There is a particular strain of British rock criticism that delights in catching a young band somewhere between aspiration and arrival — close enough to greatness to taste it, far enough away that the taste is mostly ambition. Matt Law's debut single "Made Up Construct" lives squarely in that bracket, and it does so with a swagger that suggests nobody in Strathaven told this lot they were supposed to be modest about it.

Ashley Wolfe has built a career out of refusing to behave herself, and "Say It Again" is the sound of an artist doubling down on that instinct rather than smoothing it out for easier consumption. As Blind Man's Daughter, Wolfe writes, performs, produces and records alone, which in pop music usually means one of two outcomes: a vanity project that collapses under its own indulgence, or a record that finally sounds like the person who made it. This single lands firmly in the second camp.

Mark Heffernan, recording under the name Pocket Lint, has always behaved like a man rummaging through a junk drawer for treasure, and on *Wunderkammer* he finally builds the cabinet to put it in. The conceit is a cabinet of curiosities, each song a glass case, each glass case holding something slightly unsettling that catches the light. It is a tidy organising principle for an artist whose previous work scattered its ideas like loose change, and it suits him. Heffernan has stopped emptying his pockets onto the table and started arranging the contents.

Subtlety was never going to be on the rider, and thank goodness for that. Leather Laces arrive masked, militarised and entirely without irony, and their second full-length swings its riot shield with the conviction of a band who know precisely what they're for. *Intercontinental Ballistic Music* is exactly the album its title promises: a nine-track bombardment delivered with such gleeful precision that it's hard not to surrender to it completely.

Guilt, that most British of currencies, has rarely sounded so handsomely produced. "I'll See You Soon" arrives wearing its conscience on its sleeve, and credit where it's due: 23 Fields wears it well. This is a single built entirely from the small, gnawing arithmetic of adult life — the missed call, the rescheduled visit, the phone left to ring out while something less important wins the day. It's a theme songwriters return to with the regularity of a guilty conscience itself, yet rarely with this much restraint.

Pop stars used to drown themselves metaphorically in strings and reverb. Skar de Line has gone one further and had himself photographed face-up in wet sand, arms flung wide like a man who's just lost an argument with gravity, while a drone circles overhead like a buzzard deciding whether he's worth the trouble. It's a cover image that does most of the talking before a single note arrives, and thankfully the record inside it doesn't waste that advance.