Robin James Hurt’s “A Song, A Story Told” arrives with a sound you can almost run a thumb over, like worn corduroy. In an age of sterile, diamond-polished productions, this album is a defiantly handmade thing, tracked onto vintage cassette machines. The result is not a flaw, but an ingredient. A faint, persistent hiss breathes alongside the instruments, a ghost in the machine who...

There’s a curious kind of cruelty beating at the heart of Emma Whybrow’s new single, “Amnesia,” and it is utterly exhilarating. Here is a massive, pulsing techno anthem—a thundering, four-on-the-floor declaration built for vast, sweaty rooms—and yet, tucked inside its propulsive machinery is an intensely private, bitingly personal act of dismissal. It’s like finding a handwritten "get lost" note folded neatly inside a fireworks...