Amy-Lin Slezak’s “Known 3 Yrs. Seen 24 Hrs” opens with the bright, optimistic twang of country pop, a sound so sun-drenched you can almost feel the heat coming off the asphalt. The fiddle weaves itself through clean acoustic strums and soaring electric guitars, a musical language we all know. But the story it tells is something wonderfully specific, a peculiar ache you didn't know...

Patrick Hynes’ new single, "Baby’s High Again," doesn't so much arrive as materialize, like a half-remembered scent of bourbon and regret clinging to a velvet curtain. This “Midnight Country” he’s cultivating, it’s less dusty plains, more the blue, flickering light of a motel television at 3 AM, illuminating a room where decisions have been made, then unmade, then made again. Hynes, a Scot with...