Sophie Powers – klepto (ft. Lexie Liu)

Toronto-born, Los Angeles-based Sophie Powers is 22 and already several records deep — the Red in Revenge EP, 2024's Glitch: Lvl 1, and a run of singles with titles like "popoff" and "spiderwebs" that tell you exactly what kind of pop she makes: hyper, bratty, and completely unbothered. "klepto," out on Encore Recordings, might be her sharpest three minutes yet.

The song has been waiting for its moment. Powers wrote it back in 2023, co-writing with Jutes and Cam Hunter and producing with Mike Gonek, but she held it back because it needed the right partner in crime. That turned out to be Chinese pop star Lexie Liu — known in the West for tracks like "X" and for voicing Seraphine in K/DA's "MORE". Liu heard the song on a 2025 visit to Los Angeles, and recorded her part the next day, before flying home to China.

Powers calls the song an ode to the Y2K divas — her moodboard runs from Nelly Furtado and Peaches (who she once opened for) to Lady Gaga and Britney Spears — and the opening hook lands like a mission statement: "Got a habit, always acting up / They say I'm too dramatic / Push 'em all aside and steal the spotlight / I'm a klepto." Liu has said the song is about "stepping into the spotlight unapologetically," and the video, directed by Hannah De Vries, plays the whole thing as a glamorous heist — two stars treating the spotlight like something that was theirs to steal all along.

If her face looks familiar from somewhere completely different, there's a reason. In 2025 she auditioned for season 23 of American Idol — the same season as Mattie Pruitt, who played it straight all the way to the Top 7 — and instead of singing for her life, she deadpanned an original joke song called "STFU": a mostly spoken list of everything that needs to shut up, from Karens, vegans, and babies to laundry, war, dinosaurs, traffic, and groceries. All three judges voted no, and Lionel Richie pronounced himself "mortified." Powers has since explained that the whole thing was a plan — she was signed to a label when Idol cast her, so she couldn't have won anyway; the audition was a joke designed to send people looking for her real music. It worked: the clip went viral, and she later spun her fun side off into a separate side project under another name: Pixl Girl.

"I don't think you're a good fit for American Idol – I know, I'm Canadian."

I could not believe the Pixl Girl and Sophie Powers were the same person. In her audition for American Idol, she clearly was punking them with a deliberately silly song, just for LULZ or a clever strategy for a promotion. She keeps a totally separate account under her alternate name and uses that to park her other less serious music.

This is absolutely my top favorite song of 2026 so far and it looks like it's gonna stay that way. I absolutely love how she nailed the 2000s electro pop sound that I also love. It's absolutely addictive and catchy as hell.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-htYGCnmI8Q

Mattie Pruitt – Hit The Road

Day four of my 2026 favorites series starts in Eagleville, Tennessee. Mattie Pruitt is 16 years old, plays guitar and piano, and most people met her on American Idol: she auditioned at 15 with Jessie Murph's "How Could You," with country singer Craig Campbell accompanying her on piano, and went on to finish in the Top 7 of season 23 — the youngest contestant, by birth year, ever to reach the finals.

"Hit The Road" is her 2026 single, released by 19 Recordings and Graffiti Sound — the Idol machine stayed in her corner — and it is not a sweet sixteen kind of song. It's an ultimatum, sung to a guy who won't commit either way: "Hold me close or let me go... Tell me now or hit the road." The title turns the old brush-off around — she's not the one leaving, she's the one setting the deadline. And she gives the lyric real bite: "You can keep your sorry's / Imma keep your Harley."

Her sound sits in that soulful-country-with-rock-teeth lane — Chris Stapleton, Teddy Swims, and Jessie Murph are the influences she cites — and the video, directed by Millie Dweck, keeps the focus where it belongs: on a singer who sounds like she's been making records for years, not months. Most finalists disappear when the season ends. This one sounds like she's just getting started.

It's a real Indie country gem that sticks and rolls around in your brain for days as you keep singing it over and over in your head.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0WqADoirvI

Red Hector – John Cale Song

This one goes back to January 6, 2026 — one of my first videos of the year. The song began as an improvisation from 2012, and this video is a cover version of it: me covering my own improvisation, rebuilt with the new tools. It runs just seventy-eight seconds — a miniature.

The title is the subject. John Cale is the Welsh musician who co-founded the Velvet Underground with Lou Reed in 1965, and played viola like nobody else in rock — a classical instrument dragged into the avant-garde. After the Velvets he built a solo career of restless, literate albums like Paris 1919, and produced records by the Stooges, Patti Smith (her debut, Horses), and Nico. He was still being tagged in the video's description — @therealjohncale — because some influences you address directly.

A song named for a man like that isn't really about biography, though. It's about what his example licenses: take the training seriously, then break the rules in public.

For the video, I made sure the setting was an empty warehouse, similar to Andy Warhol's Factory space, and the visual style is inspired by Kandinsky the painter.

In the years since that 2012 improvisation, I have discovered deeper tracks by The Velvet Underground and have grown in appreciation for Lou Reed and John Cale. And then, around the time I made this video early in 2026, John Cale suddenly seemed to be everywhere again: he had collaborated with the much younger Charli XCX on "House", from her Wuthering Heights soundtrack, and he later appeared on the cover art of her album Music, Fashion, Film, alongside Marc Jacobs and Martin Scorsese. The man helped invent this stuff — good to see the new generation knows it.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsVucYnbNoE

Telenova – IN THE NAME OF YOUR LOVE

Day three of my 2026 favorites series, and we cross to the other side of the world: Telenova are a Melbourne trio — vocalist and creative lead Angeline Armstrong, with multi-instrumentalists and producers Edward Quinn and Joshua Moriarty — who make what they call cinematic indie pop, and the description earns itself.

"IN THE NAME OF YOUR LOVE" is track four on their second album THE WARNING, released February 27, 2026 on EMI / Universal Music Australia, following their 2024 debut Time Is a Flower. The song has lived with the band a while — an earlier version appeared on their 2022 EP Stained Glass Love — and on the new album it arrives as what one Australian review called "a euphoric explosion of indie goodness"

On the surface it reads as a love song, and a desperate one: "I only wanted to be held in your arms." But Armstrong has pointed to its central line herself — "I cry and I curse and I scream at the heavens above / But it's you that I want and I'll bleed in the name of your love" — calling it the album's most important lyric, almost blasphemous: a song about opening yourself up to a higher power and putting your faith in the unknown.

The video matches that tension. It cuts between a silhouetted dancer against saturated red and a crowded subway car bathed in cool blue-green light, Armstrong singing straight to camera while the passengers around her sway holding the overhead rails — a whole carload of people in a trance, which is pretty much what the song does to a listener.

I feel the passion of this song deep inside.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUAvfo8fpuU

Niko Rubio – Five Star

Niko Rubio knows her worth, and "Five Star" is her singing it at the top of her lungs. Rubio is a Mexican-Salvadoran-American singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist from Los Angeles whose sound merges traditional Mexican ranchera with 90s alternative rock and modern indie pop — a combination that shouldn't work on paper and absolutely does in practice.

Fans heard "Five Star" live before they could stream it: she performed it while opening for The Two Lips on their fall tour, and when its companion song "Sunday Girl" dropped in January 2026, everyone who'd been at those shows knew "Five Star" couldn't be far behind. It arrived as a single in early 2026, paired with "Sunday Girl" on streaming, and it later landed on her six-song Sunday Girl EP on Atlantic Records, alongside "Pink Starburst" and the title track, which Rolling Stone put on its "Songs You Need To Know" playlist.

The song itself is pure confidence, chic rock with its chin up: "I'm a five-star beauty queen," she declares — she can do it all, just treat her right. It follows her 2025 EP Ring Ring, produced by Grammy winner Lester Mendez, and the momentum is real: Pandora named her to its Latin Artists to Watch list for 2026, and coverage of the Sunday Girl era had the New York Times' Style section hailing her as SoCal's first exciting new pop star since Gwen Stefani.

And a note for readers following this series: "Sunday Girl" is coming up later in my 2026 favorites list in its own right. "Five Star" is the introduction — and what an introduction.

She's one of my top favorite new artists I've discovered over the last year. She recently changed her sound to be more reggae and trip-hop, showing her versatility while maintaining quality, memorable songs.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJY227hTakc

gala dragot – femcel anthem

Some artists arrive with a TV moment behind them before they're even old enough to vote. gala dragot — stylized all lowercase — is a Belgian pop singer-songwriter of Albanian descent, born in 2005, who won The Voice Kids in Belgium in 2020 and then got national attention at home in Belgium's Eurosong 2023, the national selection for the Eurovision Song Contest. She performed two songs, "Emotion Ollie" and "T'inquiète," and chose "T'inquiète" as her entry. Since then she's kept building: a featured turn on The Subs' "Teardrop" — a cover of the Massive Attack classic — and a run of singles with titles that tell you she doesn't take herself too seriously — "uglyyyyy" among them.

"femcel anthem" came out as a single in 2025, and it also appears on her 2026 album twerking music. The title takes a piece of internet slang — "femcel," the online shorthand for a woman who describes herself as involuntarily single — and does the smartest thing you can do with a label like that: it claims it, turns the joke on herself first, and sets it to a pop beat.

Her sound is pop with indie and electronic edges, expressive vocals, and themes that swing between love, heartbreak, and self-discovery — but the delivery is what sells it. There's a self-mocking wink running through her work that keeps the sad stuff from ever getting heavy. An anthem for the chronically online and romantically unlucky, made by someone clearly in on the joke.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLX19-wa-mg

Red Hector – LF4 (Sweet Distraction)

Today's own-video slot goes back to the very start of the year — January 4, 2026 — and one of the quietest things in the whole catalog: "LF4 (Sweet Distraction)," a three-minute instrumental that lives at the chill end of the Red Hector spectrum.

LF4 stands in the lo-fi tradition — "low fidelity" — the warm, slightly dusty sound that grew out of hip-hop beat tapes and became the default soundtrack for studying, reading, and winding down. Whole corners of YouTube run on it now: endless "beats to study to" streams, usually paired with a looping animation of a girl at a desk, books open, headphones on, a cat wandering through the scene. The video's own tags tell the story — #LofiBeats, #StudyMusic, #432hz, that last one a nod to the alternate tuning a lot of ambient and lo-fi listeners swear sounds warmer and calmer than standard pitch.

It's a side of the catalog that doesn't shout. No verses, no hooks — just a mood, held steady for three minutes.

This was the start of a possible new ambient direction for me — what the kids are calling lo-fi these days. There are a lot of YouTube channels and various media players in VR, in the different worlds I go into, and a lot of them start with this type of instrumental chill vibe. Usually they have a girl studying, with a cat walking around her — she's petting the cat or whatever. And in my collected work, I include black cats as a recurring motif, so it all fits together.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG_avgsYzUc

Bruce Springsteen – Streets Of Minneapolis

Some songs take years to write. This one took days — because it had to. "Streets Of Minneapolis" is Bruce Springsteen doing what he has done for fifty years: showing up with a guitar while history is still happening.

Springsteen released the song on January 28, 2026, in the middle of the federal immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis. He wrote it the day after Alex Pretti was shot and killed by federal agents — Renée Good had been killed by an ICE officer in the same city earlier that month — recorded it almost immediately, and put it out within the week. In his own statement he said he wrote it "in response to the state terror being visited on the city of Minneapolis," and dedicated it "to the people of Minneapolis, our innocent immigrant neighbors and in memory of Alex Pretti and Renee Good."

The song names names and places: Nicollet Avenue under an occupier's boots, "King Trump's private army from the DHS," bloody footprints where mercy should have stood — and then, in the last verse, the turn that makes it a Springsteen song instead of just an angry one: "We'll take our stand for this land / And the stranger in our midst / We'll remember the names of those who died / On the streets of Minneapolis." It ends not in despair but in a chant — "ICE out now" — built for a crowd to carry.

Two days after releasing it, on January 30, Springsteen made a surprise appearance at Tom Morello's "Defend Minnesota" benefit concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis and performed it live for the first time, with all proceeds going to the families of Good and Pretti. The title itself is a callback to his own "Streets of Philadelphia" — another song written for people a crisis was leaving behind.

I live in South Minneapolis, in Uptown, where Renée was tragically and horrifically shot. I also live only blocks away from Nicollet Avenue, where Alex got shot and killed.

The terror the immigration agents unleashed caused very real uncertainty and fear. They were everywhere, and you didn't know if they were going to knock on your door at any time. It reminded us all too well of 2020, when George Floyd was murdered by a Minneapolis policeman, caught on smartphone cameras. What happened in Minneapolis started worldwide protests and started the Black Lives Matter movement — right from my neighborhood.

I'm proud of all my neighbors who have marched in the bitter cold, and despite the oppression, we stood strong — and always will.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDaPdpwA4Iw

Holly Humberstone – To Love Somebody

Day two of my 2026 favorites series, and this one is the quiet heartbreaker of the bunch. Holly Humberstone doesn't raise her voice — she just tells the truth until it hurts.

Humberstone is an English singer-songwriter who first broke through at the start of the decade and released her debut album, Paint My Bedroom Black, in 2023. "To Love Somebody" arrived on January 23, 2026 as the second single from her second album, Cruel World (Polydor, out April 10, 2026, and a #4 album in the UK). She wrote it with her long-term collaborators Rob Milton and Jon Green, with Milton producing, and she performed it on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon just days after it came out.

The story behind the song is what makes it land. Humberstone wrote it after someone very close to her went through a devastating heartbreak. Her idea: when you're in the depths of that, you can't see any silver lining — but the grief itself is a measure of the love that was there. In her words, she wanted to give her friend an affirmation that this is only one tiny blip in the story — this blue and green ball just keeps spinning, and there is so much more waiting for you. It's a song built on a genuinely kind thought: in order to feel extreme happiness, you have to know extreme sadness.

The video, directed by Silken Weinberg (known for work with Ethel Cain), leans into the dark-fairytale world of Cruel World — Victorian theatre, the Brothers Grimm, and a touch of Nosferatu. Grief staged like a gothic bedtime story, which is exactly how heartbreak feels from the inside.

Holly Humberstone is notable to me for a specific reason. Every year I compile my yearly favorites and rank them in order — and Holly Humberstone was my number one song of 2021, with "The Walls Are Way Too Thin."

I will always connect her music with being in social VR, in AltSpace, at that time. 2021 was the first year I ever developed good friendships — and even romantic connections — just through the headset. There was a whole series of romantic encounters, and a lot of drama: couples connected deeply, then separated and went with other people. And it was very easy to eavesdrop — you might not know people were listening. Literally, the virtual walls were way too thin.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hWa9w0njxE

Lola Young – Post Sex Clarity

Post two in my 2026 favorites series — and fair warning, this one is not safe for work or shy ears. Lola Young doesn't do shy.

Young is a singer from South London who broke through worldwide with "Messy" in 2024. "Post Sex Clarity" comes from her third album, I'm Only F**king Myself (released September 19, 2025, and a #3 album in the UK) — a record about sex, addiction, and trauma delivered with a candor that would make most pop stars blush. She wrote the song with Carter Lang, Conor Dickinson, Jared Solomon, and William Brown.

The idea is brilliant in its simplicity: that clear-headed moment lying in bed after intimacy, when the haze burns off and you see everything exactly as it is. Young's twist is that the clarity doesn't free her — it convicts her. "When I'm laying in bed, got post-sex clarity / I still love you, and I don't know why." She's a self-aware mess, pushing the love away and pulling it right back in the same breath, and she knows it — "I'm not usually like that" might be the most honest line on the album.

The song had a second life on TikTok in late 2025, soundtracking thousands of kitchen dances and confessional videos — proof that a song this naked finds its people fast.

As a songwriter, what I admire is the bravery of the frame: she sets the whole song at the one moment most people would lie to themselves, and then refuses to lie.

Why this one made my list: it moves me emotionally — the way she passionately sings it. And the album it's from, all the songs on it, are so absolutely unique. It's mind-blowing when you listen to the whole album. It's literally like something you have never heard before — and that's always amazing, to find an artist like that.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YO351wpgIVM

Brigitte Calls Me Baby – Slumber Party

I'm kicking off a new series on this blog: the songs I've had on repeat in 2026 — the discoveries that keep me inspired while I'm making my own records. New Music Fridays are sacred around here, and I want to share the best of what I find.

First up: "Slumber Party" by Brigitte Calls Me Baby.

The band is a five-piece from Chicago, formed in 2022 around singer Wes Leavins — a name worth knowing. As a teenager Leavins played Elvis Presley in a touring production of Million Dollar Quartet, and he famously took the band's name from his teenage correspondence with Brigitte Bardot. That old-soul streak runs through everything they do: Leavins sings like a mid-century crooner who wandered into an indie rock band — think Morrissey's drama and The Smiths' romantic sweep, with a little Muse-sized grandeur on top.

"Slumber Party" was released on January 13, 2026 as a preview of their second album, Irreversible (ATO Records, out March 13, 2026), where it sits as track two. It was written by Leavins with guitarist David Rosendahl and bassist Devin Wessels, and the album was recorded largely live with producers Yves and Lawrence Rothman — you can hear that live-wire energy in it. Where their 2024 debut The Future Is Our Way Out announced them, Irreversible is the sound of a band that has toured with Morrissey, Muse, and Fontaines D.C. and come back fearless.

The song itself is pure romantic mischief — an invitation that won't take no for an answer, with my favorite detail buried in the middle of it: "I bought Blue Velvet on a DVD, I brought it to the slumber party." A David Lynch reference as a party move. That's the whole band in one line: vintage, dramatic, and completely sincere about it.

Why this one made my list: they remind me of the Smiths, but they have their own sound — they still share some of the same attributes as the Smiths. Melodic and catchy, too. I can't stop playing it.

— Red Hector

Watch it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9rEZzMN0YU