There is a particular kind of pop song that arrives dressed as a day at the beach while quietly carrying a bag of knives. "Sha La La", the new single from Wellington's January Blue, is one of the very best of the type I've heard in a long while.

Debut albums from faceless projects usually arrive with a smoke machine and little else. *Where God Grew Tired* turns up with a cosmology. Over ten tracks and fifty-five minutes, Wildcard Campfire, the vehicle of writer and creative director Rom Burla, builds a whole fallen civilisation: a promise curdles into doctrine, a rebellion hardens into war, and humanity crawls underground while something new grows over the ruins. Millennia later, the survivors come back clutching a warped memory of what they lost. It is a mad ambition for a first record, and the thing is how often it comes off.

Witch house was never supposed to grow old gracefully. It arrived around 2009 in a fog of triangle glyphs, chopped-and-screwed hip-hop, and cheap-hearted gothic theatre, then dispersed almost as quickly as it had gathered, leaving Salem, White Ring and a handful of others as its patron saints. So it is a small shock, and a gratifying one, to find the form turning up in Ekeren, a suburb of Antwerp, in the hands of a man who has lived in the same house for 55 years and has been spinning records since 1995. *Hexen* is his debut, released in October, and it is a wonder.

Pop music has spent a century singing about love, heartbreak, revolution and the open road, and has somehow never found time for the fourth Thursday in November. Sheldon Mashugana, a Dallas comedian wearing round black glasses, a mop of lacquered hair and the manic grin of a man who has just been told the pub is open all night, has noticed the omission and fixed it. "It's Turkey Day" is billed as the first song ever dedicated to the actual day of Thanksgiving. I can't verify that claim, but I can't think of a rival either, and in rock and roll the first man through the door is usually the one who gets the glory.

Calling a seventy-seven-minute, fifteen-track collection an "EP" is the first act of mischief on Katie Noir's second record. The second is releasing it less than three months after a twenty-three-song debut. A cynic would expect leftovers: B-sides, offcuts, the sound of an artist clearing the shed. *The Aftermath EP* is nothing of the kind. It is a sequel with a sharper pulse, written by someone who has just discovered that strangers can hear her.