Pop music has always had a talent for smuggling awkward ideas past the doorman. Ooberfuse, the London duo of Cherrie Anderson and Hal St John, have built a career on this trick. Their collaborator list runs from Snoop Dogg to Cameroonian musician Abdel Tchatchet. Their conscience stays on the dancefloor, and it has rarely been dressed more sharply than on "Electrify".

Seven players, one question, and nearly seven minutes to chew it over. JFK Blue's new single is a slab of blues rock that has no interest in being polite.

Anyone who has tried to meditate with a phone buzzing face-down on the duvet will recognise the predicament at the heart of "Starstruck Simulation". Olina's new single is a song about trying to sit still while the world flickers at you, and it manages the neat trick of being both a portrait of that restlessness and a small, glowing antidote to it.

Somewhere on the outskirts of Glasgow, in a house its owner calls Electrobuddha Towers, a man in a woolly hat has been quietly assembling the sort of record the grand pop institutions stopped commissioning around the time focus groups learned to read lyric sheets. He plays it all himself, builds it all himself, and, with a wry smile you can almost hear, labels it "eco rock." Pop has weathered sillier genre names. Few of them came attached to such a sincere argument.

Dan Whitehouse has built a career on the unvarnished confession, and his new single is the most naked thing he has put his name to. It is a piano, a voice and a room, with no overdubs and no studio sleight of hand to dim the lights. Pianist David O'Brien sits opposite him, and the two play the song as it happens. Whatever you hear is what occurred.

There is a particular kind of record that can only be made by someone with nobody left to impress. It arrives without a publicist's gloss or a studio's expensive varnish, just a person, a few microphones and an ache that needs somewhere to go. "Never Had," the new single from Cheltenham's Charlie Sly, is exactly that record, and it is quietly, stubbornly wonderful.

The title is a lie, and that's the whole point. Nobody who sings "we're much better people now" has arrived anywhere near it. They're a few drinks into a long evening of self-assessment, and they know it. Michael Waters has built his new single on that gap between what we claim and what we feel, and it is the most quietly devastating thing he has put his name to.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives not with a bang but with a held breath, and Chris Beckett's latest, released under his HMS Beckett banner, is exactly that. It is the sound of a man finally opening a door he has kept shut for three decades, and discovering, to his evident surprise and our enormous benefit, that the garden on the other side is still alive.

Confession, as any pub bore or Sunday-paper columnist will tell you, is cheap. Dignified confession, the kind that tidies nothing and still leaves the listener feeling looked after, is a rarer commodity. James Crowley, a London songwriter who has spent years in the quieter corners of the indie-folk scene, delivers it across four songs on *Imprint*, an EP that opens its ribcage without ever begging for sympathy.

There is a particular kind of songwriter England keeps producing, usually in a spare room or a shed, who has spent decades listening to Lennon, Simon, Newman, Dylan and Springsteen and concluded that the trick was never the tune but the telling. Music by Jeremy, a Banbury-based writer who works from a small studio in the Oxfordshire heartland, belongs to that lineage. *Side Two*, the second quarter of a 24-track double album released in four monthly instalments, suggests he has earned his place in it.