A city can teach a person how to carry noise. The Liberties, with its old trade routes and close communal pulse, has long carried dense human music. From that inheritance, Zak Coghlan appears to have taken not only a taste for melody, but a belief that feeling becomes sharper when placed inside a story that can stand up under pressure. “Lead Balloon”, his new single...

The most arresting thing about Laura M.’s “Fly Away” arrives before any attempt to overstate it: the single is the 15-year-old singer-songwriter’s first song written completely on her own. It takes the tender, melancholy pull of first love and gives it the perspective of someone meeting those feelings in real time. “Fly Away” makes room for a young writer’s first independent statement. Laura was born in...