Pop has always needed its visionaries and its charlatans, and the trick, more often than not, is telling them apart before the second chorus. Vela Jones, a name that sounds beamed in from a near-future newsroom, arrives with enough cinematic polish to make scepticism feel almost rude. "Star Light Star Bright" doesn't so much announce itself as descend, all synth haze and slow-building tension, like a transmission catching signal after years of static.

Some songs creep up on you. "Big City" by Sour Bridges opens so modestly — a single fingerpicked guitar, nothing else — that you'd be forgiven for thinking it intends to stay that way. It doesn't, and the surprise of its unfolding is one of the great pleasures of this record.

There is a particular kind of ambition that announces itself not through volume but through lineage, and Rootless — the Glasgow-based collective who have made a virtue of being from everywhere and nowhere at once — wear theirs like a second skin. Their new single, "Dam Mast Qalandar," takes on one of the most over-recorded, over-sampled, near-untouchable pieces in the qawwali canon — the song Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan turned into a kind of devotional Big Bang — and dares to ask what happens when you run it through a Roma fiddle and a Glaswegian postcode. The audacity alone deserves a hearing.

Some songs are sacred texts. Mariah Carey's *We Belong Together* is one of them, a millennial torch song so thoroughly canonised by karaoke bars and wedding DJs that tampering with it feels less like a remix and more like graffiti on a cathedral wall. Magumbo, evidently undeterred by questions of taste or self-preservation, has not merely tampered — he has gutted the place, rewired the plumbing, and installed a disco ball where the altar used to be.

Cole Porter, one suspects, would have raised an eyebrow at the notion of his 1953 standard being handed over to a UK producer for a four-on-the-floor makeover destined for a Pride float in Paris. He might also, being a man who understood spectacle, glamour and the occasional flagrant disregard for good taste in service of a good tune, have rather enjoyed it.

Three teenagers from Espoo have made the kind of record that makes grown men reach for their old flannel shirts and pretend they never threw away the Sub Pop catalogue. Nooa, Rasmus and Kalle, all seventeen, bring fresh energy, youthful fury and an uncompromising attitude to the grunge tradition, and the result, mercifully, sounds nothing like a tribute act fumbling through someone else's adolescence. It sounds like their own.

Three tracks, two of them recycled and one of them new, and the whole exercise lands with the unhurried confidence of someone who has stopped trying to prove anything. Amanda Emblem made her case last September with *The Wood*, a ten-track album that stretched out, took its time, and asked listeners to settle in for the long haul. This EP does the opposite. It is *The Wood* with the fat trimmed and the bones rearranged, and the surgery suits it.

Solo bedroom auteurs promising stadium grandeur are ten a penny, and the smart money usually bets against them delivering anything beyond a tinny approximation of the real thing. Valmonte, to his credit, mostly clears that low bar, even if the seams of his ambition occasionally show through the stitching.

Some records arrive like a tip-off from a mate who knows a guy who knows a guy. "South Florida Police" arrives like a squad car with its lights already spinning, kicking the door clean off its hinges before you've even decided whether you wanted company. Andrei British has built a single that doesn't so much court the listener as cuff them, bundle them into the back seat, and drive off at 142 beats per minute with the windows down and the radio cranked past sensible.

There's a particular kind of record that arrives not as an event but as a conversation already in progress, and *Grey Light*, the new four-track EP from Brooklyn transplant Tasha Solomita, is exactly that sort of record. You don't so much listen to it as eavesdrop on it, the way you might catch the back half of an argument through a thin apartment wall and find yourself unable to walk away until you know how it ends.