When I pressed play on the latest release from Shelita, titled "Sailors", I wasn't expecting the floor to drop out from under me. You see, "pop" is often a safe word, a designation for the palatable. But this? This is something else entirely. It’s as if someone took a tender ballad and threw it into a particle accelerator to see what sub-atomic emotions would...

Listening to The Trusted’s new single, “Levitate,” is to willingly submit to a glorious, well-produced panic attack. From its opening moments, where frontman Tom Cunningham confesses to feeling like something to be discarded in the street, the track establishes a brutal vulnerability before yanking you into the dizzying orbit of another human being. It’s the sound of being so completely poleaxed by infatuation that...