Banbury has a cross, a cake and a motorway junction. It has never had a songwriter quite like this. Music by Jeremy, a solo artist who makes records at weekends while his partner chooses her shoes, has reached the third instalment of a 24-track autobiography. In Side Three, the memoir stops studying its own reflection and goes to the window to look at the weather.

Gianfranco Malorgio has handed himself a difficult brief. He has named his closing movement after a slur, the sort of word once hurled across a Lower East Side street at men who had just stepped off a boat with one suitcase and a cardboard-tagged coat. Plenty of composers would flinch. Malorgio takes the word, turns it over in his hands like a stone from a riverbed, and makes it sing.

The remix is a curious British pastime, and usually a cynical one. A song is dusted off, a four-on-the-floor kick is bolted underneath, and a perfectly decent confession ends up as wallpaper in a provincial nightclub. Janalynn Castelino's "But Without You (Temptation Remix)", released on 23 October, has no interest in that kind of vandalism. It treats its 2025 source material the way a good tailor treats a fine suit: nothing essential is cut away, but everything is taken in, sharpened and made to move.

Most protest songs are written at a desk by someone who has never been cold. Nate Todd wrote his while out jogging, a more honest method than it sounds. Leafy lanes, mansions loitering behind their hedges like retired aristocrats, and a few blocks back, human beings asleep on the pavement. Todd noticed, and then did what a decent man with a guitar should do. He plugged in.

Rock music has always been fond of the drunk as a romantic figure: the poet in the bar, the doomed charmer, the tragic hero with a bottle for a muse. Jamie Smith, working under the name Thousand Pieces, has no time for any of that. "Hey Man. Amen." belongs to the person standing at the other end of the story, the one who has made the phone calls, driven to the clinics, sat through the relapses and run out of ideas.