Melbourne's Bollard have never been a band content to sit still, and their new single "No Desire" confirms it once again, arriving less as a single than as a small, controlled detonation. Ahead of the melodic guitar work and songwriting polish promised for the forthcoming "Heat," this track drags the listener back toward the murkier, more disquieting terrain the six-piece first staked out on *Trawlers* — only now with a discipline that their earlier, wilder material never quite possessed.

There is a particular strain of Americana that British critics have always been suckers for — not the mythologised, dust-blown loneliness of the desert highway, but the noisier, warmer, more crowded version: the county fair, the church supper, the rodeo. It's the America of bleacher seats and funnel cake, and it is exactly the terrain that George Aiello and John Ingram, working under the name The Sonic Travelers, have chosen to stake out with their new single, "Let's All Go To The Rodeo."

The House Flies have never been a band content to sit still in the genre box built for them, and "Derelict Crawl" — the first taste of their forthcoming second album *Lions and Ore* — confirms it with a swagger that feels earned rather than borrowed. This is a Moline, Illinois four-piece taking the bones of English post-punk and dressing them in denim and rust.

Guitarists who dream in orchestral colour are rare enough. Guitarists who can persuade Vinnie Colaiuta, John Patitucci and the Bohemian Symphony Orchestra Prague to dream alongside them, on a debut single, are rarer still. NOR.BE has managed it, and "All For You" announces him not as a hopeful newcomer but as a fully formed voice who simply hadn't been heard yet.

Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.

Toronto has quietly become one of pop's great incubators, and Kylo's "Nimble" is the sound of an artist stepping out of the machine and into the room. Where her earlier material leaned on synthesised gloss, this single strips the wiring out entirely and leaves her alone with a guitar, a voice that cracks exactly when it needs to, and a heartbreak too fresh to have been tidied up for public consumption. It is a bold pivot, the kind that could easily have gone soft and beige in lesser hands. Instead, Kylo has made something that sounds lived-in rather than styled.

Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.

Costa Rica is not, on paper, a natural home for Galician folk music. And yet Terra Nai — Diego Alfaro on voice, gaita and acoustic guitar, Keith Guerrero on violin and illustration — have spent the past three years proving that geography is no obstacle to devotion. Their reading of "Foliada de Berducido," the traditional tune from the Galician village of Berducido best known through Milladoiro's celebrated 1980s arrangement, arrives as a small triumph of cross-continental fidelity: a Costa Rican duo bottling the spirit of northwestern Spain and somehow losing none of the original's mist and mischief in transit.

Twenty-nine minutes, one afternoon, four musicians and a voice that refuses to be tidied up: that's the whole conceit of Syna Awel's Live Acoustic Session, and it turns out to be plenty. Strip away the studio gloss from a record and you usually find out fairly quickly whether the songs were ever more than production. Here, the opposite happens. "Isem-is Amazigh" opens the set sounding less like a performance than a summons — Mahir Bostandzija's percussion arriving like a heartbeat remembered rather than counted, Anis Agrebi's oud curling around Syna Awel's phrasing the way smoke curls around a lamp. You sense immediately that nothing on this session was rehearsed into submission.

Grunge, as a genre, has spent the better part of three decades ossifying into cliché — flannel, feedback, and the same four chords borrowed wholesale from Seattle and worn thin by imitators who mistook volume for feeling. Laji George, to his considerable credit, has no interest in that museum piece. "Sittin' Here Thinkin'," the latest single from his forthcoming record *Out of Line*, takes the bones of that sound and grafts onto them something stranger and warmer: soul phrasing lifted from Otis Redding, the rasp and swagger of Chuck Berry's rock and roll, and — improbably, gloriously — an accordion, wheezing away underneath the distortion like it wandered in from a French dockside bar and decided to stay.