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.

Grief has a sound, and so does the slow climb out of it, and Eric David Kendall — the man behind the one-artist project BUSKING AROUND — has spent his career learning to score both. "Hello My Dear" opens on the former: a piano figure that sits low and unhurried, percussion that feels more like a pulse than a beat, strings held back like breath before a confession. It is the sound of a room with the curtains drawn. And then, patiently, deliberately, Kendall lets the light in.

There is a particular species of American rock record that only reveals itself fully once you stop expecting it to behave — and "Losing (The Only Game In Town)," the new single from Minnesota's The Scarlet Goodbye, is very much one of those records. It arrives less like a song than a conversation between two old friends who've decided, after decades of separate careers, to see what happens when they finally sit in the same room with their guitars pointed at each other.

Some records announce themselves. This one just switches the lamp on and starts talking, and you find yourself leaning in before you've decided to.

Brooklyn has coughed up another guitar band, and this one, mercifully, has bothered to write actual songs. *With Pulp*, the debut long-player from Honey VHS, arrives sounding less like a calculated bid for a sync deal and more like four musicians who locked themselves in a room until something true fell out. Produced by Lucas Saur and cut largely live, the record has the grain and stumble of a band actually playing together — chairs scraping, amps breathing, nobody quantised into submission.

There's a particular kind of record that refuses to announce itself, and "Missed Connection," the new single from Long Island songwriter Mark Cee, belongs squarely to that lineage — the hushed, unshowy tradition running from Nick Drake's bedsit reveries through to Bon Iver's cabin confessionals. It is not a song that grabs you by the lapels. It is a song that waits for you to lean in, and then, once you have, refuses to let go.

Every so often a record turns up that refuses to be tidied into a press release. "Diamonds And Gold" is one of those. It arrives from Busselton, a stretch of Western Australian coastline better known for whale-watching than songwriting, and it carries the unmistakable dust of somewhere far less picturesque: a gold mine, where Mark Moule apparently spent his days hauling rock and, evidently, storing up verses.

Confession first: the title is a typo that refused to correct itself. Joseph Mackey misremembered the name of a Hobart bar — The Mayfair, mangled by memory into The Mayfield — and rather than fix the error he built a song around it. It's a small piece of trivia, but it tells you everything about how this band operates. Coconut Shy don't chase precision. They chase the feeling that survives when precision fails, and on this single, that instinct pays off handsomely.

Some songs refuse to die. They just change costume every generation or two, and wait to be worn again. "Black Is The Colour (Of My True Love's Hair)" has drifted through Appalachian porches, Nina Simone's smoky phrasing, and a hundred folk revivalists since — a melody so durable it practically resists ownership. Which makes Layla Kaylif's decision to climb inside it, rather than simply dust it off, the boldest move on her new single.

Some records announce themselves with a fanfare. Others slip in through the back door, quietly, almost apologetically, and then refuse to leave your head for a fortnight. *Trouble in Mind*, the long-gestating debut proper from Sussex songwriter Sophie Moore, belongs firmly to the second camp. It arrives not as a debut in the conventional sense but as a reckoning — four decades in the making, dusted off, and handed to a producer who understood exactly what to do with it.