Nobody enjoys being told how to live, and almost nobody is told only once. Unsolicited opinion arrives in relays: the raised eyebrow across the dinner table, the "just saying" that is never just saying, the acquaintance with firm views on your choices. Lisac's "Nobody Asked You" takes this most ordinary of irritations and elevates it to art without raising its voice once.

Breakups are rarely as tidy as pop songs pretend. They fray, and they linger in the hallway with one arm in a coat, unsure whether to leave. The most interesting thing a dance record can do with that limbo is stay in it long enough to be honest, then open a window. That is the trick AVRION pulls off on *Free*, the second single from an independent producer who builds a catalogue with more patience than the genre's louder names can manage.

Most musicians pick an apartment and furnish it. Alexander Nantschev has spent more than forty years on the balcony between two. At one end, in a Vienna flat, his father, the violinist and instrument dealer Nikolaj, kept Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg in the air. At the other, his brother's studio hummed with synthesizers, samplers, tape machines and Beatles records. The boy who wandered between them fell hard for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Within You Without You", two songs in which pop first dared to lie down on a Persian rug and wonder what else the orchestra might be hiding. That balcony is the architecture of his new album, and he still hasn't chosen a side.

Records made by friends in a room tend to sound either like a warm hug or a hostage negotiation. *Bass River Sessions*, cut over several sittings on a Massachusetts street and named for it, sounds like three men who have spent years arguing productively about guitars finally being allowed to leave the amps switched on.

Gospel music has always known that the most interesting hour of the soul is the one before the miracle. Noel Johnson NDJ, a one-man congregation from Birmingham (the American one), has built a single around that hour. It is a hymn sung by someone unsure the hymn will be answered, and it is a fine, unsettling piece of work.

Nashville's Music Row has a habit of swallowing careers, and lately it has been swallowing buildings too. The Sound Shop, a room where Brenda Lee, Dolly Parton and Eddy Arnold once left fingerprints on the air, shut its doors for good and met the wrecking ball within days of Stephani Ezatoff finishing her session there. She cut "Run On" in the studio's last gasp, and the single carries the faint whiff of a séance: a woman summoning a very old song inside a very old room while the demolition crew waits at the kerb.

Leicester has never been filed under progressive rock, which is probably how Gurulee prefers it. He has spent the four years since his last release in a home studio he calls his safe space, doing what cranks and visionaries have always done: working in private until the thing is ready. "Time Blindness" is that thing. It emerges fully formed, blinking at the daylight and unrepentant.

Pop has always known that the dancefloor is the best place to cry. New Order knew it, the Pet Shop Boys built a career on it, and Robyn made it an emotional philosophy. On *Relabel*, her second album, Southampton's Kat Button joins that lineage with ten tracks that are danceable and disarmingly honest. Very little EDM has attempted what she does here, and the record is better for it.

Seattle guards its reputation jealously, and that reputation was not built on good manners. London Bridge Studios still seems to hum with Mother Love Bone's swagger, Soundgarden's thunder and Pearl Jam's ten-ton yearning. Booking the room takes nerve, and walking out with a song that amounts to a firm handshake and a sturdy pair of boots takes more. Pete Keating has that nerve. "Louder" uses the room's hallowed acoustics to make a point rather than a racket.

Paul McCartney woke with "Yesterday" fully formed and spent weeks canvassing the music business in case he had nicked it. Jason Mckee, the Melbourne singer-songwriter who records as Reetoxa, has a stranger claim on the dream-song tradition, and a heavier price attached to it. The first of these two tracks arrived in a prison bunk in 2017, weeks after his mother's death, delivered by a vision of two floating heads. One was his mother's. The other belonged to a daughter lost before birth, who wanted to know why nobody was looking after her in a place called Akaroa. He had never heard of it. He wrote it down phonetically, picked up his guitar, and was told through the cell door, with some vigour, to shut up.