Seattle guards its reputation jealously, and that reputation was not built on good manners. London Bridge Studios still seems to hum with Mother Love Bone's swagger, Soundgarden's thunder and Pearl Jam's ten-ton yearning. Booking the room takes nerve, and walking out with a song that amounts to a firm handshake and a sturdy pair of boots takes more. Pete Keating has that nerve. "Louder" uses the room's hallowed acoustics to make a point rather than a racket.

Paul McCartney woke with "Yesterday" fully formed and spent weeks canvassing the music business in case he had nicked it. Jason Mckee, the Melbourne singer-songwriter who records as Reetoxa, has a stranger claim on the dream-song tradition, and a heavier price attached to it. The first of these two tracks arrived in a prison bunk in 2017, weeks after his mother's death, delivered by a vision of two floating heads. One was his mother's. The other belonged to a daughter lost before birth, who wanted to know why nobody was looking after her in a place called Akaroa. He had never heard of it. He wrote it down phonetically, picked up his guitar, and was told through the cell door, with some vigour, to shut up.

Three minutes and eleven seconds: that is the whole of the ask, and Winnipeg's CAR287 spend every one of them as though the bar were closing and the jukebox had one coin left. Among streaming-age running times that bloat and songs that outstay their welcome, "End Of The Day" amounts to a public service.

Solo piano records now arrive by the thousand, most of them built to sit politely behind a spreadsheet or a sleeping child. The default setting of the genre is a pleasant fog: a few unhurried chords, a wash of reverb, a title that hints at rain. Niel Lian's debut album declines the fog. It is quiet, and it keeps its voice low, but it wants to be listened to rather than tolerated. It repays that attention with something rarer than prettiness: the sense of a mind at work.

Ten years is a long time to carry a song around. Most of us can't keep a gym membership going for ten months. Yet Franxie, the Wollongong singer-songwriter and producer, has hauled "Stone" through nearly a decade of gigs, voice memos and abandoned demos, and the wait has done what waiting rarely does. It has ripened the song rather than staled it.

Heartbreak is rock'n'roll's most reliable landlord. It collects the rent in bruises and never stops knocking. Laji George, a New Yorker who has spent years fronting the alt-rock band Pseutopia, now steps out alone with *Out of Line*, his debut solo album. Its lead calling card, "Washed Away", takes the oldest wound in the book and asks the question Charlie Kaufman and Michel Gondry posed in *Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind*. If you could delete the person you loved and the grief along with them, would you?

Odysseus had himself lashed to the ship's mast and stuffed his crew's ears with beeswax, which says a good deal about how the ancient world regarded the seductive song: a hazard to navigation. Horologica, the Milwaukee-born, London-based singer-songwriter, has fashioned a hazard of his own, and Siren Lullaby, out on 21 August, is the most alluring thing he has released. Nobody listening will be reaching for the beeswax.

Concept albums usually arrive draped in a cape, with a gatefold sleeve the size of a paving slab and a sleeve note that reads like a tax return. Fabian Starr shows up in wraparound shades that glow the blue of a science-fiction fridge, a leather jacket zipped to the chin, and an infinity symbol lit on his chest like a warning light on the dashboard of eternity. The cover says he is doing this, and that he won't be apologising.