Pop music has never been short of songs about perseverance. They tend to arrive with a key change and a fist in the air, shouting encouragement at a listener who didn't ask for it. "On My Way" takes the opposite route. It begins almost in a whisper, and it's far more persuasive for it.

Protest songs tend to fail in one of two ways. Some shout so loudly that nobody can hear the argument, and others tiptoe so politely that nobody notices there was one. Prem Byrne's "Here In America" avoids both. It is a song about the lingering damage of slavery, and it trusts a warm voice, an unhurried guitar and a plain tune to do the work that bluster usually botches.

Kieran E Scott was handed a Kodak Retina with no film in it and a guitar at around ten years old, and he has been trying to make one art form do the work of the other ever since. His brother Paul took the other guitar and went on to found Pop Mechanix, one of the 1980s' iconic New Zealand indie bands. Kieran left his own brief stint alongside Jordan Luck, in the band that became Dance Exponents, for London and a photography degree. A career in editorial photography followed, telling stories about how people live. *Air and Twigs*, released under the name Agneu, is what happens when those stories finally demand a different medium.

The soft-rock anthem has been abused for decades. It has soundtracked car adverts, talent-show finales and the last ten minutes of countless films about overcoming something. Farswani knows this, and "Born To Fly" is built to survive the comparison. It opens with a lullaby's closeness and ends in a chorus for a stadium of daughters, and the journey between the two is more carefully judged than the genre's usual lurch from hush to thunder.

Infidelity has always made for better pop music than fidelity ever could, and Mandybom knows it. "Tango," her second single, doesn't so much confess to an affair as choreograph one, and the result is the most seductive act of self-sabotage you'll hear this year.

Brandes writes songs the way a diarist writes entries he never expects anyone else to read, which is precisely why they land with such force when we do. On "Love In Two Degrees," the first taste of his forthcoming album *Still Life*, he takes the oldest subject in the songbook — love lost, love found again, love doubted — and refuses every shortcut a lesser writer would reach for.

Some records announce themselves with a fanfare. Others arrive quietly, almost apologetically, and then refuse to leave your head for a week. "My Life Is You," the debut single from Novo Grey, belongs firmly to the second camp — a song built not for spectacle but for staying power, and it earns that staying power through sheer emotional candour.

Retirement songs have a bad habit of curdling into either smugness or elegy: the victory lap or the wake. Teanko sidesteps both traps with a single that feels less like a farewell tour and more like a hand reaching across decades to shake its own.

Woodacre, California is not, on the face of it, a place you'd expect to yield anything resembling the wounded elegance of vintage Sting or the flinty candour of Tracy Chapman. And yet Prem Byrne, a singer-songwriter who has quietly amassed fourteen prior singles without much fuss or fanfare, has arrived at exactly that intersection with "How Life Is" — a song that trades in loss without ever curdling into self-pity, and in nostalgia without once reaching for the easy chord.

Michael Waters has a knack for finding the exact frequency where tenderness and devastation meet, and on *Requiem for Earth* he tunes his guitar to it with unnerving precision. This is not the sound of a man shouting slogans from a placard; it's the sound of a man kneeling at a bedside, holding the hand of something he loves and watching it struggle to breathe.