Third singles have a habit of revealing what a band actually is, once the introductions have been made and the small talk dispensed with. "The Empty Street" arrives as exactly that kind of statement from New Sunday: quieter in its ambitions than a debut, surer in its instincts, and all the more affecting for it.

Homecoming songs are two-a-penny, but few manage to sound as lived-in as this one. Allan Jamisen — the Phoenix-based painter turned songwriter — has spent a career sliding between rock, electronica, jazz and spoken word without ever quite settling, and "Milk & Honey" finds him at his most disarming: a man standing on his own doorstep, uncertain whether the key still fits.

Some records announce themselves with a knock at the door. *Perły* arrives instead through the window, cape billowing, orchestra in tow, demanding you rearrange the furniture of your afternoon. Paweł J.P. Hirlok's twelfth album is a lavish, unrepentant thing — twelve tracks that treat restraint as an option to be politely declined.

Some covers arrive like a dare. Others creep up quietly, having spent ten years fermenting in a hard drive somewhere in Augusta, Georgia, waiting for the right combination of insomnia and nerve. "Another Day In Paradise" belongs firmly to the second category, and it is all the better for the wait.

Every so often a single arrives that doesn't so much announce itself as exhale into the room, and "Breathe!" belongs to that rare, unshowy category. Fanny Alexandra has built her reputation on candour — the sort of unguarded, diaristic songwriting that makes you feel like you've stumbled into someone's private confession — and this latest offering tightens that gift into four devastating minutes of cinematic ache.

Huntsville, Ontario doesn't announce itself as a launchpad for anything resembling a stadium chorus. Cottage country breeds fiddle tunes and campfire harmonies, not synthesizers that glitter like dew on a tent flap at 3 a.m. And yet here comes The Big East, previously nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award — a pedigree that ought to guarantee flannel, not neon — pulling off the trick of sounding simultaneously homesick and interstellar.

Listen first, ask questions after. That's the dare TEANKO throws down with this single, and it's a dare that pays off handsomely. The premise sounds like the stuff of think-pieces rather than tunes: three decades of vocal recordings distilled into an AI model trained on nobody but the man himself, then folded back into a song about whether a voice can still land a gut-punch when machinery sits somewhere in the chain. It could have been a gimmick, a curiosity to be filed under "interesting but forgettable." Instead, TEANKO has built a record that earns its keep on melody and feel long before you start unpacking the concept behind it.

There's a particular kind of English songwriting that doesn't shout for your attention so much as quietly insist on it — the kind that trades in the ache of ordinary lives rendered extraordinary through careful, unshowy craft. Ian Roland's new single, "Boxing Gloves," belongs firmly in that tradition, and it lands its punches with the precision of someone who has clearly spent years learning exactly where to aim.

The question that haunts every serious piece of popular music is not whether it sounds good — competence is cheap, and the contemporary production landscape is littered with tracks that gleam without illuminating anything — but whether it *means* something. Seema Farswani, the Singapore-based singer-songwriter and composer whose musical education has sprawled across Dubai, Chicago, and the wider world, does not merely ask this question. With *Evolved*, her new cinematic rock single, she attempts to answer it with honesty and considerable atmospheric nerve.

There is a particular kind of audacity required to plant your flag beside one of the most celebrated passages in all of human literature. When Paul of Tarsus sat down to write his letter to the Corinthians — that luminous thirteenth chapter, the so-called Hymn to Love — he produced something so complete, so ruthlessly concise in its wisdom, that two thousand years of composers, preachers, and poets have circled it like moths around an open flame, rarely improving upon it, frequently diminishing it. Roland Wälzlein, the Nuremberg-born songwriter who records as Fish And Scale, has done something rather brave with "Letter from Paulus": he has not merely borrowed the text as wallpaper, as so many have. He has taken its beating heart and transplanted it into a living, breathing pop-rock ballad that pulses with hard-won personal conviction.