Raymond Chandler lent the title, from *The Big Sleep*, a line delivered with the sly relish of a man who knows exactly what the neighbourhood is going to cost him. Ryan Yingst, a folk singer from Hershey, Pennsylvania by way of a Pittsburgh jazz-guitar degree, a Nashville apprenticeship and, since late 2023, Philadelphia's gig circuit, has taken the joke and built six songs inside it. They are honest, handsome and quietly ruinous, and they are the finest thing he has put his name to.

Two decades and six years is a peculiar gestation period for a pop song, longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. And yet C'batch's new EP wears its slow-cooked origins not as a burden but as a badge, the way a good stew tastes better for having sat on the hob since roughly the turn of the millennium.

Vulnerability, on record, usually arrives pre-packaged: a stripped-back arrangement, a whispered vocal, the implicit stage direction reading *sincerity now*. Freidrich$ has spent a career resisting that packaging, burying his voice under distortion and studio trickery as if flinching from his own confessions. Doll, Here I Am is the record where the flinching stops.

Most musicians pick an apartment and furnish it. Alexander Nantschev has spent more than forty years on the balcony between two. At one end, in a Vienna flat, his father, the violinist and instrument dealer Nikolaj, kept Vivaldi, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Schoenberg in the air. At the other, his brother's studio hummed with synthesizers, samplers, tape machines and Beatles records. The boy who wandered between them fell hard for "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" and "Within You Without You", two songs in which pop first dared to lie down on a Persian rug and wonder what else the orchestra might be hiding. That balcony is the architecture of his new album, and he still hasn't chosen a side.

Records made by friends in a room tend to sound either like a warm hug or a hostage negotiation. *Bass River Sessions*, cut over several sittings on a Massachusetts street and named for it, sounds like three men who have spent years arguing productively about guitars finally being allowed to leave the amps switched on.

Pop has always known that the dancefloor is the best place to cry. New Order knew it, the Pet Shop Boys built a career on it, and Robyn made it an emotional philosophy. On *Relabel*, her second album, Southampton's Kat Button joins that lineage with ten tracks that are danceable and disarmingly honest. Very little EDM has attempted what she does here, and the record is better for it.

Paul McCartney woke with "Yesterday" fully formed and spent weeks canvassing the music business in case he had nicked it. Jason Mckee, the Melbourne singer-songwriter who records as Reetoxa, has a stranger claim on the dream-song tradition, and a heavier price attached to it. The first of these two tracks arrived in a prison bunk in 2017, weeks after his mother's death, delivered by a vision of two floating heads. One was his mother's. The other belonged to a daughter lost before birth, who wanted to know why nobody was looking after her in a place called Akaroa. He had never heard of it. He wrote it down phonetically, picked up his guitar, and was told through the cell door, with some vigour, to shut up.

Solo piano records now arrive by the thousand, most of them built to sit politely behind a spreadsheet or a sleeping child. The default setting of the genre is a pleasant fog: a few unhurried chords, a wash of reverb, a title that hints at rain. Niel Lian's debut album declines the fog. It is quiet, and it keeps its voice low, but it wants to be listened to rather than tolerated. It repays that attention with something rarer than prettiness: the sense of a mind at work.

Concept albums usually arrive draped in a cape, with a gatefold sleeve the size of a paving slab and a sleeve note that reads like a tax return. Fabian Starr shows up in wraparound shades that glow the blue of a science-fiction fridge, a leather jacket zipped to the chin, and an infinity symbol lit on his chest like a warning light on the dashboard of eternity. The cover says he is doing this, and that he won't be apologising.

The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.