Post Death Soundtrack’s latest offering, “In All My Nightmares I Am Alone,” arrived not so much as a collection of songs, but as a psychic weather event. Listening to Stephen Moore’s solo excursion is like being invited to a wake where the dearly departed is, perhaps, oneself, or maybe just the idea of a stable Tuesday afternoon. It’s a dense, prickly thing, this record....

Listening to Shotgun Driver’s new EP, “Jester Privileges”, is like finding a glitter bomb in a padded cell. The four songs present a disorienting, strangely compelling contradiction. On the surface, the alt-pop framework pulses with an upbeat, almost defiant energy; this is the slick, rock-tinged anxiety of a Machine Gun Kelly track built for open-road brooding. But beneath it, the narrative, carried by those...