This month belongs to the eclectic female singer-songwriter. The next few weeks bear witness to new albums from such veterans and newcomers as Natasha Bedingfield, Sarah Brightman, Rachel McGoye, Idina Menzel, Cat Power, Amanda Shaw, and Rhonda Vincent, with new releases from Sheryl Crow, k.d. lang, and Shelby Lynne appearing in the first week of February. Given the year their singer-songwriting sisters had in 2007 — recall the commercial and critical successes of Lily Allen, Kathy Diamond, Feist, Miranda Lambert, M.I.A., Marissa Nadler, St. Vincent, and Amy Winehouse — this shouldn’t be very surprising. Women are making some of the most infectiously hybrid pop music around right now. And Sia and Kate Nash both enter that fray with new albums out today.

Adelaide, Australia, native Sia Furler first entered the alternative-radio universe when her 2004 single, “Breathe Me,” was the concluding song to the 2005 series finale of HBO’s “Six Feet Under.” Ms. Furler’s husky voice and the song’s condominium white-on-white production perfectly suited the show’s superficial angst. The song’s mix of plaintive piano melody and moody electronic beats also perfectly captured Ms. Furler’s primary songwriting styles — winsome, downer folk and woozy acid-jazz. Her dalliances with the latter can be found in her vocal work with the downtempo Zero 7 project; her forays into more traditional singer-songwriter fare are the maudlin moments that pepper her two previous albums.

“Some People Have Real Problems” is Ms. Furler’s first release in four years, and its arrival on Starbucks’s Hear Music imprint is at once a blessing and a curse. Hear Music’s staunchly inoffensive discography both accurately and inaccurately brands “Real Problems” as the sort of laid-back background music that is easily ignored while waiting for a non-fat mocha latte. But given that the coffee megachain has successfully marketed and branded albums by Alanis Morrissette and Ray Charles — and makes a point of name-checking albums by Neko Case, Norah Jones, Calexico, and Madeleine on its Web site — it’s a prime point-of-sale space to deliver “Real Problems” to fans of literate adult contemporary pop.

Admittedly, parts of “Real Problems” do traipse too far into generic soft-rock, where forlorn piano lines set a mawkish tone (“I Go to Sleep”) and Ms. Furler drowns the ends of lines in R&B vibrato in an attempt to lend songs a gravitas they haven’t earned (“Death By Chocolate” and “Soon We’ll Be Found”). Thematically, too, much of the album sticks to such shopworn adult-contemporary subjects as love being hard to find/maintain, or breaking/broken hearts.

Ms. Furler overcomes those clichés when she sticks to her odd stylistic mix. “Day Too Soon” is a lovers-on-the-run ballad that nicely frames its creator’s sultriness with a light jazz-rock melodic background. Better still is “The Girl You Lost to Cocaine,” a more traditional why-she’s-leaving-him rocker that Ms. Furler nicely peppers with a blustery, soulful vocal. And on “Academie,” Ms. Furler marries minimal beats to a jaunty vocal and synth melody that blossoms into a puckish slice of electro-pop.

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Twenty-year-old pianist Kate Nash has a much better hit-and-miss ratio on her debut, “Made of Bricks,” a former no. 1 album in Britain, where it has already gone platinum since being released last August. In fact, on the album’s 13 songs (including one hidden track), it’s difficult to find a listless stray among Ms. Nash’s dizzying, genre-hopping, and seemingly effortless pop.

Although closely aligned with Ms. Allen and Ms. Winehouse — the former plugged Ms. Nash on her MySpace page, and all three attended South London’s British Record Industry Trust School for Performing Arts and Technology — and easily compared with Regina Spektor, Ms. Nash’s music and lyrical precocity have more in common with British-born American sparkplug Nellie McKay. Like those of the randy, irreverent Ms. McKay, Ms. Nash’s lyrics feel conversational without feeling mannered, and her pop sensibility doesn’t just borrow from what’s going on around her now but reaches back through the Brill Building and all the way to Gilbert and Sullivan at their most jocose.

“Made of Bricks” has been called a kitchen sink of wild ideas — which it is — but that description doesn’t capture the deft restraint, bubbly energy, and witty arrangements running through it. At each song’s core is some kind of piano or keyboard line; at the foreground is Ms. Nash’s expressive voice, a soulful middle-class British accent that she can bend and spike into working-class slangs. Imagine how Joanna Newsom would sound after watching a monthlong marathon of British young-adult soaps, and you’ll have an idea of Ms. Nash’s singular vocals.

And she frames that arresting vocal personality with bouncing, witty melodies that complement her lyrical panache. Sample slices sputter and collide into a cluttering rhythm in “Pumpkin Song,” a funky, coy ode to boy-girl miscommunication that finally finds Ms. Nash’s narrator admitting, “I just want your kiss, boy.” A skittering drum track underscores Ms. Nash’s choppy piano lines in “Skeleton Song,” an infectiously giddy plunge into nonsensical narrative wordplay, in which her piano jabs slice up the song’s regular meter.

Ms. Nash’s gift for such ragged piano lines is one of the more refreshing surprises on “Made of Bricks.” Though they feel at first like the start to some long-winded and ardently baroque contemporary piano composition, Ms. Nash twists them into cheery, defiant pop by what she adds to the arrangement. Drums and bass come in to turn the discordant opening piano chords of “Mouthwash” into a bittersweet self-portrait. Hand claps and sample loops circle around the gentle plinking running through the relationship meltdown “Foundations.”

The best alchemy Ms. Nash pulls off in this vein is also the album’s standout track. A forlorn piano line and plodding drum open the mini-opera “Mariella,” one of the better loner-girl anthems in recent memory. Ms. Nash crams a gorgeously defiant story about the titular young woman into a song that evolves through four different parts and just as many tempo changes inside of four minutes, finishing in an almost emo-rock explosion of noise and feeling. It’s a dazzling outpouring of pop ideas, and sophistication of emotion and arrangement that Ms. Nash displays here should make pop fans excited to hear whatever she turns out next.

Sia plays in-store performances January 9 at the Astor Place Starbucks at noon, the SoHo Apple Store at 4 p.m., and the Union Square Virgin Megastore at 7 p.m. Ms. Nash plays an in-store performance at the Union Square Virgin Megastore tonight at 7 p.m. and at the Bowery Ballroom on January 9.