Gravesend has given the world precisely two things of cultural note: a fortress and, as of this week, a bedroom producer who believes he is the spiritual heir to Ralf Hütter. Whether "Electrophobia" earns him that lineage is the question worth asking, and the answer, delivered with the bluntness Kent deserves, is: not quite, but the wiring is interesting enough that you'll forgive the loose plug sockets.

There is a particular strain of British rock criticism that delights in catching a young band somewhere between aspiration and arrival — close enough to greatness to taste it, far enough away that the taste is mostly ambition. Matt Law's debut single "Made Up Construct" lives squarely in that bracket, and it does so with a swagger that suggests nobody in Strathaven told this lot they were supposed to be modest about it.

Mark Heffernan, recording under the name Pocket Lint, has always behaved like a man rummaging through a junk drawer for treasure, and on *Wunderkammer* he finally builds the cabinet to put it in. The conceit is a cabinet of curiosities, each song a glass case, each glass case holding something slightly unsettling that catches the light. It is a tidy organising principle for an artist whose previous work scattered its ideas like loose change, and it suits him. Heffernan has stopped emptying his pockets onto the table and started arranging the contents.

Guilt, that most British of currencies, has rarely sounded so handsomely produced. "I'll See You Soon" arrives wearing its conscience on its sleeve, and credit where it's due: 23 Fields wears it well. This is a single built entirely from the small, gnawing arithmetic of adult life — the missed call, the rescheduled visit, the phone left to ring out while something less important wins the day. It's a theme songwriters return to with the regularity of a guilty conscience itself, yet rarely with this much restraint.

Pop stars used to drown themselves metaphorically in strings and reverb. Skar de Line has gone one further and had himself photographed face-up in wet sand, arms flung wide like a man who's just lost an argument with gravity, while a drone circles overhead like a buzzard deciding whether he's worth the trouble. It's a cover image that does most of the talking before a single note arrives, and thankfully the record inside it doesn't waste that advance.

Oldham has given us many things, but rarely has it given us a band quite so determined to sound like four decades of post-punk and stadium-rock distilled into a single, sweaty rehearsal room — and rarely has the gamble paid off so handsomely. Mercy Kelly, once a five-piece, have shed two members and emerged leaner, hungrier, and considerably more thrilling for it. *Summer of Silence* is the sound of a band finding exactly the shape it was always meant to be in.

Glasgow has never been short of bands willing to plug in, crank up, and dare the room to ignore them, and Delta Fire's third single arrives with the swagger of a group who know exactly which lineage they're auditioning for. "Love Stops First" doesn't so much knock on the door of 70s hard rock as kick it clean off the hinges, dust off the welcome mat, and invite Deep Purple and ZZ Top round for a pint.

Three lads from Wallington walk into a studio in Canning Town, the same room where Blue once cut their pop confections, and decide to make a record that owes nothing to boybands and everything to a man with a red Stratocaster and a laconic Geordie drawl. That, in essence, is "My Guess Is No," the fifth single from Sunday Smoke and the clearest evidence yet that this trio — brothers Benj and Oliver alongside school friend Marcus — know precisely whose shoulders they're standing on.

There's a particular strain of London songwriter who treats the pun not as a cheap trick but as a structural principle, and Tom Minor is clearly working that vein for all it's worth. "Bureau of Change" — the new single trailing his second album, the gloriously titled *Ten New Toe-Tappers for Shoplifting & Self-Mutilation* — takes its title from the currency exchange shopfront and proceeds to wring every conceivable meaning out of the word "change" until the listener is left slightly dizzy and more than a little impressed.

Confession dressed as pop record, or pop record dressed as confession — either way, DARNELL has built something rare: a breakup song that refuses the comforts of villainy. Most songs of this genre arrive armed, ready to indict an absent other. This one turns the blade inward, and the wound it opens is more interesting for it.