Grief has always made for peculiar pop music. It arrives sideways, dressed up as nostalgia or seaside reverie, and it takes a canny songwriter to smuggle real devastation past the listener's guard. Kiey manages exactly that with "phan thiet," a single so gently disarming you barely notice it's broken your heart until the final chorus has already done the damage.

Ten years is a long time to sit with eight songs. Long enough for a record to calcify into pastiche, or, if the maker is patient and unshowy about it, long enough for something genuinely lived-in to emerge. HOLLYWAND's debut, White Magic, belongs firmly to the second category — a record that wears its decade of gestation not as a gimmick but as texture, the way a well-loved leather jacket wears its creases.

French solo outfit Rorksha has fashioned something genuinely arresting with "Récif," a single that understands the value of patience before it lets rip. The title translates to "reef," and the song earns that image with unusual honesty: it doesn't arrive as a wall of noise but as a whisper that slowly gathers weight, guitar and voice circling each other with the wariness of two people testing whether trust is worth the risk.

Every so often a record arrives that refuses to apologise for itself, and Remik Erikson's "Nacho" struts through the door with the confidence of a man who has found his muse standing at the stove, tortilla chips scattered like confetti at a wedding he can't stop writing about. This is a songwriter who began, by his own account, penning verses for his own nuptials, and that origin story matters here: "Nacho" is not a novelty single dressed up as romance, it is a love song that has simply found a more honest vocabulary than roses and moonlight.

There's a particular kind of English songwriting that doesn't shout for your attention so much as quietly insist on it — the kind that trades in the ache of ordinary lives rendered extraordinary through careful, unshowy craft. Ian Roland's new single, "Boxing Gloves," belongs firmly in that tradition, and it lands its punches with the precision of someone who has clearly spent years learning exactly where to aim.

Leeds has a habit of producing bands who sound like they've spent a winter arguing about genre and lost, gloriously, on every front. Lomens are the latest case for the prosecution. Five old friends — Christopher Parker on vocals, Jordan McNamara on drums, Jason Glazebrook and Joshua Stevens trading guitar and bass duties, Thomas Nicholson filling the gaps with synth and percussion — have spent the past year building a debut EP that refuses to sit still, and "Surely Not?" is the moment that refusal pays off.

Fourteen years is a long time to sit on a song. Long enough for a demo tape to gather dust, for a marriage to deepen, for a melody once scratched onto a cassette to wait patiently for its proper coat of paint. George Aiello wrote this one back in 2011, tucked it away, and now, with John Ingram beside him under The Sonic Travelers banner, he has finally given it the treatment it always deserved.

There's a particular pleasure in being lied to well, and HANGAWI (formerly SYLVIA M) has built a career on exactly that pleasure. "NPD" arrives like a love letter written in someone else's blood, and it takes a good ninety seconds before you notice whose blood it actually is.

Every so often a single arrives that refuses to announce itself with fanfare, choosing instead to smoulder its way into the room. "Burning," the lead cut from ANTXNXO's forthcoming debut *Only the Darkness Can Save Me Now*, does exactly that. It doesn't kick the door down. It waits until you've stopped watching, then sets the curtains alight.

Every so often a single arrives that seems less interested in charming the listener than in putting them on trial. "Righteousness," the second instalment of OpCritical's oligarch trilogy, does exactly that, and does it with the sneering confidence of a band who know precisely which side of the barricade they're standing on.