Closing a double album is a gamble. Having kept the listener company across two discs of Texas songwriting, an artist must send them home without sentimentality or anticlimax. Rusty Reid's answer, on *Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters)*, is to hand the last word to Kacey Musgraves, and to a song about wonder.

Pop music has always had a soft spot for the man who goes too far. Here he is again, hurtling westward across America with a guitar, a sell-out crowd at every stop, and a heart that stays stubbornly parked in England. Colchester's KaiserKillers have turned this ancient predicament into a single that rattles, chimes and aches in roughly equal measure.

There is a particular sort of dread that arrives not with a scream but with a pulse. John Carpenter understood this in 1978, when he sat down with a synthesiser and a time signature that refuses to let the listener settle, and produced what remains perhaps the most economical piece of terror in popular music. Five beats to the bar, a handful of notes, and a generation of cinema-goers has never again been able to walk home from the pictures without glancing over a shoulder.

Breakups get all the attention. The slammed door, the thrown mug, the voicemail that should never have been sent: pop has built a gaudy industry on the night everything ends. Twisted Natures is interested in the morning after, and the many mornings after that, when the person has gone but their ghost still turns up uninvited. "Do You Think of Me Too?" is about that haunting, and it is lovely.

Oklahoma has a long habit of producing music that sounds like weather: the Flaming Lips' cosmic downpours, the Starlight Mints' bright squalls. Echo The Light's "Send Me" arrives like something gentler and more stubborn, a front of warm air that settles over the room and refuses to leave. It is a worship song that has been out in the world, been rained on, and come home with its pulse intact.

Banbury has a cross, a cake and a motorway junction. It has never had a songwriter quite like this. Music by Jeremy, a solo artist who makes records at weekends while his partner chooses her shoes, has reached the third instalment of a 24-track autobiography. In Side Three, the memoir stops studying its own reflection and goes to the window to look at the weather.

Gianfranco Malorgio has handed himself a difficult brief. He has named his closing movement after a slur, the sort of word once hurled across a Lower East Side street at men who had just stepped off a boat with one suitcase and a cardboard-tagged coat. Plenty of composers would flinch. Malorgio takes the word, turns it over in his hands like a stone from a riverbed, and makes it sing.

The remix is a curious British pastime, and usually a cynical one. A song is dusted off, a four-on-the-floor kick is bolted underneath, and a perfectly decent confession ends up as wallpaper in a provincial nightclub. Janalynn Castelino's "But Without You (Temptation Remix)", released on 23 October, has no interest in that kind of vandalism. It treats its 2025 source material the way a good tailor treats a fine suit: nothing essential is cut away, but everything is taken in, sharpened and made to move.

Most protest songs are written at a desk by someone who has never been cold. Nate Todd wrote his while out jogging, a more honest method than it sounds. Leafy lanes, mansions loitering behind their hedges like retired aristocrats, and a few blocks back, human beings asleep on the pavement. Todd noticed, and then did what a decent man with a guitar should do. He plugged in.

Rock music has always been fond of the drunk as a romantic figure: the poet in the bar, the doomed charmer, the tragic hero with a bottle for a muse. Jamie Smith, working under the name Thousand Pieces, has no time for any of that. "Hey Man. Amen." belongs to the person standing at the other end of the story, the one who has made the phone calls, driven to the clinics, sat through the relapses and run out of ideas.