WAIN’s debut EP, "Still Colorful", arrives not as a singular declaration but as a meticulously curated gallery of the self, with one man acting as architect, painter, and lighting technician all at once. It’s an unusual feeling, listening to it. You get the sense that you’re touring a house designed and built by a single, obsessive artisan, but where every room is inhabited by...

Patrick Hynes’ new single, "Baby’s High Again," doesn't so much arrive as materialize, like a half-remembered scent of bourbon and regret clinging to a velvet curtain. This “Midnight Country” he’s cultivating, it’s less dusty plains, more the blue, flickering light of a motel television at 3 AM, illuminating a room where decisions have been made, then unmade, then made again. Hynes, a Scot with...