Heartbreak has always been pop's most reliable fuel, and the songwriters who burn it are legion. The ones who bottle the opposite, the first dizzy seconds of falling for someone, are rarer and much braver, because happiness is hard to make interesting. It tends to produce greeting cards. Sunstroke Rain, with "I Levitate," has produced something that sounds like a person leaving the ground.

Most musicians who resurface after twenty-five years of silence arrive with a midlife crisis and a leather jacket. Michael Hellquist arrives with a kitchen knife, a walk-in fridge and a grudge against the idea that dance music belongs to the young. As Il Coltello, "the knife" in Italian, the Gothenburg caterer-turned-producer has made a debut that cuts cleanly and leaves no mess.

Memory is a poor archivist. It keeps the wrong things: a yellow tile floor, the angle of a mother's resting legs, the particular hush of a bedroom before the lights went out. Rico Fabello understands this better than most songwriters half his age would dare to admit, and *November 2008*, released today, is the sound of a man building a house out of exactly those misfiled fragments, then watching the water come in.