Jon Gold’s new single, "Lullaby for a Dream," is an act of gorgeous disorientation. You see the name—a pianist rooted in the intricate soils of jazz—and you prepare for one thing, but what arrives is a mist-laden skiff drifting from an entirely different shore. Gold, a Delaware musician, has composed a piece of British-Gaelic folk, and the cognitive dissonance is half the immediate magic....

Post-punk and corporate jargon have seldom been this intimate. When Charts and Graphs dropped "Assume the Position," I wasn’t expecting them to twist a cubicle-bound lexicon into something that dances around your brain like your 1984 office nightmares had a rhythmic pulse. But here we are, shoulders bouncing while existential dread whispers in the ear. It's synthetic, it’s tangible, but it’s also claustrophobic. It's...