Amara-Fe has definitively shifted from the messy business of becoming into the absolute certainty of claiming with her new album, "A Queen’s Ambition". The rising solo artist, tethered to deep musical roots extending through Mission and Dallas, Texas, arrives fully formed here. There is a palpable weight to her cinematic R&B and electropop arrangements. You can almost feel her surveying her territory, setting borders,...

Seven Shades of Nothing’s new single, “When The Lights Go Down,” offers an incredibly peculiar form of comfort—it’s a soundtrack for deciding, over your third cup of lukewarm coffee, that perhaps global, society-dissolving collapse might actually be a blessed relief. James Cole, the project’s architect, doesn't sound panicked about the approaching end; he sounds incredibly, beautifully bored by everything that led up to it. https://open.spotify.com/album/0Z5K652TNvuB9fpt9Amdut?si=_mevo7tcSGunNpswpfCSsQ This...