks of herself as a producer first, not just a singer — see her KProfiles profile for the discography.

"You Forgot One Thing" arrived on February 26, 2026, as the lead single ahead of her second album, I hate myself, I love myself. She composed, arranged, produced, and wrote it herself, and directed and edited the video too, with Karma Cheng as DOP, producer, and colorist.

The song's own message, in her words in the video description, is a reminder "for all the kind-hearted people out there: it's time for you to put yourself first, and that's not selfish" — "Never forget about yourself." That is the one thing of the title: in all the giving, you forgot yourself.

I like this sort of driving, minimalistic, pulsating track. It reminds me of the style of Tiga and his track "Bugatti". I tried to make my own version of this style with my track "Operator".

— Red Hector

Red Hector – The Cupboard Rabbit

David Bowie died in January 2016 — suddenly, from the point of view of the world. He had been hiding his illness, and he had just released his last album on the Friday. I woke up to my phone lit up with the news, an article about it still open on the screen. It got me thinking about him, and doing a deeper dive into his music.

Not too long after that, I saw him in a dream. It was very realistic. He came up to me and said, "Hey man, I've got a little song for you," and he sang this quirky song about a farmer chasing a rabbit. The tune was so distinct that when I woke up, I sang it into my Voice Memo app.

Last year, when Suno was getting good at transforming demos, I thought I should test it out on that David Bowie song. I made sure to describe his style in the mid 70s, and I was absolutely amazed with the result. When I tried to find the uploaded voice memo on Suno later, I found out it was the first Suno project I ever did. I took the polished version and made a Midjourney animated video to it.

I love how it turned out, and it's my tribute back to David Bowie.

— Red Hector

Leith – The Messenger

Leith is Jessie Leith Munro, a Canadian singer-songwriter recording for Akira Records. "The Messenger" — written with Will Bloomfield and produced by Jonah Summerfield and Bloomfield — was in her live set through 2025, played in Paris and London, before the single and its video (directed by Natasha Pheko) arrived in February 2026. You can find her on Spotify.

The song is written from the worst seat in a friendship: the 3 a.m. phone call. She has watched her friend's relationship burn out from the sidelines — "he doesn't make you smile" — and taken the anger that isn't really meant for her. The chorus turns on one line: "It's too late to say I told you so / But not too late to say I love you though."

That is where the title lands. Don't waste the shot on me, she sings — I'm just the messenger. It is a love song aimed sideways: not at a lover, but at a friend who isn't ready to hear the truth yet, from the one person who will still be waiting in the wings to build her up again.

— Red Hector

Mikaela Davis – (Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses

Mikaela Davis is a Rochester-born singer, songwriter, and harpist who has spent her whole life bending a classical instrument into pop, psychedelia, and folk rock. She took up the harp at eight years old, studied in youth orchestras rather than garage bands, and earned a degree in harp performance at the Crane School of Music. That training powers a catalogue that runs from her Rounder Records album Delivery in 2018 to And Southern Star in 2023, and along the way she has shared stages with artists including Bob Weir, Bon Iver, and Lake Street Dive.

Her new album, Graceland Way, was released April 24, 2026, on Kill Rock Stars. It was co-written and co-produced with guitarist John Lee Shannon — the debut of the Davis–Shannon songwriting partnership — and its songs together tell the story of an unnamed antihero navigating life in a failing world: "The songs were written from our personal experience, but together they tell the arc of humanity," Davis says.

"(Looking Through) Rose Colored Glasses" is the opening track, and it announces that story in one gesture. It opens with a harp glissando burst that her album notes compare to being burst through a blissful wormhole, then settles into dark Western tones, with Kurt G. Johnson's pedal steel and harmonies from guest vocalists Madison Cunningham and Tim Heidecker — both also credited as featured artists on the song and its video. Of Cunningham, Davis says: "I feel like I found my Emmylou."

The lyric is a jilted lover's inventory of false hopes, sung clear-eyed after the fact: "Throwing pennies in an empty fountain / Rainbows in the dark / Pulling petals from a dying flower / A sudden change of heart." She painted pretty pictures with the stories she was told, she sings, but the colours all ran — and the title turns into the diagnosis: looking through rose coloured glasses, thinking it might be blue. The video, directed by Mama Hot Dog, gives that waking-up a dreamy, film-textured world.

It is a perfect album opener because it does two things at once: the harp says wonder, and the words say the wonder was a mistake. The rest of Graceland Way sets out from exactly that place — a journey into the unknown, taken with open eyes this time.

— Red Hector