Listening to Nom De Plume’s new album, Circle the Dream, is like finding an old, intricate map for a place that doesn't exist on any globe. This is a record for the motionless traveler, the soul pacing the perimeter of its own skull. Aris Karabelas and Michael Magee have crafted a landscape not of highways and canyons, but of the vast, contradictory terrain behind...

Let’s be clear about Social Gravy’s re-released single, “Fools”: this is not a song that uses metaphor as a shield. From its first snarling chords, this track, a furious time capsule from 2016 unearthed by Brad Kohn and Vee Bordukov, feels less like a composition and more like a brick heaved through a stained-glass window. It’s a raw-throated accusation, a two-by-four of a protest...