A Glaswegian who has spent two decades in Sweden occupies a peculiar position: too Scottish to be Swedish, too Swedish to be Scottish, and therefore perfectly placed to notice what the locals no longer see. Alastair Macduff, now based in Gothenburg, has spent that time looking at the abandoned houses that dot the Swedish landscape, the *ödehus*, with their sagging roofs and curtains left to rot. *Kåtebol*, his first solo album, is what came back from the looking. It is a small marvel, and it is 35 minutes long, which makes it a rarity in itself.

Start with the admission, because the label does: Onyx is an AI artist. Words, arrangements, mixing decisions and creative direction are human; the voice and the visuals are generated. Novaix stamps this on every release, and the honesty clears the air. Nobody is being fooled, so the question becomes whether the music is any good. On *CLOSE*, it is better than good. It is the most coherent debut statement from a synthetic performer so far, and it would be a sharp record whatever its provenance.

Heartbreak songs usually arrive dressed for a party. They shout, they swagger, they rhyme "pain" with "rain" and hope nobody notices. "Letting Go", the new single from Lancaster's Open Horizon Records, does something braver and far quieter. It sits down at the kitchen table at two in the morning, phone face-up and silent, and tells the truth.

Plenty of musicians claim to heal. Few arrive with a Master's in jazz from Rome's Conservatorio Santa Cecilia, fifteen years restoring double basses, and the patience to build a seven-movement suite around the body's energy centres. Andrea Romanazzo, who records as Aner Andros, is one of the few. His debut is a serious, handsomely made piece of work. It asks to be heard from first bar to last, and it rewards anyone who obliges.

Layla Kaylif is a magpie with an Oxford degree, a back catalogue that includes Leonard Cohen translated into Arabic, and a working knowledge of Nizar Qabbani's love poetry. "Walks on Water", the second single from her forthcoming album, is her most daring act of borrowing yet. It is also, happily, her most convincing.

Ask Al Swainger what his music is and he will, with a bassist's patience, decline to tell you. The album's liner notes confess that the question is the hardest one he faces, and that every tidy answer shaves off the strange, fragile and unresolved parts that made the work worth doing. *Impure Imagination*, the third record from his Pointless Beauty project, is the sound of a man refusing to be filed. That refusal could be tiresome in lesser hands. Here it is exhilarating.

A fader at zero is a promise as much as a silence. The channel is open and the signal is waiting, and everything depends on the hand that moves it. Jasmith, a Singapore-based producer who tracked this single in England, has built a whole song around that moment, and the result is a confident, polished piece of electronic pop with a thesis it never has to shout.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives in the dead of a Scandinavian winter and makes you feel, briefly and thrillingly, that the walls of your own house are thinner than you thought. *WORLD-ENDING FIRE*, the self-titled debut from the Uppsala duo of the same name, is one of those records. It is also, as it happens, one of the most quietly extraordinary things to come out of the Swedish forest in years.

Johnny O.'s original is a love song of the old, certain kind, the sort that announces a girl and a destiny in the same breath and never stops to ask whether the girl has been consulted. Watch Me Die Inside, the Cyprus-based project orbiting the enigmatic figure of Aleph, takes that certainty and holds it up to the light until it starts to look like something else: a man talking to a mirror and calling it a woman.

Somewhere between a Bristol basement in 1995 and a Berlin dance floor in 2002, a door was left ajar. Inverted Mirror has walked through it with a single synthesizer, a drum machine's worth of nerve, and a conviction that the avant-garde and the earworm were never meant to be enemies. "Automatic Earth" is his debut, the opening transmission from a project promising three singles and then an album. If the rest keeps this standard, the signal will be worth following.