Daydreaming, as a subject for pop music, carries an obvious risk: nothing much happens. The mind wanders, the kettle boils, the bus arrives late, and somewhere behind the eyes a whole cinematic romance unfolds without anyone else noticing. Annika Bellamy has built a single around exactly that gap between the mundane and the imagined, and she's found a clever way to make the daydream itself the drama, rather than just the excuse for one.

Somewhere between the pine barrens of southern New Jersey and the ghost of a saxophone conversation on Long Island, Matt DeAngelis has found himself a sermon dressed up as a rock single, and it's a rather magnificent piece of theatre. "Playing God" arrives with the swagger of a man who has spent two decades sharpening a pen against the whetstone of his own conscience, and you can hear every year of it.

Recorded at Phoenix Production Studios in London and lifted from the forthcoming second album *Age of Mess*, "Sugar Ocean Girl" arrives with the confidence of a record that already knows exactly what it wants to be: a wide, sun-warmed slab of commercial pop-rock built for open windows and longer evenings. Ziggy, the singular architect behind The Mess:Age, has never been a songwriter interested in subtlety for its own sake, and this single is no exception — it announces its intentions within seconds and then spends the rest of its running time making good on them.

Family bands carry a particular kind of risk. Get it wrong and you end up with the sonic equivalent of a Christmas dinner argument nobody asked to overhear. Get it right, though, and you get something no amount of session musicianship can fake: people who have spent decades finishing each other's sentences finishing each other's phrases instead. *Sharp Comfort*, the new album from Woodstock, Georgia's The Bastas Project, belongs firmly in the second category, and it announces itself with the confidence of a group who know exactly what they've got.

Brisbane has never been shy about producing artists who sound like they belong somewhere much bigger, and Noah Bates has just handed the city its most confident case yet. "For You" doesn't so much arrive as detonate — a single built from the wreckage of certainty, dressed in gated drums and synths that shimmer like they've been dipped in hairspray and neon.

Heartbreak has been strip-mined so thoroughly by songwriters that fresh ore is hard to come by. Elwood, a Texan with a voice built for empty rooms and last orders, manages to find a seam nobody else had quite located: the moment blame stops pointing outward and starts pointing home.

Pop songs about happiness are notoriously difficult to pull off. Misery hands a songwriter automatic gravitas; contentment forces them to earn the listener's attention through craft alone, with no shortcut through shared wreckage. JF Roy, a Canadian singer-songwriter better known until now for rock built on faith and struggle, has wandered into this trickier territory with "Sundress," and come out the other side with something genuinely disarming: a love song that refuses to manufacture conflict it doesn't feel.

Third singles have a habit of revealing what a band actually is, once the introductions have been made and the small talk dispensed with. "The Empty Street" arrives as exactly that kind of statement from New Sunday: quieter in its ambitions than a debut, surer in its instincts, and all the more affecting for it.

Homecoming songs are two-a-penny, but few manage to sound as lived-in as this one. Allan Jamisen — the Phoenix-based painter turned songwriter — has spent a career sliding between rock, electronica, jazz and spoken word without ever quite settling, and "Milk & Honey" finds him at his most disarming: a man standing on his own doorstep, uncertain whether the key still fits.

Some records announce themselves with a knock at the door. *Perły* arrives instead through the window, cape billowing, orchestra in tow, demanding you rearrange the furniture of your afternoon. Paweł J.P. Hirlok's twelfth album is a lavish, unrepentant thing — twelve tracks that treat restraint as an option to be politely declined.