The Pet Shop Boys made loneliness sound like a ticker-tape parade, and Donna Summer made desire sound like a medical emergency. Now zukrassverliebt takes the most contemporary of low-grade miseries, the feeling of a brain with forty tabs open and no idea which one is playing music, and turns it into a dance-pop single that you can't switch off. That is the cruel joke at the heart of "Sensory Overload", and it's a very good one.

Post-punk has spent decades learning to dress for funerals, and most of its apprentices have mastered the black clothes and forgotten the grief. The House Flies, from Moline, Illinois, remember the grief. *Lions and Ore*, their second full-length, is a record of rooms with the lights off and fields shimmering in the heat, of sleep that won't quite arrive and objects abandoned by people who meant to come back. It was recorded in vocalist and guitarist Alex Riggen's basement, which explains the closeness, the sense of songs pressed against the walls, and also the ambition, because the walls have clearly been asked to hold more than they were built for.

Pop music has always been a time-travel business. Songs get written in one decade, heard in another, and loved in a third. Frank Joshua has taken the longest route I can remember. He wrote "Made For Me" at nineteen, put it in a drawer for more than four decades, and has finally let it out into a world that has had plenty of time to grow cynical. The remarkable thing is that the song hasn't aged a day.

Love songs usually come in two flavours: the swooning and the sneering. Kasper's "Give and Take" refuses both and sits down at the kitchen table instead, where most real relationships are won, lost and quietly renegotiated. It is a duet in spirit if not in form, a conversation between two people who have not stopped loving each other but have somehow stopped listening. It is also one of the more grown-up pop songs to wander into earshot this year.

Garage has always been music for people pretending to be fine. The two-step shuffle was made for a Friday night in your best shirt, hips swinging, heart quietly negotiating with itself. Roger K, an independent artist from Victoria, Australia, has noticed this and built a whole single around it. "Alter Ego" is a garage record about the exact moment the front you've been holding up for the room stops holding.

There is a particular kind of pop song that arrives dressed as a day at the beach while quietly carrying a bag of knives. "Sha La La", the new single from Wellington's January Blue, is one of the very best of the type I've heard in a long while.

Debut albums from faceless projects usually arrive with a smoke machine and little else. *Where God Grew Tired* turns up with a cosmology. Over ten tracks and fifty-five minutes, Wildcard Campfire, the vehicle of writer and creative director Rom Burla, builds a whole fallen civilisation: a promise curdles into doctrine, a rebellion hardens into war, and humanity crawls underground while something new grows over the ruins. Millennia later, the survivors come back clutching a warped memory of what they lost. It is a mad ambition for a first record, and the thing is how often it comes off.

Witch house was never supposed to grow old gracefully. It arrived around 2009 in a fog of triangle glyphs, chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, and cheap-hearted gothic theatre, then dispersed almost as quickly as it had gathered, leaving Salem, White Ring and a handful of others as its patron saints. So it is a small shock, and a gratifying one, to find the form turning up in Ekeren, a suburb of Antwerp, in the hands of a man who has lived in the same house for 55 years and has been spinning records since 1995. *Hexen* is his debut, released in October, and it is a wonder.

Pop music has spent a century singing about love, heartbreak, revolution and the open road, and has somehow never found time for the fourth Thursday in November. Sheldon Mashugana, a Dallas comedian wearing round black glasses, a mop of lacquered hair and the manic grin of a man who has just been told the pub is open all night, has noticed the omission and fixed it. "It's Turkey Day" is billed as the first song ever dedicated to the actual day of Thanksgiving. I can't verify that claim, but I can't think of a rival either, and in rock and roll the first man through the door is usually the one who gets the glory.

Calling a seventy-seven-minute, fifteen-track collection an "EP" is the first act of mischief on Katie Noir's second record. The second is releasing it less than three months after a twenty-three-song debut. A cynic would expect leftovers: B-sides, offcuts, the sound of an artist clearing the shed. *The Aftermath EP* is nothing of the kind. It is a sequel with a sharper pulse, written by someone who has just discovered that strangers can hear her.