A reunion can go two ways. Either the old gang shuffle onstage, squint at one another through the stage lights and perform a well-meaning wake for their younger selves, or they plug in, count off and discover that thirty years of friendship is a splendid rhythm section in its own right. Ray's Music Exchange, happily, belong to the second camp. *A Live Family Rayunion 2025*, their first live recording in fifteen years, is a warm, rowdy and gloriously unbuttoned document of a band who still have plenty to say and a houseful of friends to say it with.

Heartbreak songs usually arrive wearing black and carrying a handkerchief. Exzenya's "B!tch Please" turns up in good heels, pours itself a drink and lets the cheating husband's mistress know, with a raised eyebrow, that she has been paid a favour. The song is a divorce lawyer's nightmare and a jukebox's dream.

Seattle has never lacked for rain, and The Night and The Dirty have bottled it. "Reflections" sounds like a downpour on a Pacific Northwest window at dusk, the kind that blurs the streetlights into smears of amber and sends a person back through the drawers of their own past. The band call their sound "Surf Drench", and for once the press release is on to something. It's surf music after the beach has emptied, the tide gone out, the sky the colour of wet slate and the only company a guitar still dripping from the sea.

Nobody asked for the power ballad to come back. It was supposed to be a fossil, a thing of wind machines, satin jackets and lighters held aloft by grown men who would deny it in the morning. Yet here is Oakland's Everything But The Everything, releasing "Hollow Heart" on the tenth of July with the cheerful nerve of a band that has noticed the genre's grave is empty and moved in.

There is a particular kind of record that can only be made by someone who has spent years at the back of the stage, watching. Drummers know where the bodies are buried. They know when a song is straining and when it is breathing, and they know that the most devastating moment in any arrangement is often the one where nothing happens at all. Nick Liberatore, a man who has kept time for the rowdy gallows humour of *The Goddamn Comedy Jam* and the sooty, whisky-soaked canon of *Tom Waits War Songs*, has now stepped to the front of the stage. "Parallel", his debut solo single, is a quietly remarkable thing.

Chicago has a habit of hiding its best people in plain sight. Sacha Mullin has spent more than twenty years there making records that refuse to sit still, from the experimental-metal clatter of *Whelm* to the dense, collaborative *Casino Wilderness Period*. Along the way he has collected a small, devoted following and a mountain of credits that would make a session-world veteran blush. Now, with his fourth solo album, he does the most disarming thing available to a man of his talents: he writes pop songs, and means them.

Pop music has always been a form of weather. Some songs arrive as drizzle, some as thunder, and a precious few as the particular amber light of a late October evening, when the streetlamps flicker on and everything seems briefly, absurdly possible. "All The Time", the new single from Disco Dreams, belongs firmly to that last category. It is a lovely thing: unhurried, glowing and quietly sure of itself.

Pop rock has a habit of mistaking volume for feeling. Eyal Har-Noy's new single, *This Is Me*, goes the other way. It begins quietly, almost shyly, like a man clearing his throat before saying something he has rehearsed in the mirror for years. By the time the chorus arrives, that nervous clearing of the throat has become a declaration, and a room full of strangers could happily sing it back.

A-ha's "Take On Me" arrived in 1985 wearing a pencil-sketch video and a synthesiser riff bright enough to power a small town. Its chorus is a notorious vocal assault course, which Morten Harket scaled with the nonchalance of a man popping out for milk. Since then it has been covered by everyone from wedding bands to metal outfits, usually with all the subtlety of a dropped tray. So when Susie Cousins announces that she has stripped it of synthesisers and handed it to a string quartet, the sensible reviewer sharpens his pencil and prepares to be unkind.

Flowers have always been the great alibi of the dangerous man. They arrive wrapped in cellophane and ribbon, they are presented in public, and they ask the recipient to be grateful. LTMAA understands this better than most songwriters, and "Violent Bouquets", the second dispatch from her debut solo EP, builds an entire nightmare from the idea.