Drum & bass has always been a music of motion, a genre that hurtles toward the horizon at 174 beats per minute and rarely looks back. Stay still in the middle of it and you feel the floor move. So it is a small act of rebellion that "Stay a While" asks you to linger, and a larger one that it gets you to agree.

Press releases tend to promise a great deal, and ambient music, a genre built on the absence of incident, is particularly prone to overselling its own quietness. So it is a pleasure to report that John Beith, working alone in a home studio in Devon under the name The Snowball Effect, has made a single that earns its calm honestly. "The Colour of Dust" is unhurried, handsomely made and quietly affecting, and it rewards the kind of attention that most music no longer bothers to ask for.

Break-ups are petty burglars. They take the record collection, the good coat, the shared jokes. The cruellest ones take the one song you could always rely on and leave it ruined, so you flinch when it comes on in a taxi or a supermarket. WØLFFE has written an entire single about reclaiming that stolen property, and she does it with the swagger of someone kicking down the door of her own house.

Pop music has always had a soft spot for the man who goes too far. Here he is again, hurtling westward across America with a guitar, a sell-out crowd at every stop, and a heart that stays stubbornly parked in England. Colchester's KaiserKillers have turned this ancient predicament into a single that rattles, chimes and aches in roughly equal measure.

Banbury has a cross, a cake and a motorway junction. It has never had a songwriter quite like this. Music by Jeremy, a solo artist who makes records at weekends while his partner chooses her shoes, has reached the third instalment of a 24-track autobiography. In Side Three, the memoir stops studying its own reflection and goes to the window to look at the weather.

Rock music has always been fond of the drunk as a romantic figure: the poet in the bar, the doomed charmer, the tragic hero with a bottle for a muse. Jamie Smith, working under the name Thousand Pieces, has no time for any of that. "Hey Man. Amen." belongs to the person standing at the other end of the story, the one who has made the phone calls, driven to the clinics, sat through the relapses and run out of ideas.

Northern Ireland has a long record of producing songwriters who treat a three-minute single as a piece of unfinished business. Rumour Den's latest runs to four and a half minutes, and it earns every second of them.

There is a particular kind of British band that emerges every few years from somewhere that isn't London, Manchester or anywhere else the weekly papers consider interesting. They have no manifesto, no stylist and no discernible interest in the algorithm. They simply plug in, turn up and play as if the building might be demolished at midnight. MUTE TV, a Bath trio barely a year old, are that band, and "Broken Drum" is the sound of them knowing it.

Heartbreak songs usually shout. The tradition runs from the torch singer to the stadium balladeer, and it assumes that grief must be loud to be believed. Brandes goes the other way. "Behind Your Eyes" is a murmur, a confidence passed across a kitchen table late at night, and it has more force than most of its bigger-voiced rivals.

Ian Roland has put an astronaut in a tin can, pointed it at the void, and asked him how he's feeling. The answer, reassuringly, is "I'm not getting paid enough." It is the best line about interstellar travel since Bowie's Major Tom lost his signal, and it arrives wrapped in a song of real grace.