Sound Liberation’s “Elegy” isn’t so much an album as it is an unbolting of several sonic cages, letting the inhabitants mingle, argue, and eventually, find a strange, compelling harmony. Gene Pritsker and his rotating ensemble are, as ever, on a crusade against the "segregation of sound vibration," and here, their weapon of choice is grief, remembrance, and an absolutely defiant refusal to sit still...

Listening to Elena C. Lockleis’s new single, “Mind - Vs. - Heart,” feels like witnessing a civil war fought entirely within a single nervous system. The sound is an intimate knot of pop architecture, the kind Julia Michaels patents in her sleep, where a confession arrives not as a ballad but as a skittish, rhythm-driven pulse. You feel the frantic heartbeat right there in...