It takes a particular kind of nerve to drag Underworld's most over-quoted vocal fragment out of its glass case fifteen years after Trainspotting turned it into shorthand for chemical bliss, and have the cheek to make it sound like a discovery again. Janger, a CalArts product with a half-decade gap in his discography and apparently no fear of ghosts, pulls it off — mostly by treating the sample less as a totem and more as debris, something washed up and half-dissolved rather than triumphantly restored.

There is a particular kind of song that arrives not to entertain but to confront, and Keesha Blair's "Truth Always Shows Its Face" belongs unmistakably to that lineage. It is neo-soul built less for the dancefloor than for the long drive home after a difficult conversation, the kind you have with yourself in the rearview mirror. Blair, the songwriter and creative director behind Divine Purpose Music, has built her short catalogue on exactly this premise: that healing is not a hook but a process, and that pop music can still afford the patience to trace it properly.

There is a particular kind of ambition that announces itself not through volume but through lineage, and Rootless — the Glasgow-based collective who have made a virtue of being from everywhere and nowhere at once — wear theirs like a second skin. Their new single, "Dam Mast Qalandar," takes on one of the most over-recorded, over-sampled, near-untouchable pieces in the qawwali canon — the song Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan turned into a kind of devotional Big Bang — and dares to ask what happens when you run it through a Roma fiddle and a Glaswegian postcode. The audacity alone deserves a hearing.

Some records arrive like a tip-off from a mate who knows a guy who knows a guy. "South Florida Police" arrives like a squad car with its lights already spinning, kicking the door clean off its hinges before you've even decided whether you wanted company. Andrei British has built a single that doesn't so much court the listener as cuff them, bundle them into the back seat, and drive off at 142 beats per minute with the windows down and the radio cranked past sensible.