Normani – Motivation

The former Fifth Harmony member’s best single to date bears clear evidence of co-writer Ariana Grande’s influence. Normani breezes through the verses as if skipping down a crystalline staircase, just as Grande usually does. But Normani also has inimitable charisma, evincing her supreme confidence that she’s absolutely the only one who can please her man by taking a light touch to the delivery; no sledgehammer required. It’s brassy and excellently sloganeering – “let me be your motivation … let me be your inspiration” – and has a proper dancing-in-the-rain, flirting-on-the-basketball-court smash of a video to match. LS

Cxloe – Sick

Australian pop-star-in-waiting Cxloe has written the anthem for an era in which fans express their love by asking their favourite stars to step their necks or run them over with a truck. Sick isn’t about pining politely: “I need you to make me sick / Love me out my mind,” she pleads, channelling some of Lorde’s dangerous intimacy, all tapered, gasping vocal delivery writhing through producer Gnash’s beats. Probably not what the doctor ordered, but when life is tempered through screens and a generation of young rappers and pop stars ooze numbed pain, her demand for a visceral, mind-overhauling kind of obsession sounds quite appealing. LS

Kim Gordon – Sketch Artist

Like bonfires and birthday candles, Kim Gordon’s voice has a particular char that has become more distinctive with age. Now 66, she is releasing her first solo album, No Home Record, and the lead single places her signature ashy tone front and centre. She declaims menacingly and obliquely – “aliveness is an objection, affected me” – as a bass clarinet shudders like the surface of dark water, and percussive blasts detonate at random. It’s an unnerving landscape that becomes strangely moving when a pocket of reflection opens up, Gordon musing about a day “in the sunlight, dreaming in a tent”. The sound of forlorn acoustic guitar appears, seeming to mock her bucolic reverie. LS

Tinariwen feat. Cass McCombs – Kel Tinawen

Tuareg rockers Tinariwen have always made music that reflects the desert setting of its creation: loose, sparsely populated and full of stark contrasts. For their ninth album, the group rehearsed in the Moroccan Sahara en route to recording in Mauritania. You can almost hear a sand-laden breeze waft through the background on Kel Tinawen as singer Ibrahim Ag Alhabib employs his gravelly baritone as a counterpoint to indie star Cass McCombs’s spangly guitars, a chorus of backing vocals keeping the mid-tempo groove undulating. It is imaginative music, a song to place the listener squarely within Tinariwen’s universe, regardless of where you are listening. AK

Miley Cyrus – Slide Away

Not a tribute to Definitely Maybe on its 25th anniversary – though admirably brazen in title – Slide Away is Miley Cyrus’s eulogy for her marriage to actor Liam Hemsworth. And it’s beautiful. Her dramatic vocal turn in the verses traces the scale of what they had – paradise, paralysing – only to shrink again, conveying the sense of necessary retreat in her lovely, limpid chorus: “So won’t you slide away? / Back to the ocean, I’ll go back to the city lights.” Like Ariana Grande’s Thank U, Next, it’s a dignified, adult breakup song – not score-settling, but honouring what was before moving on. LS

Pelada – Ajetreo

Pelada are Montreal electronic duo Chris Vargas and Tobias Rochman. Set to release their debut album on Pan this autumn, they came up through the city’s rave scene (the one that birthed Grimes a decade ago), distinguishing themselves by pairing Rochman’s hardware-focused production with unusual live vocals by Vargas, who rails in Spanish against power, surveillance and politics. While Vargas has cited the influence of their childhood exposure to cumbia on Pelada’s sound, Ajetreo (hustle and bustle) hews closer to the hectic, compressed kuduro sound that travelled from Angola to Lisbon’s electronic scene: Rochman gives the beat a junkyard patina that offers a playful contrast with his slippery pitch-shifting. LS

Binker Golding – … And I Like Your Feathers

Since winning the Mobo for best jazz act in 2015 with drummer Moses Boyd, saxophonist Binker Golding has become one of the key sidemen in the renascent London jazz scene, blowing coruscating sheets of free improvisation with Boyd, tasteful balladry with singer Zara McFarlane and challenging bebop with pianist Elliot Galvin. With his first quartet album as bandleader out in September, single ... And I Like Your Feathers is a subtly intricate number featuring a breezy interplay between Golding and bassist Daniel Casimir. It’s straight-ahead jazz but loses none of its potency for it; Golding shows that his playing isn’t to be relegated to a dinner party background. AK

Megan Thee Stallion – Hot Girl Summer ft Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign

A quick catch-up, for anyone not primed in the hot girl summer meme: Houston rapper Megan Thee Stallion has various aliases, including the Hot Girl. A few months back, a fan declared this a “hot girl summer”, and a meme was born, mostly revolving around Instagram posts of people showing off their hot bods. Obviously, brands from makeup companies to fast food chains leapt on it, almost killing it stone dead. But on the brink of summer’s burnout, Megan revived it with a titular anthem. It’s surprisingly laid back, but then, what is the essence of hot girl summer if not having nothing to prove? Getting Nicki Minaj (with her best verse in months) and Ty Dolla $ign (who arguably dominates too much) is bragging rights enough. Though Megan – her voice brilliantly thick with cynicism – packs in a few for good measure. “Got a whole lot of options ’cause you know a bitch poppin’.” LS

Lana Del Rey – The Greatest

Lana Del Rey’s frame of reference is well established: Americana, essentially, as her new album’s brilliant title, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, makes plain. But now and then, another (probably accidental) reference rears up in her music: the ironclad, turn-of-the-millennium songwriting of Robbie Williams collaborator Guy Chambers. It’s there in the classic piano arrangement of The Greatest, a song about precisely the opposite of such triumphalism: the end of a relationship, the climate crisis, how “Kanye West is blond and gone”. If this is the end, at least Del Rey gives it a gorgeous coda. LS

The Highwomen – Highwomen

The Highwomen are country supergroup Brandi Carlile, Amanda Shires, Maren Morris and Natalie Hemby; their mission closing the still staggering gender gap in country music. For their theme song, they involved Jimmy Webb in a rewrite of his 1975 hit that became the founding text for country supergroup the Highwaymen (comprising Johnny Cash, Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson and Kris Kristofferson) in 1985. But with a difference: the quartet don’t paint themselves as heroic outlaws, but revamp the original to reference the fates that befell women who dared to step outside society’s bounds. The group’s debut album will feature various guests: here, Bristol soul singer Yola and Sheryl Crow add to the quartet’s stirring vocal harmonies. LS