DBsock, the artistic moniker of Mingwei Gao, arrives not with a gentle announcement, but with a complex, shifting statement in her debut EP, "The Journey". The songs on this album do not really feel like easy music. Instead, they feel more like a complicated guide that shows the way through internal territories. Gao is a singer, musician, producer, and creator who works in Los Angeles and...

Listening to lumin's "On My Own" feels a bit like finding a thoughtfully folded note tucked into the spine of a library book you weren’t looking for. It unfolds a specific kind of disorientation, that modern ache of feeling adrift while supposedly surrounded by connection points. Lumin, a solo creator working out of Hurst, crafts this sentiment not with grand despair, but with a...