What you may have missed: October

Adwaith - Y Diweddaraf
Haven't been as convinced as many about the - go on, guess - Welsh trio (Carmarthen, to be exact) but this dip into crepescular Siouxsie territory around a slowly evolving circular riff where the track is nearly halfway done before the vocals come in is a big step forward

Anatomy - Anatomy Theme
Well, that's the existence of Grey's Anatomy making this post completely unGoogleable. Emily from Kermes' other band debut properly with six minutes plus of what they term "spooky doo-wop", developing from haunted drones and grooves to full abrasive noise and cathartic howling into the void

Baxter Dury, Etienne De Crécy, Delilah Holliday - Tais Toi
At nine tracks totalling nineteen minutes B.E.D. is largely being treated as a stop-gap but it doesn't feel like a set of knock-offs, Dury's typically overdetailed sprechgesang persona rubbing up against Holliday (of Skinny Girl Diet) as contemptuous foil

Boy Harsher - Face The Fire
Darkwave is a very easy thing to get wrong, too far a step in the wrong direction and you end up too goth for your own good. The Massachusetts duo stay comfortably the right side, their minimal atmospheric mumblecore a more nuanced version of the if-80s-were-10s thing so many others with synths are doing

Brix & The Extricated - Heavy Crown
Breaking State, the second album by four of the Fallen, is entirely made up of original songs, despite this starting with something very like the Totally Wired intro drums. Actually they haven't moved that far here, you could easily imagine this track from that band's 1983-84 vintage until dropping into a Blondie-adjacent pop chorus

Chemtrails - I'll Never Be
A little late in the day for glorious summer anthems, but the psych-garage outfit following up their unjustly overlooked album Calf Of The Sacred Cow with the Cuckoo Spit EP on 7th December have hit on a bouncy, Farfisa-fuelled anthem of self-acceptance

Chorusgirl - In Dreams
From second album Shimmer & Spin, out 16th November, the power-pop gets turned down a couple of notches, the echoey twang is less clean and deliberately unsure of itself, and Silvi's occasional lyrical touchstone of waiting to grow up and move away weighs heavier. Touted as an album detailing a year of personal bad news it's an intriguing semi-introduction

Comet Gain - I Was More Of A Mess Then
26 years in the grand staging post of indiepop reopens business once again with a double A side, this side a scrappy sub-two and a half minute cut of secret hope maybe deliberately designed to sound like a dug up garage 7" obscurity

Dead Slow Hoot - Below
Sounding like they could have made this into an anthem but didn't have that much ambition, the Sheffield four-piece deal in melancholia that colours in the cracks and unfolds in its own richly detailed time unless it's being derailed by a sudden burst of noise

Diva Sweetly - Detox Island
NorCal newcomers deal in skippy, carefree pop headed to the beach, mainlined for instant catchiness. It also shifts speed attractively, though the counter-vocals suggest something else might be going on underneath

Fightmilk - Not Going Anywhere
Although we could have picked practically anything from Not With That Attitude's biting power-pop thrills, which got a surprise digital release today two days ahead of schedule so just got in under the wire by circumstance

flirting. - Yum
It's not often these days that a debut EP sets out its stall and approach equally now and for the extended discography universe future as effectively as This Would Be Funny If It Were Happening To Anyone But Me. Ambitiously, entrancingly vaulting in a "didn't think new bands sounded like this any more" way, it touches on post-rock, pared down National-like ambition, the odd mathy break, weighed down atmosphere build-and-release and a nod especially in the spoken word breakdown to Meanwhile Back In Communist Russia

Hairband - Bee
1:58, just like mum used to make. Sounding like they intended to make either a janglepop record or a Breeders record but got distracted and piled too much onto it, submerging an insistent jangle beneath overlapping harmonies and intricate about-turns not that far from the blessed Life Without Buildings' twisting frictionless syncopation

Her Name Is Calla - Swan
The longserving post-rockers' final single, apparently, and it's a bleak exit, crushing a Valhalla-heading stomp under a refracting doomy riff

Hussy - Slayer
South Londoner Sophie Nicole Ellison by name, trading in underwater dreampop that surges and stalk in textures of distorted, darting guitars in ways that recall someone like Tanya Donelly

J. Lynch - Bereft
Johny Lamb has been around for a while, most notably as Thirty Pounds Of Bone; his latest outlet throws out the folky handbook and picks up the second hand modular synths, dressing downbeat songs in a variety of distorting and broken electronic noise and drones that somehow coalesce to form mini-melodies of their own

Pavvla - Something New
This month's nod to actual pop modernity comes from Barcelona's Paula Jornet, whose pared down, introspective take on modern electronic pop tropes suggests a Catalan Lorde

Piney Gir - Dreamcatcher
Gir's another one who has been around for years in assorted forms and styles - actually we last saw her, we now realise, as one of Gaz Coombes' backing singers. Back to the grind with an insistent, dreamy West Coast guitar pop excursion about taking risks augmented with crunching solos - plus Sweet Baboo parping away on sax, surely by now having far cleared Thomas White's previous all-comers record for most bands played with

Pozi - KCTMO
New on PRAH Recordings, the Moshi Moshi spinoff that gave us Haiku Salut's recent album, a trio who prove you can do wiry, jittery motorik-driven post-punk without a guitar (a violin fills the gap instead) debut with a pointedly angry instant reaction-penned song about Grenfell

R.Seiliog - Opal Drift
Robin Edwards says his second album Megadoze will be more on the ambient techno side then his earlier kosmiche. The first taste does feel becalmed in comparison but possesses that pulsing, undulating build to a point where it seems to naturally open out and embrace the insistent rush

Red Telephone - Victoria Park
This Barrett/Lennon-nodding nostalgia trip is, for what it's worth, what we reckon is the Cardiff psychedelics' weakest track in their current set, and it's still hugely appealing in its evocation of place, time and social surroundings

Store Front - Go For Broke
The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart were never the same after Peggy Wang left, so nice to see she's resurfaced in a new Brooklyn-based band who debut with a propulsive, effortlessly melodic and hooky song about the money/culture/happiness balance which recalls The Organ (there's one for the teenagers)

Tiny Ruins - Olympic Girls
Fulfilling October's New Zealand quotient, Hollie Fullbrook brings out her third album under this umbrella in January, picked up by Milk! Records (proprietor: C. Barnett) domestically. Folky and delicately intricate in its acoustic picking, woodwind and woody backing colours the backdrop of her literate hopes of escape

The Wave Pictures - House By The Beach
Their second album of the year, because they're the Wave Pictures and they do that, Look Inside Your Heart is out on 9th November. They've released a whole bunch of tracks from it on a weekly basis, of which this almost straightforward rock'n'roll excursion made the most ground. Solos abound

Wooing - Could Have Been
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players were an entertaining diversion in the middle of the New York New Rock Revolution, a married couple basing weird pop songs on found slides with their pre-teen daughter on drums. We're talking about them now because Rachel Trachtenburg has re-emerged at the front of a meaty new proposition, swooning, swirling guitars like college rock in a cement machine pushing against her insistent leaping vocals.