Heartbreak songs usually arrive in one of two postures: prostrate or vengeful. Neo Brightwell skips both and walks straight onto the dancefloor instead, which turns out to be the more dangerous move. "Break Me Like a Promise," the opening shot from his forthcoming album *Burn Bright, Stay Free*, doesn't grieve a love affair so much as throw it a leaving party and insist everyone dance properly.

Pop music has spent decades pretending that love resolves into a single, seamless organism — two halves clicking into a whole, the credits rolling on "happily ever after." Chiara Castello and Camilla Benedini, who record as I'm Not a Blonde, arrive at a more honest arithmetic. Their fourth album insists that 1+1 doesn't equal 2 but 11: two intact digits standing shoulder to shoulder, refusing to collapse into each other. It's a clever conceit, and rarer still, the record actually earns it.

Some songs arrive announcing their own importance before a single chord has rung out, and "Groundhog Day" belongs squarely to that camp. Anna Thoresen, the LA-via-somewhere-else singer-songwriter with one eye on Stevie Nicks and the other on Dijon, has built her latest single around a metaphor so obvious it practically directs its own video: the same bad day, looping forever, like heartbreak with a calendar problem.

Most break-up songs arrive after the fact, written from the safety of the other side. "Great Pretender" does something gutsier: it's written from inside the thing, before it's ended, while the narrator is still going through the motions and quietly cataloguing every reason it won't last. That's a much harder song to write at sixteen, or at any age, because it requires admitting you knew the whole time and kept showing up anyway.

Pop music has always had a soft spot for moral fury, and OpCritical clearly understand the assignment. "Liar Liar" wants to be a fist raised at the billionaire class, and it gets there without a moment's hesitation. The refrain — world on fire, funeral pyres, getting what you desire — lands with the blunt satisfaction of a great tabloid headline: punchy, rhythmic, impossible to forget once it's lodged itself in your head.

There is a particular kind of pop song that announces its ambitions before the first chorus has even landed, and Roxé's "This Moment" wears that ambition beautifully. From the first bars, this single feels built for a big stage, and rather than apologise for its scale, it leans into it with real conviction.

The first thing to say about "She Didn't Lose" is that it withholds the obvious gesture. A song with this title, in lesser hands, would announce itself with a key change and a fist in the air; Nina D. instead opens almost apologetically, a low vocal line sitting close to the mic, as though she's talking herself into the sentiment before she's willing to sing it to anyone else. It's a canny opening move, and it sets the terms for everything that follows: this is a record about composure, not conquest, and it treats the difference as the whole point.

Some artists arrive with a thesis statement instead of a song, and Deportee's new single wears its argument on its sleeve before the first bar has even cleared the speakers. "Black Women Are Not Cheap" announces its intentions with the bluntness of a placard, which is either its great strength or its great risk, depending on how much patience you have for music that knows exactly what it wants to say before it has worked out how to say it memorably.

Pop music has always had a soft spot for the wolf dressed as a valentine, and Blake Rave knows the trick well enough to dress it in legwarmers and synth gloss. "Drive Me Crazy" arrives sounding like a love letter, all glitter and chorus-pedal sparkle, before you clock that the object of affection is rather less romantic than advertised: a record label, and a bad one at that. The fairytale-to-horror-story arc is old as the music business itself, but Rave tells it with enough sleight of hand that the bitterness only surfaces once the hooks have already done their work on you.

Television scoring is a strange trade. The composer labours in service of someone else's narrative, hitting marks set by editors and producers, and rarely gets to step out from behind the curtain to take a bow. Chris Wirsig, the Los Angeles-based composer behind the atmospheric backbone of "Ancient Aliens" and "The Curse of Oak Island", has finally taken that bow. *Case Closed* gathers five cues from his work on "Crimes Gone Viral", "Celebrity Crime Files" and "Sin City Murders" and sets them loose without the grainy reconstructions and breathless narration they once served — and the music turns out to be sturdy enough to stand entirely on its own feet.