Paul McCartney woke with "Yesterday" fully formed and spent weeks canvassing the music business in case he had nicked it. Jason Mckee, the Melbourne singer-songwriter who records as Reetoxa, has a stranger claim on the dream-song tradition, and a heavier price attached to it. The first of these two tracks arrived in a prison bunk in 2017, weeks after his mother's death, delivered by a vision of two floating heads. One was his mother's. The other belonged to a daughter lost before birth, who wanted to know why nobody was looking after her in a place called Akaroa. He had never heard of it. He wrote it down phonetically, picked up his guitar, and was told through the cell door, with some vigour, to shut up.

Pop reinvention stories rarely arrive this cleanly plotted. A child actor who spent her formative years lending her voice to a plastic-eyed toddler in a beloved animated trilogy decides, somewhere in her twenties, that the microphone suits her better on record than on screen. Cynics might expect a vanity project, all gloss and no grit. Emily Ricks delivers the opposite: a single so confidently constructed it makes the transition look inevitable rather than opportunistic.

Fifteen years is a long time to sit on a secret. Long enough for a city to rebuild itself twice over, for a ballerina's slippers to gather dust in someone else's memory, for the person who wrote a song to become, quietly and without ceremony, a stranger to the boy who wrote it. That gap — the one between London and Thailand, between the version of Shivers who fell for a dancer's late-night confessions and the version who finally pressed record thousands of miles away — is the whole engine of this record. You can hear the years in it. Not as nostalgia, which is cheap and always a little dishonest, but as distance: the kind that only comes from actually living the thing you once merely wondered about.

Charts these days reward the calculated over the felt, the algorithm-tested chorus over the risky one. Which makes "Bad For My Reputation" such a pleasure to sit with: it sounds like the work of someone who knew exactly what she wanted to say and simply refused to soften it for anybody's comfort.

Daydreaming, as a subject for pop music, carries an obvious risk: nothing much happens. The mind wanders, the kettle boils, the bus arrives late, and somewhere behind the eyes a whole cinematic romance unfolds without anyone else noticing. Annika Bellamy has built a single around exactly that gap between the mundane and the imagined, and she's found a clever way to make the daydream itself the drama, rather than just the excuse for one.

Somewhere between the pine barrens of southern New Jersey and the ghost of a saxophone conversation on Long Island, Matt DeAngelis has found himself a sermon dressed up as a rock single, and it's a rather magnificent piece of theatre. "Playing God" arrives with the swagger of a man who has spent two decades sharpening a pen against the whetstone of his own conscience, and you can hear every year of it.

Recorded at Phoenix Production Studios in London and lifted from the forthcoming second album *Age of Mess*, "Sugar Ocean Girl" arrives with the confidence of a record that already knows exactly what it wants to be: a wide, sun-warmed slab of commercial pop-rock built for open windows and longer evenings. Ziggy, the singular architect behind The Mess:Age, has never been a songwriter interested in subtlety for its own sake, and this single is no exception — it announces its intentions within seconds and then spends the rest of its running time making good on them.

Family bands carry a particular kind of risk. Get it wrong and you end up with the sonic equivalent of a Christmas dinner argument nobody asked to overhear. Get it right, though, and you get something no amount of session musicianship can fake: people who have spent decades finishing each other's sentences finishing each other's phrases instead. *Sharp Comfort*, the new album from Woodstock, Georgia's The Bastas Project, belongs firmly in the second category, and it announces itself with the confidence of a group who know exactly what they've got.

Brisbane has never been shy about producing artists who sound like they belong somewhere much bigger, and Noah Bates has just handed the city its most confident case yet. "For You" doesn't so much arrive as detonate — a single built from the wreckage of certainty, dressed in gated drums and synths that shimmer like they've been dipped in hairspray and neon.

Heartbreak has been strip-mined so thoroughly by songwriters that fresh ore is hard to come by. Elwood, a Texan with a voice built for empty rooms and last orders, manages to find a seam nobody else had quite located: the moment blame stops pointing outward and starts pointing home.