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.

Regret is the most flattering light in pop. It softens every edge, gilds every doorway, and persuades us that the person who left was always the one. Most songs about it wallow. A rare few sit quietly in the dusk of the thing and simply look. NBP Human's "All My Mind Is on You" belongs to the second kind, and it is a lovely, unshowy piece of work.

A sufficient number of synthesisers can make almost any sentiment sound like a revelation, and pop has long confused grandeur with depth. "More to Give", the 22nd release from the Norwegian-Chicagoan songwriting trio Popkanon, arrives with a modesty that makes its ambitions all the more convincing. Credited alongside the Chicago Latin artist RarriQUESO and the producer Jack Flash, it is a song about stubbornness, the particular kind that survives a bad few years and still manages to look at a horizon without flinching.

Songs that tell us how to feel about one another are never in short supply. Far rarer is one that simply asks, then trusts the listener to do the work. "HUMAN", the new single from British independent singer-songwriter TaniA Kyllikki, puts the question in its title, repeats it until it becomes a mantra, and wraps it in a dancefloor pulse that keeps the feet busy while the conscience catches up.

Johnny O.'s original is a love song of the old, certain kind, the sort that announces a girl and a destiny in the same breath and never stops to ask whether the girl has been consulted. Watch Me Die Inside, the Cyprus-based project orbiting the enigmatic figure of Aleph, takes that certainty and holds it up to the light until it starts to look like something else: a man talking to a mirror and calling it a woman.

Somewhere between a Bristol basement in 1995 and a Berlin dance floor in 2002, a door was left ajar. Inverted Mirror has walked through it with a single synthesizer, a drum machine's worth of nerve, and a conviction that the avant-garde and the earworm were never meant to be enemies. "Automatic Earth" is his debut, the opening transmission from a project promising three singles and then an album. If the rest keeps this standard, the signal will be worth following.

Post-punk has spent forty-odd years learning how to dress for a funeral, and the more interesting question is whether it can dance at the wake. The House Flies, four men from Moline, Illinois, answer with "Lost Literature", the second single from their forthcoming Lions and Ore. It is gloomy, gripping and very hard to keep your feet still through.

Pop music has grown so loud, so eager to be liked, that a song willing to wait for you feels almost impolite. Danny Lu's "我渴望," a Mandarin single written in the high desert of Santa Fe and finished many years later, does exactly that. It sits there, unhurried, with its coat still on, and lets you decide whether to come in.

Protest songs tend to fail in one of two ways. Some shout so loudly that nobody can hear the argument, and others tiptoe so politely that nobody notices there was one. Prem Byrne's "Here In America" avoids both. It is a song about the lingering damage of slavery, and it trusts a warm voice, an unhurried guitar and a plain tune to do the work that bluster usually botches.

Dawn is rock music's oldest trick, and the genre has been squinting into it since the first amplifier warmed up. Canadian singer-songwriter JF Roy, born in Atlantic Canada and now settled in Alberta, takes it on with "The Morning Light". He does so with a lack of irony that is almost radical, and the result is a rousing, big-hearted record that leaves a rather better mood behind than most of its more fashionable neighbours.