Three lads from Wallington walk into a studio in Canning Town, the same room where Blue once cut their pop confections, and decide to make a record that owes nothing to boybands and everything to a man with a red Stratocaster and a laconic Geordie drawl. That, in essence, is "My Guess Is No," the fifth single from Sunday Smoke and the clearest evidence yet that this trio — brothers Benj and Oliver alongside school friend Marcus — know precisely whose shoulders they're standing on.

There is a particular kind of song that arrives not to perform but to confess, and Janeuary's "Undress My Heart" belongs unmistakably to that lineage. Released on May 15th, it is a single built almost entirely on absence — absence of noise, absence of spectacle, absence of anywhere to hide.

Some artists chase the mainstream like a bus they've already missed. Julie Paschke, by every indication of her work, simply stood at a different stop altogether and built her own timetable. "Nowhere," the latest single and video in her remarkable bimonthly procession of releases, finds her once again working from the most private of studios — her own home in Melbourne — and from the most private of impulses: the conviction that a life lived sideways to convention is not a deficiency but a discipline.

There's a particular strain of London songwriter who treats the pun not as a cheap trick but as a structural principle, and Tom Minor is clearly working that vein for all it's worth. "Bureau of Change" — the new single trailing his second album, the gloriously titled *Ten New Toe-Tappers for Shoplifting & Self-Mutilation* — takes its title from the currency exchange shopfront and proceeds to wring every conceivable meaning out of the word "change" until the listener is left slightly dizzy and more than a little impressed.

Confession dressed as pop record, or pop record dressed as confession — either way, DARNELL has built something rare: a breakup song that refuses the comforts of villainy. Most songs of this genre arrive armed, ready to indict an absent other. This one turns the blade inward, and the wound it opens is more interesting for it.

Some comebacks announce themselves with a fanfare. Others creep up on you, quietly insistent, like a half-remembered melody hummed in the shower decades after you last sang it properly. Mister Chorister's "Spark" belongs firmly to the latter camp, and it's all the better for it.

Despite the Wane have made something quietly ruthless with "All in Vain" — a single that earns its drama instead of borrowing it. The band still operates around its two architects: Mir Kollins, who handles vocals, synths, writing, and arrangement, and Max Dury, on lead guitar. Between them they write, play, and produce everything, which goes some way toward explaining why the sound feels so unified rather than assembled from parts.

Pop has always needed its visionaries and its charlatans, and the trick, more often than not, is telling them apart before the second chorus. Vela Jones, a name that sounds beamed in from a near-future newsroom, arrives with enough cinematic polish to make scepticism feel almost rude. "Star Light Star Bright" doesn't so much announce itself as descend, all synth haze and slow-building tension, like a transmission catching signal after years of static.

Some songs creep up on you. "Big City" by Sour Bridges opens so modestly — a single fingerpicked guitar, nothing else — that you'd be forgiven for thinking it intends to stay that way. It doesn't, and the surprise of its unfolding is one of the great pleasures of this record.

Some songs are sacred texts. Mariah Carey's *We Belong Together* is one of them, a millennial torch song so thoroughly canonised by karaoke bars and wedding DJs that tampering with it feels less like a remix and more like graffiti on a cathedral wall. Magumbo, evidently undeterred by questions of taste or self-preservation, has not merely tampered — he has gutted the place, rewired the plumbing, and installed a disco ball where the altar used to be.