Nobody asked for the power ballad to come back. It was supposed to be a fossil, a thing of wind machines, satin jackets and lighters held aloft by grown men who would deny it in the morning. Yet here is Oakland's Everything But The Everything, releasing "Hollow Heart" on the tenth of July with the cheerful nerve of a band that has noticed the genre's grave is empty and moved in.

There is a particular kind of record that can only be made by someone who has spent years at the back of the stage, watching. Drummers know where the bodies are buried. They know when a song is straining and when it is breathing, and they know that the most devastating moment in any arrangement is often the one where nothing happens at all. Nick Liberatore, a man who has kept time for the rowdy gallows humour of *The Goddamn Comedy Jam* and the sooty, whisky-soaked canon of *Tom Waits War Songs*, has now stepped to the front of the stage. "Parallel", his debut solo single, is a quietly remarkable thing.

The nickname was never Beethoven's. It was bestowed after his death by the poet Ludwig Rellstab, who imagined a boat adrift on Lake Lucerne, and the composer, who headed the score *Sonata quasi una fantasia*, might have winced at the picture. Yet the name has outlasted every objection. This is a piece that all pianists must play and all listeners believe they already know, so issuing it afresh as a single is an act of either courage or innocence. Sasc Classical, the imprint of Tolga Tümözen's SoloArtStudio, makes it feel like courage.

Grief rarely arrives dressed for a party, yet Ricky's Rebel Rabble have put it in satin and platform boots and sent it dancing. "Molly" is a tribute to the aunt who raised Ricky and then helped raise his disabled son, and who died suddenly. Rock and roll has always been better at mourning than at being cool, and this single understands that instinctively.

Grunge has always had a fondness for the apology. Cobain mumbled his through a mouthful of gravel, and Cornell sang his from the bottom of a well. Barbaros Evin's contribution is the rarest sort: an apology delivered in advance, to a son who is still growing into the world it describes.

Chicago has a habit of hiding its best people in plain sight. Sacha Mullin has spent more than twenty years there making records that refuse to sit still, from the experimental-metal clatter of *Whelm* to the dense, collaborative *Casino Wilderness Period*. Along the way he has collected a small, devoted following and a mountain of credits that would make a session-world veteran blush. Now, with his fourth solo album, he does the most disarming thing available to a man of his talents: he writes pop songs, and means them.

The gap has always been fond of pop. Consider the pause before a chorus lands, the held breath before a key change, the half-second when a stranger's eyes meet yours across a crowded room. Delphine Savatte's new single builds an entire song around that fondness, and the result is the most disarmingly lovely thing the Montpellier vocalist and her producer Al Young have yet released.

Pop comebacks tend to arrive with a fanfare, a rebrand and a lengthy statement about "journeys". "So Hard" arrives with a hook, which is the more persuasive credential. Released on 7 August, it marks the return of Mylène Schuler's Swiss electro-pop project Pull n Way after a near four-year silence, and it does the sensible thing: it gets on with it.

"You Don't Know" begins with a guitar that plays as if it were afraid of waking someone. Jacob's Cry sets the instrument down in the middle of the room and lets it breathe, and for the first thirty seconds nothing else is asked of it. The restraint is the first sign that this is a singer who understands how much weight a quiet note can carry.

Anyone who has found an old snapshot at the bottom of a drawer knows the small lurch that follows: the haircut, the squint, the stranger wearing your face. Most songwriters treat that moment as a postcard. Fanny Alexandra, the Swiss independent artist whose new single released on 9 October, treats it as a summons. "Girl in the Photograph" is a conversation across the years, conducted in the dark, with nobody sure at the outset who owes whom an apology.