Parmy Dhillon brings a searing kind of emotional gravity to his new single "Nashville", a track that manages to sound exactly like the specific exhaustion of staring at a ceiling fan in a hotel room three thousand miles from home. Coming out of Naarm, Dhillon has somehow bottled the very air of Tennessee humid, heavy with history, and thick with the tension of unfulfilled...

Ava Valianti represents something increasingly rare in contemporary music: genuine precocity without artifice. This Massachusetts artist, who is only fifteen years old, handles general themes with a level of emotional depth that is shocking. She shows that youth can bring out the best in complicated human experiences, rather than hiding them. "Distant," her sixth single, functions as a sonic archaeology of friendship's dissolution. The track excavates layers...