Country music has always known that the best songs are written from the kitchen table, not the stage. Hank Williams knew it, Loretta Lynn built a career on it, and Trail Hawk's "Confused" belongs to that line. It arrives from a home studio in Frankfort, Kentucky, with no polish to hide behind, and it is better for it.

Country music has always been a music of passports and pedigrees, of who gets to claim the dirt road and the dusty hat. Erick Oscar answers the question with a title: *Two Flags, One Heart*. It is a statement of residence and of loyalty, delivered by a man who has spent thirty-odd years with an acoustic guitar in his lap and thirty-four of them as an American, having been born in Panamá and posted across nearly every Latin American country that work could find for him. He calls himself "an American with Panamanian Heritage." The record is that sentence stretched over ten songs, and it is a great deal more persuasive than any manifesto.

Most Civil War songs end where the bugles stop. Foxy Leopard starts there. "Children of the War," the flagship single from the forthcoming album *After*, arrives once the armies have gone home, the flags are folded and the speeches made, and it turns its gaze on the people those speeches forgot. It is a song about the long afterwards, and it may be the finest thing this Quebec project has yet put its name to.

Independent songwriting rarely bothers with subtlety when it comes to the old wound of being misunderstood by the people who ought to know better, and Flaxman doesn't bother either. What he does instead, on this new single, is turn that wound into something closer to architecture — a song built room by room, with the family table on one side of the wall and a lit stage on the other, and the listener left to work out which side actually feels like home.

A recording surfacing decades after it was cut can go one of two ways. It can sound like exactly what it is — dusty, apologetic, a museum piece wheeled out for the curious. Or it can land as if no time passed at all. LaCosta Tucker's rendition of "It Matters to Me" belongs firmly in the second camp, and that alone makes this quiet act of archival excavation worth your attention.

There is a particular strain of Americana that British critics have always been suckers for — not the mythologised, dust-blown loneliness of the desert highway, but the noisier, warmer, more crowded version: the county fair, the church supper, the rodeo. It's the America of bleacher seats and funnel cake, and it is exactly the terrain that George Aiello and John Ingram, working under the name The Sonic Travelers, have chosen to stake out with their new single, "Let's All Go To The Rodeo."

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.