Dylan Forshner's new EP, “Hopeless Optimism,” presents itself not so much as a collection of songs but as a series of candid diary entries set to intricately picked acoustic strings. This five-song journey from the Welland, Canada artist begins in a place of palpable internal wrestling, where the lyrics – and Forshner’s delivery – map out the grim territories of being overwhelmed, using substances...

There is a specific kind of magic that happens when an artist decides to stop overthinking and starts feeling. For Joshua Pearlstein, that moment of clarity arrived in the form of a sleepless night and a single, urgent creative impulse. His latest single, “Wanna Dance”, is the result of that urgency, a track that feels less like a calculated career move and more like a...