Most protest songs are written at a desk by someone who has never been cold. Nate Todd wrote his while out jogging, a more honest method than it sounds. Leafy lanes, mansions loitering behind their hedges like retired aristocrats, and a few blocks back, human beings asleep on the pavement. Todd noticed, and then did what a decent man with a guitar should do. He plugged in.

Nobody needs to be told that a steamship deck crowded with hats and bundles is a sad sight. The sepia photograph on the sleeve of Gianfranco Malorgio's new single does that work unaided, with a faded thousand-lire banknote ghosting behind the title like a debt that never quite gets paid. What the music must do is harder: turn a statistic into a feeling. Thirty million Italians have left home since 1861, and sixty to eighty million people now carry the surname, the recipes and the ache abroad. A number that size usually numbs. Malorgio, to his great credit, makes it personal.

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.

Rock'n'roll has always been a getaway car with the radio turned up, and Robert Allen, the writer and producer behind DownTown Mystic, knows exactly which road he's on. *Maybe Love's A Crime* is a single that declines to reinvent anything. It simply remembers how a rhythm section ought to behave, and the result is a good deal more thrilling than another round of knob-twiddling.

Rock and roll has a habit of attracting people who want to talk about it more than play it. Pennan Brae, a Vancouver singer-songwriter who writes his own songs and scores independent films, belongs to the other camp. *Studio*, his latest album, is a record made by someone who has spent a great deal of time in a room with amplifiers and wants you to hear what happens when they are switched on.

A home studio with a view of the garden is not, on paper, where one expects swagger to be manufactured. The image is of lawn and shed and a kettle on the boil. Yet Lyndo Jaco, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and sole occupant of the control room, has made an EP in that tranquil setting that carries itself like a band who've spent years in the back of a van and emerged with their tempers and their tunes intact.

Nashville's Music Row has a habit of swallowing careers, and lately it has been swallowing buildings too. The Sound Shop, a room where Brenda Lee, Dolly Parton and Eddy Arnold once left fingerprints on the air, shut its doors for good and met the wrecking ball within days of Stephani Ezatoff finishing her session there. She cut "Run On" in the studio's last gasp, and the single carries the faint whiff of a séance: a woman summoning a very old song inside a very old room while the demolition crew waits at the kerb.

The compilation album has a shabby reputation, and usually deserves it: a hurried shuffle of old favourites, a couple of scraps to tempt the completists, a contractual obligation with a sleeve. *Elf* is a different animal. Its title is German for "eleven", the number of tracks Roland Wälzlein, who records as Fish And Scale, has chosen from his musical journey so far and set beside brand-new pieces. He has hung them the way a good curator hangs a retrospective, so the older work looks freshly lit and the new work looks as though it has always lived there. The result is cohesive, atmospheric and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather wonderful.

Writing convincingly about pleasure is a harder trick than writing about heartbreak. Misery hands a songwriter its own scaffolding — the minor key, the slowed tempo, the lyric that trails off into silence. Joy has to build its own architecture from nothing, and most attempts collapse into syrup within thirty seconds. Which is why the 2026 remaster of "Feel Like This" deserves a longer look than a single spin on the radio would suggest: this is a record that understands exactly how much sugar a summer song can carry before it curdles, and stops just short of the line.

Christopher Scott Brammer has spent nearly thirty years away from music, which perhaps explains why "You're Not Listening" arrives sounding like a man with decades of unfinished business to settle — not with anyone else, as it turns out, but with himself.