Roadside shrines, rain-slicked tarmac and weeping pianos have furnished the tragedy song since the days of the teenage death disc, and most of them move the listener about as much as a cold cup of tea. So it is to Elias Dream's credit that "Goodbye, My Love", released on 13 August, arrives with a pulse, a plot and a conscience.

Proxima b is a long way from the nearest kitchen table, which makes it an improbable setting for the most tender single of Vela Jones's career. Yet she has gone to the far edge of human settlement and come back with something rarer than a silver jumpsuit and a slogan: a song about missing your mother.

Digital romance has never sounded quite so uneasy, nor quite so danceable. "you.Love" arrives as the second salvo from Co.LeGa this year, and it lands with the poise of someone who has stopped worrying about whether electronic music can be both cerebral and physical, and simply gone ahead and made it both.

Benjamin Lazzaro has spent four decades wielding a guitar, and it shows in the muscular confidence of "The Crown," the opening salvo of Act IV in his sprawling, Jungian-soaked concept saga. This is not a musician chasing trends; this is a craftsman who has finally built the machine capable of matching the scope of his imagination.

Some bands are formed in rehearsal rooms. TrixxStarr appear to have been assembled at the kitchen table. What began as the solo project of Dusty Starr, of Chihuahua and Les Biches, has grown into a family firm, with brothers Heli, C.C. and Darc pulling up chairs. On "Enough" the result is a band asking the question the rest of us dodge at parties: when do we stop chasing the things we've been told should make us happy? They ask it without a finger wagged and without a sermon in sight.

Thirteen is an odd age to hand someone a guitar-shaped microphone and ask them to say something true. Most who try it hide behind borrowed phrases, safe choruses, the sound of an artist rehearsing adulthood rather than living inside it. Peter Melodist does something more interesting on "Fear": he sounds like a kid who has already worked out that rock music was invented for exactly this — for turning the unnameable stuff in your chest into something you can play loud.

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.

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.

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.

Confidence is the rarest ingredient in modern rap, and "99 Apples" has it in spades. Spoony-B has built a track around the kind of central metaphor that shouldn't work on paper — abundance, temptation, the orchard as a stand-in for a heart that keeps saying yes to everyone — and somehow makes it feel inevitable rather than gimmicky by the second hook.