Listening to RIOT SON’s new single, “Loneliest at Best,” is a curious exercise in emotional time-travel. The sound pulls you back to the early 2000s, to a time of angular guitars and heartfelt, frayed-collar vocals. It has that nervous, shimmering energy of indie rock that always sounded best on a pair of wired headphones, the beat prodding you forward even as the lyrics confess...

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...