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...

Southern Louisiana Creole visionary Zióna Maré-Laveaux introduces her new single, "FOLD ME LIKE SUNDAY", and honestly, my immediate physical reaction was a sudden urge to lay flat on the floor and cancel all appointments. She calls this entirely original sonic territory ZIONYX™. It is a staggering, humid fusion of Afrobeat, Global Black Sound, and Bayou Soul that flawlessly bridges her ancestral heritage with a...