Drum & bass has always been a music of motion, a genre that hurtles toward the horizon at 174 beats per minute and rarely looks back. Stay still in the middle of it and you feel the floor move. So it is a small act of rebellion that "Stay a While" asks you to linger, and a larger one that it gets you to agree.

Somewhere in a cramped workshop, a man has spent the better part of fifteen years coaxing a monster into existence. The razor belt, part chainsaw and part electric guitar, sounds like the sort of contraption a sensible person would keep away from the neighbours. Shortout Kid has instead kept it close, tuned it, tamed it, and now unleashed it on "Lamb", the first proper calling card from his forthcoming debut album. It is a gloriously unreasonable record, and it is better than it has any right to be.

Debussy's "Clair de lune" began life, around 1890, under a different name. *Promenade sentimentale* was the title of the movement, the third of the *Suite bergamasque*, and the composer sat on it for some fifteen years before letting it reach print in 1905. The more famous title comes from Verlaine, whose masked revellers dance sadly beneath the moon, singing in a minor key of love and a life they do not quite believe in. Debussy's gift was to catch that doubleness, joy and sorrow braided together, without a single word. Sasc Classical's new single, produced by SoloArtStudio, sets out to honour that gift, and does so with a sincerity that disarms.

Park City, Utah is famous for ski lifts, film-festival lanyards and millionaires in expensive fleece. On paper it is not the sort of town that produces a man who sounds as if he has spent a fortnight in a pickup truck with a Buck Owens cassette and a flask of something unlicensed. Yet here is Johnny Ranck with his self-titled debut EP, and the paperwork turns out to be misleading.

Nobody should be allowed to be this unguarded in public, and yet here is Erin Sydney, in a Chicago club in July, taking a song about marital jealousy and singing it as though the roof is already on fire and she's the only one who's noticed. "Jealous Love (Live)", lifted from the forthcoming *Live in Chicago* EP, is a rock record in the oldest and least fashionable sense: a few people, loud amplifiers, and an emotional situation that cannot be resolved by anything short of volume.

Press releases tend to promise a great deal, and ambient music, a genre built on the absence of incident, is particularly prone to overselling its own quietness. So it is a pleasure to report that John Beith, working alone in a home studio in Devon under the name The Snowball Effect, has made a single that earns its calm honestly. "The Colour of Dust" is unhurried, handsomely made and quietly affecting, and it rewards the kind of attention that most music no longer bothers to ask for.

Fourteen years is a long time to stay curious. Most bands that start as a trio end as a tribute act to their own second album, but Snowapple Collective went the other way, swelling from three people into an international, interdisciplinary troupe that treats albums, videos and live performance as one continuous experiment. Their latest gesture is a remix, which sounds like a footnote and plays like a manifesto.

Break-ups are petty burglars. They take the record collection, the good coat, the shared jokes. The cruellest ones take the one song you could always rely on and leave it ruined, so you flinch when it comes on in a taxi or a supermarket. WØLFFE has written an entire single about reclaiming that stolen property, and she does it with the swagger of someone kicking down the door of her own house.

Brno is a city of Gregor Mendel's pea plants, Janáček's folk-fevered operas and concrete modernism that looks as though it was built to withstand a siege. It makes sense that its most promising alternative rock export should combine those instincts: heredity, hysteria and heavy engineering. CREEPS have spent the past year slipping out of the Czech Republic one single at a time, and "Cry of the Banshee" is the moment the door comes off its hinges.

Hurb Jephasun has taken roughly four decades to release a record this good, and the wait was worth it. *In The End* is a four-track EP that sounds as though it was recorded in the one room where nobody was lying. The microphone is open and the walls are listening. You hear a chair creak, a breath drawn before a line, a voice fraying at the exact word where fraying is the only honest option.