The Pet Shop Boys made loneliness sound like a ticker-tape parade, and Donna Summer made desire sound like a medical emergency. Now zukrassverliebt takes the most contemporary of low-grade miseries, the feeling of a brain with forty tabs open and no idea which one is playing music, and turns it into a dance-pop single that you can't switch off. That is the cruel joke at the heart of "Sensory Overload", and it's a very good one.

Post-punk has spent decades learning to dress for funerals, and most of its apprentices have mastered the black clothes and forgotten the grief. The House Flies, from Moline, Illinois, remember the grief. *Lions and Ore*, their second full-length, is a record of rooms with the lights off and fields shimmering in the heat, of sleep that won't quite arrive and objects abandoned by people who meant to come back. It was recorded in vocalist and guitarist Alex Riggen's basement, which explains the closeness, the sense of songs pressed against the walls, and also the ambition, because the walls have clearly been asked to hold more than they were built for.

Pop music has always been a time-travel business. Songs get written in one decade, heard in another, and loved in a third. Frank Joshua has taken the longest route I can remember. He wrote "Made For Me" at nineteen, put it in a drawer for more than four decades, and has finally let it out into a world that has had plenty of time to grow cynical. The remarkable thing is that the song hasn't aged a day.

Love songs usually come in two flavours: the swooning and the sneering. Kasper's "Give and Take" refuses both and sits down at the kitchen table instead, where most real relationships are won, lost and quietly renegotiated. It is a duet in spirit if not in form, a conversation between two people who have not stopped loving each other but have somehow stopped listening. It is also one of the more grown-up pop songs to wander into earshot this year.

Garage has always been music for people pretending to be fine. The two-step shuffle was made for a Friday night in your best shirt, hips swinging, heart quietly negotiating with itself. Roger K, an independent artist from Victoria, Australia, has noticed this and built a whole single around it. "Alter Ego" is a garage record about the exact moment the front you've been holding up for the room stops holding.