Heartbreak has produced some of pop's grandest monuments: the torch song, the slammed-door anthem, the strings-and-sobbing ballad. Jordan Lake has taken a different route. He has written a song about a coffee that never got bought, and it may well be one of the smartest things pop has done with a grievance this year.

A laptop is open in a basement in Great Bend, a microphone is wobbling on its stand, and a man is yelling. He is not yelling at anyone in particular. He is a sample, a disembodied bellow plucked from the ether, and he has just become the unlikely midwife to the most gloriously daft hip-hop single of the autumn.

Dogs have been the subject of sentimental songs for as long as men with guitars have owned them, and the results are usually a slobbering mess. Uncanny Valley Girls, a London band who have spent eight years earning their keep in the sweaty back rooms of the capital, have written a love song to a dog that is clever, tender and very funny, with none of the usual mawkishness.

Chris Beck has spent a long time in the company of his own thoughts, and *Bright And Morningstar* is the handsome receipt. Released on 25 September, the single comes from a spare room in Milwaukee, where Beck, trading as Baby Tapir, wrote, played, recorded and mixed every second of it himself. No co-writer, no engineer, no producer in a gilet to tell him the middle eight needs more cowbell. It is a one-man cottage industry, and its product is anything but modest.

Synth-pop has a habit of arriving at the party in a rented tuxedo, all sheen and no stories. Segana, the Sydney duo of Blair Djuna and Josh Paltoo, turn up in denim and trainers, sit on a graffiti-scrawled wall, and then make the neon sound dangerous again. *Midnight Masquerade*, their ten-song after-hours confessional, is a record of real swagger and, better still, real nerve.

Heavy music has always been a refuge for people who feel things too loudly for polite company. The best of it doesn't pretend otherwise. It plugs the feeling into a wall of amplifiers and lets it howl. Escape The Box, the Anglo-electro-metal duo of Ziey Kizzy and Dreadf4ll, understand this in their bones, and on *Dead Ends & DayDreams* they have made a mini-album that howls, whispers, and occasionally does both inside the same four minutes.

Some artists arrive overnight, wrapped in a marketing budget. Others do it the slow way, one festival stage and one community radio slot at a time, until the work speaks louder than the publicity. MUNZER belongs firmly to the second camp, and "Freak Mode," his new single with Bullzeye Beats, is the sound of that patience paying off.

Sixteen years is a long time for a record to spend in a pile of cuttings. Hamish's second album, the follow-up to 1999's *Picture In My Bag* (produced by Les Penning, best known for his work with Mike Oldfield), went missing, resurfaced, went missing again, and was finally rescued by a lodger. Chris Oldfield, late of Dreadzone, rented the cabin at the bottom of Hamish's Stroud garden and stayed to become the producer the songs had been waiting for. The result is a 15-track collection that sounds like a life's work assembled with love.

A sufficient number of synthesisers can make almost any sentiment sound like a revelation, and pop has long confused grandeur with depth. "More to Give", the 22nd release from the Norwegian-Chicagoan songwriting trio Popkanon, arrives with a modesty that makes its ambitions all the more convincing. Credited alongside the Chicago Latin artist RarriQUESO and the producer Jack Flash, it is a song about stubbornness, the particular kind that survives a bad few years and still manages to look at a horizon without flinching.

Rock music has spent decades trying to outrun sincerity, and most of it has been caught. The irony helmets, the smirking self-mythologising and the studio gloss applied like cheap varnish have all had their day. So it is a small shock to hear Steven Luke, a Lancashire songwriter working without a major label, walk straight into the cold with his heart on his sleeve and a cellist at his shoulder. "Seasons (to be human)" is a ballad of real stature, and it deserves to be heard well beyond its postcode.