Pop-punk has always been the music of bad decisions made at speed, and the genre's best songs know that regret can be made to sound like joy. Weekday Social, a London trio of Louise, Gavin and Ben, understand this thoroughly. "So Close," released last week, is a song about walking into a mistake with your eyes open, and the band sound delighted to be doing it.

Saša Miočić spends his working life making other people's music sound magnificent, first as a producer and then as a live sound engineer. That is a strange apprenticeship for a solo debut, and it shows on "Forgiveness," the lead single from his fifteen-track album *Take What You Need*. This is a record made by someone who knows exactly what a kick drum does to a ribcage in a full room, and who has decided, with admirable perversity, to put that knowledge in the service of a grand piano.

Raymond Chandler lent the title, from *The Big Sleep*, a line delivered with the sly relish of a man who knows exactly what the neighbourhood is going to cost him. Ryan Yingst, a folk singer from Hershey, Pennsylvania by way of a Pittsburgh jazz-guitar degree, a Nashville apprenticeship and, since late 2023, Philadelphia's gig circuit, has taken the joke and built six songs inside it. They are honest, handsome and quietly ruinous, and they are the finest thing he has put his name to.

Anyone who has stumbled out of a festival field at midnight knows the peculiar loneliness that follows. The ringing ears, the trampled grass, the sudden hush of a taxi or a kitchen: it feels like a rude betrayal by the universe. Most of us respond by putting the kettle on and lying face-down on the sofa. DEHUSSLAR MUSIC, an Auckland producer with a bin-liner's worth of appetite for chaos, responded by opening his laptop at 3am and building a rave from scratch.

Digital romance has never sounded quite so uneasy, nor quite so danceable. "you.Love" arrives as the second salvo from Co.LeGa this year, and it lands with the poise of someone who has stopped worrying about whether electronic music can be both cerebral and physical, and simply gone ahead and made it both.

Benjamin Lazzaro has spent four decades wielding a guitar, and it shows in the muscular confidence of "The Crown," the opening salvo of Act IV in his sprawling, Jungian-soaked concept saga. This is not a musician chasing trends; this is a craftsman who has finally built the machine capable of matching the scope of his imagination.

Two decades and six years is a peculiar gestation period for a pop song, longer than most marriages, longer than most careers. And yet C'batch's new EP wears its slow-cooked origins not as a burden but as a badge, the way a good stew tastes better for having sat on the hob since roughly the turn of the millennium.