Anyone who has tried to meditate with a phone buzzing face-down on the duvet will recognise the predicament at the heart of "Starstruck Simulation". Olina's new single is a song about trying to sit still while the world flickers at you, and it manages the neat trick of being both a portrait of that restlessness and a small, glowing antidote to it.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow, in a house its owner calls Electrobuddha Towers, a man in a woolly hat has been quietly assembling the sort of record the grand pop institutions stopped commissioning around the time focus groups learned to read lyric sheets. He plays it all himself, builds it all himself, and, with a wry smile you can almost hear, labels it "eco rock." Pop has weathered sillier genre names. Few of them came attached to such a sincere argument.

Britpop was always an act of imagination before it was an act of geography. Damon Albarn never lived in a Cockney music-hall song, Jarvis Cocker watched the English from the edge of the party, and half of Oasis's mythology was built from a Manchester that sounded bigger on record than it was in life. So it makes a certain sense that one of the warmest tributes to the genre in years arrives from Seoul, from a bedroom-scale operation whose maker goes by appetiteapple and credits no one else because no one else was in the room.

Wade Easy has now made three albums in under a year, which in the current climate of careful, focus-grouped rollout strategies is practically an act of insurrection. Most musicians agonise for half a decade over a record nobody asked for. Easy simply sits in a room in Morgantown, West Virginia, plugs in, hits record and lets the fog roll in. *Honey Venom* is the third dispatch from that room, and it is the best yet.

Protest songs tend to fail in one of two ways. Some shout so loudly that nobody can hear the argument, and others tiptoe so politely that nobody notices there was one. Prem Byrne's "Here In America" avoids both. It is a song about the lingering damage of slavery, and it trusts a warm voice, an unhurried guitar and a plain tune to do the work that bluster usually botches.

Friday night, a bathroom mirror, a stick of red lipstick hovering an inch from the mouth. It is pop's most democratic theatre of self-doubt, and Siri Neel has dragged it out of the flat and onto the pavement. "West Street", out 2 October, is the sound of someone deciding that the evening, and the person she might be in it, deserves a fighting chance.