Pop-punk has always been the music of bad decisions made at speed, and the genre's best songs know that regret can be made to sound like joy. Weekday Social, a London trio of Louise, Gavin and Ben, understand this thoroughly. "So Close," released last week, is a song about walking into a mistake with your eyes open, and the band sound delighted to be doing it.

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.

There's a particular kind of English melancholy that knows better than to wallow, and Paul Garside has bottled it rather beautifully on "Mariana Trench." This is a record that takes its title from the deepest, darkest, most crushing place on Earth and somehow turns it into a reason to punch the air. That paradox—darkness rendered as uplift—is the single's great trick, and Garside pulls it off with the sort of unforced conviction that can't be faked.

Leicester has never been filed under progressive rock, which is probably how Gurulee prefers it. He has spent the four years since his last release in a home studio he calls his safe space, doing what cranks and visionaries have always done: working in private until the thing is ready. "Time Blindness" is that thing. It emerges fully formed, blinking at the daylight and unrepentant.

Pop has always known that the dancefloor is the best place to cry. New Order knew it, the Pet Shop Boys built a career on it, and Robyn made it an emotional philosophy. On *Relabel*, her second album, Southampton's Kat Button joins that lineage with ten tracks that are danceable and disarmingly honest. Very little EDM has attempted what she does here, and the record is better for it.

Odysseus had himself lashed to the ship's mast and stuffed his crew's ears with beeswax, which says a good deal about how the ancient world regarded the seductive song: a hazard to navigation. Horologica, the Milwaukee-born, London-based singer-songwriter, has fashioned a hazard of his own, and Siren Lullaby, out on 21 August, is the most alluring thing he has released. Nobody listening will be reaching for the beeswax.

A record built from a single fixed vantage point risks monotony, but Estrada Music Project turns that limitation into the whole point of "Looking Out the Window." The song was written during a stretch of medical isolation, and it wears that origin plainly, without theatrics. No swelling strings arrive to underline the drama, no chorus tries to console you. Instead, the track sits in its restriction and lets the restriction do the work.

Somewhere between the fog-draped rooftops of a London bedroom studio and the sun-bleached film reels of 1970s Rome, Don Cicci has found his sound, and on "Polpette" he sounds thoroughly at home in it. This is a producer who has clearly spent years with his ear pressed to vinyl crackle, absorbing the swagger of vintage Italian film scores the way other musicians absorb the blues, and the result is a track that feels less like a beat than a mood board set to a metronome.

There's a particular kind of racket that only comes from a band who've spent five years getting to know each other's bad habits before they ever plugged in together properly, and "No Pictures" — the new shot fired by Cardiff's Underlowe — has that racket in spades. This is a record built on trust, on the kind of shorthand that only exists between old friends and older riffs, and it announces itself with the confidence of a band who know exactly what they're doing, even if the world hasn't quite caught up yet.

Birmingham has given the world heavy metal, bhangra fusion, and now, it seems, a drummer-turned-producer with a taste for wormholes. Kai Moa's debut EP arrives after a run of singles that already hinted at an appetite bigger than any one genre could satisfy, and the full collection makes good on that promise with a confidence that borders on the reckless — the good kind of reckless, the kind that used to get records described as "dangerous" before that word got worn smooth by overuse.