On their expansive album "Solid Ground", Steve and Dolapo construct an audacious sanctuary out of pure, unvarnished hope. Together, Dolapo Oladejo and Steve Petrinko draw upon sixty years of shared choral discipline and vast multi-instrumental instincts, assembling a kaleidoscopic sound that refuses to settle into an easy category. They treat the modern pop spectrum as an expansive canvas where heavy burdens are acknowledged, dissected,...

There's a specific kind of bleak bartering that happens at 2 AM, and Rusty Reid’s single “Piece of the Action” builds a whole four-minute economy around it. This isn't a song about the sweeping grandeur of romance; it’s a clinical look at turning “dissatisfaction” into “a transaction of love.” The language is deliberate, almost like a contract being signed on a napkin under a...