To listen to Stevie Hawkins’ take on "A Song For You" is to have a conversation with a ghost in a dimly lit room after the show has ended. Hawkins, long the rhythmic engine for the song's originator Leon Russell, steps from behind the drum kit to the microphone, and the space between these two roles compresses decades into four and a half minutes....

Clare Easdown’s new single, "Lipstick On My Restraints," doesn't arrive so much as it materializes, spitting glitter and venom in the face of polite society. This is the sound of a patient hijacking the asylum’s PA system, a furious and fiercely glamorous reclamation of a narrative. It’s a track that feels less written and more clawed into existence, forged in the friction between imposed...