Rock music has spent decades trying to outrun sincerity, and most of it has been caught. The irony helmets, the smirking self-mythologising and the studio gloss applied like cheap varnish have all had their day. So it is a small shock to hear Steven Luke, a Lancashire songwriter working without a major label, walk straight into the cold with his heart on his sleeve and a cellist at his shoulder. "Seasons (to be human)" is a ballad of real stature, and it deserves to be heard well beyond its postcode.

Protest music has a habit of congratulating itself. It stands on a stage, clears its throat and informs the audience of what they already believe, while the rhythm section sits politely in the background doing as it is told. Sheykh Forever has no such manners. *Fire in the Master's House*, the fourteen-track debut-in-all-but-name from the London-based Iraqi-born Mostafa Al, drags the anti-war album onto the dancefloor and refuses to let it leave until everyone has sweated through their conscience.

Most records about recovery are written from the far bank, by someone dry and composed, pointing back at the river. *Only Human* is written from the water. Tallulah Rendall's seventh album, which follows a toxic relationship and the death of her father from Covid, keeps the wet hair and shaking hands in the frame. It is all the more affecting for it.

Songs that tell us how to feel about one another are never in short supply. Far rarer is one that simply asks, then trusts the listener to do the work. "HUMAN", the new single from British independent singer-songwriter TaniA Kyllikki, puts the question in its title, repeats it until it becomes a mantra, and wraps it in a dancefloor pulse that keeps the feet busy while the conscience catches up.

Pete Meaney has made a record that sounds like it was recorded in the room next to yours, by a man who has just put the kettle on and wants to tell you something that matters. "Walk You to the Altar" arrives from Plymouth with no glossy sheen and no stadium-sized chorus. It has a guitar, a voice, a few walls, and a father's reckoning with the speed of the calendar.

Heartbreak songs usually arrive dressed for a party. They shout, they swagger, they rhyme "pain" with "rain" and hope nobody notices. "Letting Go", the new single from Lancaster's Open Horizon Records, does something braver and far quieter. It sits down at the kitchen table at two in the morning, phone face-up and silent, and tells the truth.

Layla Kaylif is a magpie with an Oxford degree, a back catalogue that includes Leonard Cohen translated into Arabic, and a working knowledge of Nizar Qabbani's love poetry. "Walks on Water", the second single from her forthcoming album, is her most daring act of borrowing yet. It is also, happily, her most convincing.

Ask Al Swainger what his music is and he will, with a bassist's patience, decline to tell you. The album's liner notes confess that the question is the hardest one he faces, and that every tidy answer shaves off the strange, fragile and unresolved parts that made the work worth doing. *Impure Imagination*, the third record from his Pointless Beauty project, is the sound of a man refusing to be filed. That refusal could be tiresome in lesser hands. Here it is exhilarating.

Bristol has a long record of producing music that sounds as though it were made in a damp basement by someone who has seen through everything. Lucian Lacewing makes his in a bedroom, a smaller room with a better view of the ceiling, and this four-track mini-album is the sound of a man lying on his back and watching the plaster turn into weather.

Home studios are usually where ambition goes to be politely lowered. Bedroom producers tend to emerge with a few sketches, a fondness for reverb and an apology. Claire Hadidjenar and Matthew Walker, who record as Apple Eyes from a corner of London, have used theirs to make a finished record. "Be" is a single of such assured, glittering pop craftsmanship that its homespun origins feel like a conjuring trick.