Jacob Klein has spent the past few years accumulating grief the way other people accumulate frequent flyer miles, and on *DOGSTAR 1* he finally cashes it all in. This is a record built from the wreckage of a very specific, very brutal stretch of one man's life — a dying dog, a dissolved decade-long relationship, a flood that swallowed his adopted city whole — and yet it never once curdles into misery tourism. That's the trick of it. Grief albums are two a penny; ones that actually earn their catharsis are rarer than a clear night sky over Asheville.

Independent pop records rarely arrive with this much self-possession. Dorian, already carrying more than two million streams into this release without the machinery of a major label behind him, has used that freedom wisely: *RECONNECTED* sounds like an artist who has stopped asking permission and started trusting his own instincts.

There's a moment, roughly forty seconds into "Who Said That?", when the beat drops away just long enough for Yaz to let a line land with the flat, unbothered certainty of someone reading out a bank statement. No flourish, no plea for your attention. She simply states her business and waits for the room to catch up. That's the whole record in miniature: a woman who has stopped negotiating for space and started distributing it on her own terms.

Grief makes a strange collaborator. It arrives uninvited, rearranges the furniture of a life, and refuses to leave until it has extracted something from you — usually silence. Trail Hawk, a Kentucky songwriter recording from his own front room in Frankfort, has instead handed grief a microphone. The result, "One Hundred Angels," is a single that trades in the oldest currency country and gospel music have ever dealt in: loss transmuted into something a listener can hold onto.

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.

Silver Spring, Maryland isn't exactly synonymous with cosmic disaster narratives set to a funk groove, but LunaRover have never been a band content to work within the confines of geography or genre. "Throw Me A Line" arrives as a gleaming, slightly unhinged single that manages the rare trick of sounding both meticulously engineered and gloriously off-kilter — a combination that shouldn't work nearly as well as it does.

Songwriting has a lousy track record when it comes to loss. Most who attempt it either drown the thing in strings until it becomes a funeral parlour advert, or they flinch at the last second and reach for a platitude instead of a truth. Scott Lowder does neither. "Ghost of You" is a song that had the patience to wait a decade for its author to be ready to record it properly, and that patience is audible in every bar.

A bedroom in Orange County has produced nine albums now, and on the ninth, something loosens. Guitars muscle their way to the front of the mix, elbowing the keyboards that once ran this operation unchallenged, and the result is a record that sounds less like a solitary hobbyist tinkering after midnight and more like a man finally letting the noise in his head off the leash.

There is a very specific kind of nerve required to write a song that treats the Almighty as just another mark to be worked, and Madeline Rosene has it in spades. "I'll Seduce God to Get Into Heaven" doesn't so much knock on the pearly gates as kick them off their hinges, saunter in, and start making eyes at the doorman.

Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.