The Faroe Islands have a reputation for weather that punishes and light that vanishes early, and a lazier writer would reach straight for the fog-and-fjord metaphors before the needle even drops. Djurhuus, a producer who has spent years shaping other people's records from the shadows, refuses to give us that. His debut steps out from behind the mixing desk with something far stranger and more valuable than atmosphere for its own sake: patience.

Confidence is the rarest ingredient in modern rap, and "99 Apples" has it in spades. Spoony-B has built a track around the kind of central metaphor that shouldn't work on paper — abundance, temptation, the orchard as a stand-in for a heart that keeps saying yes to everyone — and somehow makes it feel inevitable rather than gimmicky by the second hook.

Infidelity has always made for better pop music than fidelity ever could, and Mandybom knows it. "Tango," her second single, doesn't so much confess to an affair as choreograph one, and the result is the most seductive act of self-sabotage you'll hear this year.

A hymn disguised as a family conversation, "The Inheritance" opens gently, almost shyly, as though Blair is working up the nerve to say something she has carried for years. By the time the refrain lands — the disarmingly plain declaration that we all add to the pot — you realise the song has smuggled a whole philosophy of legacy into four words. It announces its ambition quietly and lets that ambition grow.

Banquet Darling has never been an act content to sit quietly at the back of the room, and NOW confirms as much within its opening bars. Todd Kilby's music arrives dressed in sequins and doubt in equal measure, and the record wastes no time announcing itself as a genuine leap from Dreamlove Obscura's cult beginnings into something altogether more confident, more sprawling, and considerably stranger.

There's a particular alchemy that happens when a band understands that rage, to be truly effective, must be dressed in melody. OpCritical have understood this from the start, but with "Guillotine," the closing chapter of their inequality trilogy, they've perfected it. This is protest music that doesn't so much knock on your door as kick it clean off the hinges — and yet you find yourself humming the wreckage on the way to work the next morning.

Melbourne's Bollard have never been a band content to sit still, and their new single "No Desire" confirms it once again, arriving less as a single than as a small, controlled detonation. Ahead of the melodic guitar work and songwriting polish promised for the forthcoming "Heat," this track drags the listener back toward the murkier, more disquieting terrain the six-piece first staked out on *Trawlers* — only now with a discipline that their earlier, wilder material never quite possessed.

Some records announce themselves with a shove; this one arrives like a hand on your shoulder in a crowded room, quiet enough that you have to lean in to catch it, and once you have, you can't quite look away. "The Path," the single that opened Emil Andersson's account under the name Evermo, is proof that pop's oldest trick — the ache dressed up as a hook — still has plenty of life in it, provided the person wielding it actually means it.