Dublin's Gravite Fresq has built a reputation on turning private dread into something you can dance to, and "Hypocrisy Loophole" is the sharpest weapon in that arsenal yet. It arrives clad in synthetic armour — a rigid, pulsating bassline that sounds machined rather than played, married to a four-on-the-floor drum pattern so unyielding it borders on liturgical. Fitting, given the subject matter.

Somewhere between the fog-draped rooftops of a London bedroom studio and the sun-bleached film reels of 1970s Rome, Don Cicci has found his sound, and on "Polpette" he sounds thoroughly at home in it. This is a producer who has clearly spent years with his ear pressed to vinyl crackle, absorbing the swagger of vintage Italian film scores the way other musicians absorb the blues, and the result is a track that feels less like a beat than a mood board set to a metronome.

Palos Hills isn't exactly Laurel Canyon, and Cupp isn't pretending otherwise. What arrives instead, on this new single, is something far more useful to the modern ear: a rain song built by a man who clearly adores the ones that came before him and refuses to simply photocopy them.

You can tell a great deal about a duet by what happens in the silences between the words, and it's in those gaps that "Higher Love" does its finest work. Melbourne's River Holland has built a small but sturdy reputation on songs about becoming — the unglamorous, unfinished business of self-discovery — and here he hands half the microphone to Eadiella, a singer whose voice carries the kind of weather-beaten warmth that usually takes decades to earn. That he trusts her with equal billing on his own recording says something about his priorities: this is a record built on conversation, not showmanship.

There's a particular kind of racket that only comes from a band who've spent five years getting to know each other's bad habits before they ever plugged in together properly, and "No Pictures" — the new shot fired by Cardiff's Underlowe — has that racket in spades. This is a record built on trust, on the kind of shorthand that only exists between old friends and older riffs, and it announces itself with the confidence of a band who know exactly what they're doing, even if the world hasn't quite caught up yet.

Pop reinvention stories rarely arrive this cleanly plotted. A child actor who spent her formative years lending her voice to a plastic-eyed toddler in a beloved animated trilogy decides, somewhere in her twenties, that the microphone suits her better on record than on screen. Cynics might expect a vanity project, all gloss and no grit. Emily Ricks delivers the opposite: a single so confidently constructed it makes the transition look inevitable rather than opportunistic.

A cover version can so easily become an exhumation — reverent, embalmed, drained of the pulse that made the original worth stealing in the first place. Rusty Reid's take on "I Can See Clearly Now" commits no such crime. What he's done, cannily, is resist the urge to reinvent, and in doing so he's pulled off something far harder than reinvention: he's made an over-familiar song feel newly inhabited.

Birmingham has given the world heavy metal, bhangra fusion, and now, it seems, a drummer-turned-producer with a taste for wormholes. Kai Moa's debut EP arrives after a run of singles that already hinted at an appetite bigger than any one genre could satisfy, and the full collection makes good on that promise with a confidence that borders on the reckless — the good kind of reckless, the kind that used to get records described as "dangerous" before that word got worn smooth by overuse.

Let us be clear about what should not work here. Take a song built on brass-stabbed swagger and pelvic certainty, strip out the horns, bolt on a wall of Sub Pop-grade distortion, and hand the microphone to a man doing his best impression of a Memphis icon fronting a Seattle power trio. On paper it reads like the setlist of a stag do that has gone badly, gloriously wrong. On record, it is a small triumph of bad taste executed with impeccable judgement.

Bondi's finest export this season arrives wrapped in a title that does the opposite of what titles are supposed to do: it tells you exactly what you're about to get, and then spends three and a half minutes proving the label wrong in the most gorgeously roundabout way imaginable.