Across their 17-year career, Liars have become renowned for both their genre-jumping and for making good music wherever their stylistic tent is pitched. With founding member Aaron Hemphill leaving the Los Angeles band on amicable terms earlier this year, sole Liar Angus Andrew was left with the task of maintaining their momentum, and with TFCF, he’s made a uniquely strange album that encompasses this stripped-down band in both its music and its production.

Nine hours after meeting up in a Shoreditch courtyard to discuss her new album Music for People in Trouble, Norway’s Susanne Sundfør is on stage elsewhere in the district at a theatre called The Courtyard. It’s a sell-out and the room she’s playing is over-full and over-hot. A few days before the album’s release, most of the new songs are unfamiliar to the audience. Yet connections are made instantly.

After the gruelling five-hour coach journey to Powys, Wales, we strolled over a bridge into Glanusk Park, through two security guards, and into Green Man with only so much as a sing-song “Bore da”. Satisfied, we picked a spot and set up camp in the intense heat. Young Welsh scholars waved their A-level results in the air and cracked open that first bottle of cider, quaint middle-class families eagerly discussing the multitude of vegan opportunities.

True to their name, Finland’s Man Duo are male and there are two of them. The better-known half is former Helsinki tram driver Jaakko Eino Kalevi. Born Jaakko Savolainen – the Kalevi nods to his home country’s epic tale, The Kalevala – his long solo discography stretches back to 2001. That year, he made a collaborative single with Sami Toroi, who traded as Long-Sam. Following a 2012 album credited to Jaakko Eino Kalevi & Long-Sam they’re back, but as Man Duo.

As the title and Seventies-style cover image indicate, Across the Multiverse is knowing. Though the “Across the Universe” reference nods to The Beatles, it is the spirit of the Alessi Brothers, Hall & Oates, Harry Nilsson, Van Dyke Parks and Brian Wilson which are nearest. But whatever Dent May’s smarts, his fourth album is shot through with instantly memorable melodies.

The Duke Spirit’s newest album, Sky Is Mine, comes quickly on the heels of 2016’s well-received Kin LP and Serenade EP. Produced by the band themselves, and featuring vocal contributions from the likes of Josh T. Pearson and Duke Garwood, it shows a softer and more contemplative side of The Duke Spirit. Frontwoman Liela Moss goes so far as to claim that “sonically, Sky is Mine is the most tender record [The Duke Spirit] have made”, and she’s not wrong.

Ironically then, the first thing that hits you about album opener “Magenta” is the dirty and propulsive bass of Toby Butler, yet this sets the template for the rest of Sky Is Mine, which juxtaposes grit and beauty with mostly enthralling results. On “Bones of Truth”, soft strings ensconce the slow waltz rhythm in warmth and fragility, while the magic of “See Power” lies in the little discordances that pepper the song, giving it a biting edge underneath the deceptively pretty vocals and structure.

“YoYo” merges the avant-pop of Jesca Hoop with the exotic sway of Blur’s Think Tank, in what ends up being the most insistent and engaging listen of the album. It teeters on mania before plunging into the icy “The Contaminant”, a song with a vulnerability reminiscent of Daughter. Vocally, Moss describes the album as a “snapshot of a palpitating heart that values above all things, life”; while a grand claim, her crystalline vocals are never cold – on the contrary, the (perhaps underused) Duke Garwood on album closer “Broken Dream” lends Moss’s repeated “waiting, waiting, show me / fading, peaceful, show me” a vague sense of hope and expectation.

A beguiling listen, Sky Is Mine showcases this indie/goth band staying on top of their game.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for "Magenta" by The Duke Spirit

At the start of 2016 shouty Essex bedroom musician Jordan Cardy – AKA Rat Boy – was on all those media tastemaker lists of stars about to imminently explode. Maybe he’s been in major label development hell since. His debut album’s been a long time coming and, commercially, it will possibly need that lost initial momentum. But that’s for the streaming public to decide. In the meantime, SCUM is a bouncy, youthful, over-excited Labrador of a thing, distortion-amped, loud, flicking the Vs, and generally bringing the kind of party where crockery gets smashed.

The obvious comparison is Jamie T’s geezer-ish social commentary pop-rock, but Rat Boy’s musical mash-up owes less to late-Seventies artists such as The Clash or Ian Dury. Instead, names that spring to mind include Rizzle Kicks, late Nineties Fatboy Slim and the Ritalin pop mania of the late Lil’ Chris, but with buzz-saw guitars, iffy hip hop MCing, and the everything-turned-up-to-11 production style of The Go! Team in their early ‘00s prime. It deliberately crashes at the ears, in other words, with goofy Americanised skits hamming up the irritant factor, even when poking obvious fun at Donald Trump.

Many songs offer basic, pissed-off commentary on how crappy the lot of the working man can be, but aggravating nursery rhyme tunes, such as on “Everyday”, reduce the appeal. Happily, there are also tasty cuts, notably the sneering punk of “Knock Knock”, and the fired-up skank of the title track and “Left For Dead”. The latter’s portrayal of loan shark hell boasts welcome lyrical bite (“What happens when you don’t pay your fees?/You get the shit kicked out of you by common thieves”).

There’s not much light and shade on SCUM but this album isn’t about that. Like Slaves, it’s noisy, energised, mosh-pit fuel for teenagers and early 20-somethings, with occasional bursts of musical promise. On that basis it’s a partial success.

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Overleaf: watch the video for "Revolution" by Rat Boy

Girl Ray. Man Ray. Geddit? Earl Grey, the debut album from London female three-piece Girl Ray isn’t as freewheeling as the art of the man whose name they rework, but it is strikingly reminiscent of a particular strand of introspective 1980’s British music which balanced thoughtfulness with an awareness of classic reference points.

To anyone other than Eighties and Nineties indie obsessives, the guitarist from The House of Love and Levitation and the singer from Adorable getting together in 2014 did not cause a stir. However, both had stylistically leapt away from their pasts, and the resulting album, Broken Heart Surgery, showcased rich, heart-worn songs, filtered through a sensibility somewhere between Lee Hazelwood and John Barry 1960s film scores. It brought them a new audience. Their second album is equally palatable.

Boasting great cover art by photographer Rosanne de Lange, featuring the now disappeared car graveyard in Chatillon, Belgium, We Are Millionaires is also appropriately rusted and battered-sounding, bringing to mind the broken junkie romanticism of Nikki Sudden or even late period Johnny Thunders (especially on the frail ballad “Over You”). Lyrically, it’s good, poetic stuff too. The lovely title song is a peach. “We both love downbeat movies,” it almost whispers, like a Byronic barfly at 3am, “Inhabit a monochrome world, where the beat-up hero never seems to get the girl,” before blossoming into a twinkling, longing Bickers guitar solo, with a hint of Dave Gilmour about its technical skill.

The finger-clickin’, Hispanic-flavoured “If the World Is All We Have” is a stoned, filmic rock’n’roll shuffle, a bit Chris Isaak, a bit Twin Peaks, while “Mary Celeste” is Lou Reed in melodically light “Stephanie Says” mode. Throughout the whole album, there’s a clear, world-weary thoughtfulness that’s most welcome in this age of heart-on-sleeve non-specific singer-songwriter vulnerability. There’s also a shining instrumental twang to it that lifts these nine songs, gives them added heft.

A life lived pursuing dreams on the fringes of the music business has given Pete Fij and Terry Bickers requisite experience to fill their work with a resigned charm, and also, more importantly, the ability to attach that feeling to songs of forlorn lusciousness. The pair may be heading into the most fruitful period of their career.

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Overleaf: Watch the video for Pete Fij & Terry BIckers's "Love's going to Get You"

In February 1983, New Musical Express ran a cover feature categorising what it termed “positive punk”. Bands co-opted into this ostensibly new trend were Blood & Roses, Brigandage, Danse Society, Rubella Ballet, Sex Gang Children, Southern Death Cult, The Specimen, UK Decay and The Virgin Prunes.