Rock music has always been fond of the drunk as a romantic figure: the poet in the bar, the doomed charmer, the tragic hero with a bottle for a muse. Jamie Smith, working under the name Thousand Pieces, has no time for any of that. "Hey Man. Amen." belongs to the person standing at the other end of the story, the one who has made the phone calls, driven to the clinics, sat through the relapses and run out of ideas.

Every so often a record turns up that has no business existing, and is all the better for it. *Holding On*, the debut album from The Snow Ponies, was recorded over twelve months by one man in the Waikato, who played every instrument himself. That man is Phil Dean. His CV includes thirty-odd years of gigging, a guard's uniform in *Rings of Power*, a thumping from Jason Momoa in *Aquaman 2*, and a head injury that has left him unable to tolerate bright lights and loud noise. This is not the usual route to a good guitar record, and yet here it is.

Dogs have been the subject of sentimental songs for as long as men with guitars have owned them, and the results are usually a slobbering mess. Uncanny Valley Girls, a London band who have spent eight years earning their keep in the sweaty back rooms of the capital, have written a love song to a dog that is clever, tender and very funny, with none of the usual mawkishness.

Some bands arrive with a press release and a haircut. The Elusives arrive with thirty years of unfinished business. "Run Away Into the Night" is the sound of two old friends opening a cupboard they locked in the Clinton years, finding the music still warm, and deciding to let it out.

Releasing a song about September 11th on its twenty-fifth anniversary invites disaster. The risk is easy to name: mawkishness, opportunism, the hand-on-heart bombast that turns grief into a product. The Real Anthem walk straight into that minefield and emerge with their dignity, and their nerve, intact.

Lancashire has a habit of producing bands who sound like they've been forged rather than formed, and Defined By slot neatly into that lineage with "Monopoly," a single that arrives less like a calling card and more like a clenched fist through the letterbox. Four musicians, freshly reconstituted, have spent the past couple of years road-testing this sound in rooms that matter more than their size suggests — Preston's Ferret, Burnley's Loom, a headline turn at Horwich's Ramp — and the graft shows. This is a band who've learned their craft on sticky floors rather than in spreadsheets, and "Monopoly" carries the calluses to prove it.

Records made by friends in a room tend to sound either like a warm hug or a hostage negotiation. *Bass River Sessions*, cut over several sittings on a Massachusetts street and named for it, sounds like three men who have spent years arguing productively about guitars finally being allowed to leave the amps switched on.

Thiago Barlanza has picked an audacious name for a project built on such quiet, unshowy tenderness. We As Gods, shuttling between Rio de Janeiro and Lisbon in its making, trades in analog warmth and hazy, softly smudged textures — the sonic equivalent of a photograph left slightly out of focus on purpose. "A Human Like You," the title track and opening statement of his debut album, is the clearest possible introduction to that world, and it earns the honour.

Three years of van fumes, sticky floors and half-empty rehearsal rooms have distilled into something genuinely worth your attention. *I Will Work Harder* arrives not as a tentative debut but as a document of a band who have already lived the life the songs describe — and it shows in every bruised, brassy bar of it.

Banquet Darling has never been an act content to sit quietly at the back of the room, and NOW confirms as much within its opening bars. Todd Kilby's music arrives dressed in sequins and doubt in equal measure, and the record wastes no time announcing itself as a genuine leap from Dreamlove Obscura's cult beginnings into something altogether more confident, more sprawling, and considerably stranger.