Nostalgia usually goes wrong by fixing a memory in amber and admiring it from a safe distance. Dylan Forshner's "Meant For Me" walks straight into the memory and opens the windows. It is a love song about a love that ended, sung from the far side of the wreckage by a man who has found the wreckage lovely and, more dangerously, has started to hope again.

Nobody asked for another song about wandering. The troubadour with a rucksack and a restless heart is among the oldest figures in popular music, and the road has been worn smooth by a century of boots. Firefly Search Party walk it anyway, and "Sing Me A Song," the second single from their debut album *Prism of Dispositions*, turns out to be a small, glowing, thoroughly disarming thing.

Sixteen years is a long time for a record to spend in a pile of cuttings. Hamish's second album, the follow-up to 1999's *Picture In My Bag* (produced by Les Penning, best known for his work with Mike Oldfield), went missing, resurfaced, went missing again, and was finally rescued by a lodger. Chris Oldfield, late of Dreadzone, rented the cabin at the bottom of Hamish's Stroud garden and stayed to become the producer the songs had been waiting for. The result is a 15-track collection that sounds like a life's work assembled with love.

Twenty years is a long time to leave a song waiting, and most songs would have sulked. Tarita, the solo project of Chennai-based psychologist Dr Sindhuja Sankaran, wrote "The Death of Peter Pan" at 21 and released it at 41. In between it lived on an old IBM laptop, unproduced and unheard, losing a stanza somewhere along the way like a sock in a launderette. That the wait has produced something this tender, rather than something merely nostalgic, is to everyone's credit.

There is a particular kind of record that arrives not with a bang but with a held breath, and Chris Beckett's latest, released under his HMS Beckett banner, is exactly that. It is the sound of a man finally opening a door he has kept shut for three decades, and discovering, to his evident surprise and our enormous benefit, that the garden on the other side is still alive.

Confession, as any pub bore or Sunday-paper columnist will tell you, is cheap. Dignified confession, the kind that tidies nothing and still leaves the listener feeling looked after, is a rarer commodity. James Crowley, a London songwriter who has spent years in the quieter corners of the indie-folk scene, delivers it across four songs on *Imprint*, an EP that opens its ribcage without ever begging for sympathy.

Restraint is the hardest thing to sell. Rock and pop have long rewarded the big gesture: the key change, the stadium chorus, the guitar solo flung skywards like a hat at a graduation. New Sunday, a band from Hafnarfjörður whose members have never occupied the same room, have built something sturdier on a different principle. Their fourth single, "Here I Am Meant To Be," shows that restraint, practised with conviction, can hit harder than bombast.

Raymond Chandler lent the title, from *The Big Sleep*, a line delivered with the sly relish of a man who knows exactly what the neighbourhood is going to cost him. Ryan Yingst, a folk singer from Hershey, Pennsylvania by way of a Pittsburgh jazz-guitar degree, a Nashville apprenticeship and, since late 2023, Philadelphia's gig circuit, has taken the joke and built six songs inside it. They are honest, handsome and quietly ruinous, and they are the finest thing he has put his name to.

There's a particular kind of English melancholy that knows better than to wallow, and Paul Garside has bottled it rather beautifully on "Mariana Trench." This is a record that takes its title from the deepest, darkest, most crushing place on Earth and somehow turns it into a reason to punch the air. That paradox—darkness rendered as uplift—is the single's great trick, and Garside pulls it off with the sort of unforced conviction that can't be faked.

Nine tracks in, and the record still refuses to sound like anyone's homework. That's the first thing worth saying about OM Mare Shangri-la, the debut vocal statement from a composer who has spent a decade letting piano pieces arrive to her fully formed, as though dictated rather than written. Karen Salicath Jamali has finally picked up a microphone, and the results carry the strange, unhurried confidence of someone who has nothing to prove and everything to offer.