Loss makes strange producers of us all, but few have channelled it into quite as painstaking a form of devotion as David Moore has on this record. Named with the kind of dry, sideways humour its dedicatee apparently possessed in spades, this is an album built not from a demo tape or a scrapbook of half-finished ideas, but from measure-by-measure MIDI reconstructions of a dead man's drum parts, patiently rebuilt by hand and ear rather than farmed out to any algorithm. That's a laborious, almost devotional way to make a record, and it shows: nothing here feels tossed off.

Stephen Paul writes songs the way a novelist plots a chapter: not with a diary entry but with a scene, a room, a specific slant of light. That's the first thing worth saying about "Never Forever," the latest single from his melodic rock vehicle D.D.R., because it explains everything that follows — why a song about the death of a promise manages to sound less like a confession and more like a short story you've somehow already lived.

Thirty-three years is a long time to leave a tune sitting in a storage unit off some grey London side street, and longer still if that tune turns out to be this good. "When I Tell You" arrives with the peculiar glow of something both brand new and thoroughly aged — a debut single from a band that split up before most of today's listeners were born, unearthed like a reel of film that's somehow kept its colour.

Somewhere between a kibbutz guitar and a laptop full of arrangement software, Gideon Unna has stumbled onto something quietly radical: a pop song that dares to be sincere without flinching. "Heaven Is Here" wears its influences on its sleeve — literally, if the cover art's flower-power swirl is anything to go by — but it wears them like a well-tailored coat rather than a costume borrowed for the occasion.

Rock and roll doesn't need reinventing this year — not when a BC guitar man with two decades of mileage under his belt can plug in, count off, and remind everyone why the format never needed fixing in the first place. *Living the Dream Right Now* is Steve Montgomery's ninth studio outing under the SkipRock Music banner, and it lands like a bar-room encore: sweaty, grinning, and utterly unbothered by fashion.

Every band claims a story of sweat and underdog grit; Evil Jake happen to have earned theirs. Formed in New York City and fronted by guitarist and songwriter Mike Jacobs, this is a band that learned its trade the honest way — through overdriven amplifiers and rooms too small for the noise being made in them. Released on April 1, 2003, *Be My Ex-Girlfriend* remains the record that put them on the map, and two decades on it still sounds like a band with something to prove and the chops to prove it.

Jason McKee has spent thirty years carrying a debt around in his chest, and on "Dancing With Lou" he finally pays it, with interest, on the dancefloor. This is a single built from a single afternoon: fifteen years old, a friend's living room, a joint being rolled, and a copy of "The Blue Mask" dropping needle-first into a Frankston kid's skull like a depth charge. Grunge was busy chewing its own flannel sleeves in 1995, three chords and a grimace, and here comes Lou Reed instead, talking about hands like slow karate and sex and the general indignity of growing up, and suddenly the whole map gets redrawn.

Kit Cooper has always written like a man taking inventory of his own bruises, but "Grave Concern" finds him counting other people's for a change, and the shift suits him. This is a band who long ago earned the right to be called reliable, which in rock music is usually a polite word for boring. Not here. "Grave Concern" is the sound of a group refusing to coast on the goodwill of millions of sold records, choosing instead to dig somewhere colder and more interesting.

Some records announce themselves within seconds — no slow build required, no patience necessary. "Waterfall," the new single from Jersey City singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Kevin Honold, is that kind of record: the sort you want to shout about before the second chorus has even landed.

Jerusalem does not often export remix albums, and perhaps that scarcity is precisely why *Soulslike* lands with such peculiar force. Eugene Kuzmin, the composer, multi-instrumentalist and evident engine of this Jerusalem collective, has assembled a record that refuses to sit still: part liturgy, part séance, part late-night guitar confession, stitched together with the kind of unbothered confidence that only comes from people who have stopped worrying about which genre they belong to.