The biggest K-pop band in the world inch towards being the biggest global pop act full stop – the video for this latest single was played 45m times on YouTube in the first 24 hours of release, which is a new record. And with good reason: it is an absolute juggernaut, with a terrace chant chorus, Eurovision-level saxophone, and a surprisingly welcome return for Nicki Minaj to pop-dance beats. The group are folding ever more English language into their tracks as their star rises in the west, resulting in a dizzying bilingual hybrid.

Quite simply the best track yet from Empress Of, AKA LA singer-songwriter-producer Lorely Rodriguez. Her 2015 debut album was head-turning for its sensual, impulsive pop smarts, but not all the choruses totally connected. No such problem here – the central melody is riveting: feathery and near-falsetto, it drops into a heartwrenching final line as as Rodriguez laments her disconnection from the man she’s with. Shades of Jessie Ware and her regular collaborator Dev Hynes, perhaps, but outshining both with a song that already feels classic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Breaking boundaries … Theophilus London. Photograph: Ryan Cardoso

He has never truly broken into the mainstream, seen sometimes as a mere curio or clotheshorse, but Theophilus London is a valuable MC, announcing earlier than most that rap should think bigger when it comes to genre boundaries. Everyone from Tegan and Sara’s Sara Quinn and Leon Ware to Kanye West have appeared on his tracks; now he recruits Giggs for a remix of his track Bebey. The bright, funky, loping beat draws out the puckish side of his London guest, his phone blowing up as he announces his greatness and does a spot of shopping on Bond Street.

Marie Davidson’s voice is one of the biggest pleasures in contemporary electronic music. French-accented, often drily amused and given to rants, declarations and snatches of internal monologue, she continues the grand style of talky electro on from the likes of Miss Kittin. On So Right, the first track from forthcoming album Working Class Woman, a quiet side-of-the-dancefloor reverie (“He’s got me feeling so high / man this is so nice”) builds into a full house diva performance, over a classic Chicago bassline. The result is a track that essays the body high of club music and shows how close that feeling is to the erotic. It’s gloriously populist, but still retains Davidson’s indelible stamp; expect to hear this everywhere.

A new supergroup that is quite formidable in its collective angst: Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus are all experts at emotional torpor, articulated with pin-drop clarity amid moping guitars, but thankfully don’t cancel each other out when they come together. Three tracks from their forthcoming EP have been released, all excellent. Stay Down is simultaneously the most morose and the most uplifting, Baker taking the lead vocal for a song of compromised romance that builds to a stunning arena-indie climax.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Indie supergroup … Phoebe Bridgers, Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus, aka Boygenius.

Downbeat, understated R&B might look easy on paper – smoky vocal, minimalist drums, job done – but the patchiness of, say, the Jorja Smith album shows how tough it is to pull off. Kenzie, a Bostonian singer-songwriter now living in London, is managing it, though, with her debut tracks. Over Dark July’s softly pattering breakbeat, she sings a beautiful, fragmentary summer love story with perfect huskiness, speeding from meet-cute to crying breakup in the space of a chorus. Its nagging melody is deceptively simple, but will set up shop in your brain if you’re not careful.

You can take comfort, in this mixed-up world, from the fact that every year there’ll be a new Kurt Vile record: it won’t be very different from the last, and it’ll be great. On this one there is the usual bold and beautiful Neil Young-ish strumming, the glittering yet unshowy solos, and the drily amused slacker vocals. “How beautiful to take a bite out of the world,” Vile muses as he kicks around his home town on the way to a long psychedelic outro.

Beautiful and beguiling bedroom pop here, from rising London-based producer Jess Bartlet. The other two tracks from her Comrade EP flirt with a 4/4 techno pulse, but the title track has sweet and subtle syncopation under a glittering curtain of multitracked harp. It could have been twee in its sheer prettiness, but the jazzy sax and trumpet solos keep it cutely idiosyncratic, and Bartlet’s vocal in the chorus – “I’ll be there when you need me” – is powerful in its calm certainty.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Beguiling … Island Fox, AKA Jess Bartlet. Photograph: Kalina Pulit

Love blokes screaming their larynxes out in near-unintelligible roars but can’t get on board with the double kick-drums of straight metal nor the pomposity of the doom scene? Thou are your new favourite band. Despite being from Louisiana they dress like a group of Transylvanian vampires going to a cabaret evening, and have a great interplay between giant doom chords, stirring melodic progressions, and quite splashy, punkish drums. Elimination Rhetoric has the added bonus of an uplifting bit of soloing, segueing into a passage of joyous headbanging. “I can’t help myself, don’t talk to me!” Bryan Funck declares through his apparently rotted throat.

One of the year’s best and creepiest 12ins has been released: Don’t DJ’s All Love Affairs Fail But They Never End, a dub-techno epic that kicks off with Veles. Created by Berliner Florian Meyer, it has a tiny whisper of his earlier work with “exotic” sounds such as marimbas and flutes, in the subtle pan-pipe pattern on the offbeat. But that is met with absolute menace in the form of what sounds like a detuned, timestretched monastic chant. Its restless beat never quite finds its footing, and what is that scurrying and creaking at the back of the mix? This is a whole universe of glorious disquiet.