Break-ups are petty burglars. They take the record collection, the good coat, the shared jokes. The cruellest ones take the one song you could always rely on and leave it ruined, so you flinch when it comes on in a taxi or a supermarket. WØLFFE has written an entire single about reclaiming that stolen property, and she does it with the swagger of someone kicking down the door of her own house.

Brno is a city of Gregor Mendel's pea plants, Janáček's folk-fevered operas and concrete modernism that looks as though it was built to withstand a siege. It makes sense that its most promising alternative rock export should combine those instincts: heredity, hysteria and heavy engineering. CREEPS have spent the past year slipping out of the Czech Republic one single at a time, and "Cry of the Banshee" is the moment the door comes off its hinges.

Hurb Jephasun has taken roughly four decades to release a record this good, and the wait was worth it. *In The End* is a four-track EP that sounds as though it was recorded in the one room where nobody was lying. The microphone is open and the walls are listening. You hear a chair creak, a breath drawn before a line, a voice fraying at the exact word where fraying is the only honest option.

Closing a double album is a gamble. Having kept the listener company across two discs of Texas songwriting, an artist must send them home without sentimentality or anticlimax. Rusty Reid's answer, on *Lone Stardust (Masterworks of Texas Songwriters)*, is to hand the last word to Kacey Musgraves, and to a song about wonder.