Glasgow has never been short of bands willing to plug in, crank up, and dare the room to ignore them, and Delta Fire's third single arrives with the swagger of a group who know exactly which lineage they're auditioning for. "Love Stops First" doesn't so much knock on the door of 70s hard rock as kick it clean off the hinges, dust off the welcome mat, and invite Deep Purple and ZZ Top round for a pint.

Three lads from Wallington walk into a studio in Canning Town, the same room where Blue once cut their pop confections, and decide to make a record that owes nothing to boybands and everything to a man with a red Stratocaster and a laconic Geordie drawl. That, in essence, is "My Guess Is No," the fifth single from Sunday Smoke and the clearest evidence yet that this trio — brothers Benj and Oliver alongside school friend Marcus — know precisely whose shoulders they're standing on.

There's a particular strain of London songwriter who treats the pun not as a cheap trick but as a structural principle, and Tom Minor is clearly working that vein for all it's worth. "Bureau of Change" — the new single trailing his second album, the gloriously titled *Ten New Toe-Tappers for Shoplifting & Self-Mutilation* — takes its title from the currency exchange shopfront and proceeds to wring every conceivable meaning out of the word "change" until the listener is left slightly dizzy and more than a little impressed.

Confession dressed as pop record, or pop record dressed as confession — either way, DARNELL has built something rare: a breakup song that refuses the comforts of villainy. Most songs of this genre arrive armed, ready to indict an absent other. This one turns the blade inward, and the wound it opens is more interesting for it.

Some comebacks announce themselves with a fanfare. Others creep up on you, quietly insistent, like a half-remembered melody hummed in the shower decades after you last sang it properly. Mister Chorister's "Spark" belongs firmly to the latter camp, and it's all the better for it.

Pop has always needed its visionaries and its charlatans, and the trick, more often than not, is telling them apart before the second chorus. Vela Jones, a name that sounds beamed in from a near-future newsroom, arrives with enough cinematic polish to make scepticism feel almost rude. "Star Light Star Bright" doesn't so much announce itself as descend, all synth haze and slow-building tension, like a transmission catching signal after years of static.

There is a particular kind of ambition that announces itself not through volume but through lineage, and Rootless — the Glasgow-based collective who have made a virtue of being from everywhere and nowhere at once — wear theirs like a second skin. Their new single, "Dam Mast Qalandar," takes on one of the most over-recorded, over-sampled, near-untouchable pieces in the qawwali canon — the song Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan turned into a kind of devotional Big Bang — and dares to ask what happens when you run it through a Roma fiddle and a Glaswegian postcode. The audacity alone deserves a hearing.

There is a particular kind of English misery that wears velvet rather than sackcloth, and Marry Me Emelie! have spent two years quietly perfecting it. "Flowers," the duo's first single since last spring's quietly devastating EP, doesn't so much arrive as exhale. It is less a song than a held breath that finally, reluctantly, lets go.

Southampton has given English music plenty over the years, though dance-floor mysticism has never been high on the list — that's normally Manchester's department, or Bristol's, cities that have built entire mythologies around a bassline and a smoke machine. CDubs, working out of a Hampshire studio rather than anywhere fashionable, has decided the south coast deserves its own contribution to the genre: a producer's confession dressed up as a single, built on the rather endearing premise that he has identified a sixth love language, and that language is, conveniently, the one he happens to speak professionally.

Six men in a room, the press notes insist, with no rhythm or reason to how the songs arrive — which is either disarming honesty or the oldest dodge in rock journalism, the one where "we just feel it, man" stands in for "we haven't thought about structure since 2019." Either way, "Restless City" is the sound of a band climbing back onto a stage they vacated seven years ago, and to their credit, they don't sneak back in quietly. They open with a police siren, which is the musical equivalent of clearing your throat with a foghorn.