Grief makes a strange collaborator. It arrives uninvited, rearranges the furniture of a life, and refuses to leave until it has extracted something from you — usually silence. Trail Hawk, a Kentucky songwriter recording from his own front room in Frankfort, has instead handed grief a microphone. The result, "One Hundred Angels," is a single that trades in the oldest currency country and gospel music have ever dealt in: loss transmuted into something a listener can hold onto.

Point Pleasant have arrived with a single that refuses to announce itself the way first singles usually do — no fanfare, no calculated hook dropped in the first four bars to catch a scrolling thumb. "The Fall" opens instead with a guitar figure that sounds like it's been left running in an empty room for hours, patient and slightly haunted, before the rhythm section walks in and claims the space as its own.

Thirty-three years is a long time to leave a tune sitting in a storage unit off some grey London side street, and longer still if that tune turns out to be this good. "When I Tell You" arrives with the peculiar glow of something both brand new and thoroughly aged — a debut single from a band that split up before most of today's listeners were born, unearthed like a reel of film that's somehow kept its colour.

Six minutes and ten seconds is a long time to ask a listener to sit still, and Project D.S.F spends every one of them earning the privilege. "Transformation," the latest cut from the "Uncharted Networks" EP, is a piece that refuses to announce itself with a hook or a chorus, instead unspooling like a reel of film shot somewhere far beyond the reach of a satellite dish. It opens on hush and static, the kind of tentative electronic murmur you might associate with a control room going dark, before the strings creep in — not lush, not yet, but wary, as though they too are waiting to see what the silence contains.

Sydney has given the world plenty of noise over the decades, but rarely anything quite this hushed and calculating. "Oh" arrives less like a single than a decision — the decision to slow everything down until the city itself becomes audible: the hum of a streetlamp, the half-second before a train's doors close, the private static of 3 a.m.

Silver Spring, Maryland isn't exactly synonymous with cosmic disaster narratives set to a funk groove, but LunaRover have never been a band content to work within the confines of geography or genre. "Throw Me A Line" arrives as a gleaming, slightly unhinged single that manages the rare trick of sounding both meticulously engineered and gloriously off-kilter — a combination that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.

Songwriting has a lousy track record when it comes to loss. Most who attempt it either drown the thing in strings until it becomes a funeral parlour advert, or they flinch at the last second and reach for a platitude instead of a truth. Scott Lowder does neither. "Ghost of You" is a song that had the patience to wait a decade for its author to be ready to record it properly, and that patience is audible in every bar.

Somewhere between the high passes of the Andes and the low, bone-crushing throb of a Marshall stack, Untold Jukebox have found a sound nobody asked for and everybody suddenly wants. "Empire of Stone," the towering lead single from their new six-track concept record of the same lineage, doesn't so much blend panflute and heavy metal as stage a coup between them — and metal, remarkably, loses gracefully.

There is a very specific kind of nerve required to write a song that treats the Almighty as just another mark to be worked, and Madeline Rosene has it in spades. "I'll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven" doesn't so much knock on the pearly gates as kick them off their hinges, saunter in, and start making eyes at the doorman.

Brandes writes songs the way a diarist writes entries he never expects anyone else to read, which is precisely why they land with such force when we do. On "Love In Two Degrees," the first taste of his forthcoming album *Still Life*, he takes the oldest subject in the songbook — love lost, love found again, love doubted — and refuses every shortcut a lesser writer would reach for.