Somewhere between a Bristol basement in 1995 and a Berlin dance floor in 2002, a door was left ajar. Inverted Mirror has walked through it with a single synthesizer, a drum machine's worth of nerve, and a conviction that the avant-garde and the earworm were never meant to be enemies. "Automatic Earth" is his debut, the opening transmission from a project promising three singles and then an album. If the rest keeps this standard, the signal will be worth following.

There is a particular kind of comeback that announces itself with a press conference, a countdown clock and a tearful interview. Then there is Dia The Libra's, which slips in wearing sunglasses, mutters something about chaos, and proceeds to rearrange the furniture. "INTRODUCTION" is the first single from her forthcoming album *maybe i've always been more comfortable in chaos*, and it is the rare opening gambit that makes you want to see the rest of the hand.

It begins with unease. A background of dark, uncertain colour seeps out of the speakers, the sort of sound that makes you check whether someone has come into the room behind you. Over it, a crackling rhythm starts to fizz and spit like a fuse working its way through the dark, restless and slightly put out, like a landlord who has come about the rent. Within thirty seconds Conchis has dragged you into a room you didn't know you'd entered and can't imagine leaving. "It Will Only Hurt Once" is the third single from *Gravity*, and it is the most physically commanding thing she has done.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives not so much to be reviewed as to be survived, in the best sense. *EMA*, the seventh full-length from Kyoto-born, Oslo-dwelling Sienná, is one such object: nine pieces of music that treat the listener's attention as something to be gently confiscated and returned, subtly altered, an hour later.

Birmingham has given the world heavy metal, bhangra fusion, and now, it seems, a drummer-turned-producer with a taste for wormholes. Kai Moa's debut EP arrives after a run of singles that already hinted at an appetite bigger than any one genre could satisfy, and the full collection makes good on that promise with a confidence that borders on the reckless — the good kind of reckless, the kind that used to get records described as "dangerous" before that word got worn smooth by overuse.

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.

Bureaucracy has never sounded so seductive. DIE DIE BE, the Swiss duo of Liliane Bürli and Bujar Berisha, open their new single with the coldest of images — a face scratched from a document, a person reduced to paperwork — and then spend four minutes proving that erasure can groove.

Most confessional records flatten themselves into something palatable, sanding down the jagged edges until grief and shame arrive pre-approved for radio. Xxäm refuses that bargain. This self-titled debut is eleven tracks of unruly, gorgeously overdressed feeling, and it treats the listener as someone capable of sitting with discomfort rather than being soothed past it.

Colin Keefe has spent his career behind the kit, keeping time for other people's songs in the band Woof. On "River," he steps out from behind the drums and lets the rest of us catch up. It's a single that arrives less like a calculated re-introduction and more like a door left ajar — you wander in, and by the second verse you're not leaving.

Now and again a record arrives that seems to have been assembled out of spite for the studio manual. "Almost Nothing," the new single and video from the Kansas solo project NO IDENTITY, is exactly that kind of record: a three-and-a-half-minute act of controlled sabotage, built almost entirely from a handclap that has been beaten, filtered, and dragged through enough distortion pedals to emerge sounding like a bass guitar dredged out of a septic tank. It shouldn't work. It works anyway, and works with a swagger that plenty of better-funded productions never manage.