Listening to T-RAN and his new single "Don’t Stop the Fight" creates the sensation of finding a frantic heartbeat returning to a steady, confident rhythm after a near-miss on the highway. There is an immediate urgency here, a sonic landscape that refuses to sit politely in the background. https://open.spotify.com/track/7BAbhLJoHZYcwAMH6BvnhV?si=1d371859cf294456 The production fits the moniker of "gospel firestarter" perfectly, though perhaps not in the way you’d expect...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...