Casey McQuillen’s single “Better” arrives not with a bang, but with the quiet, decisive click of a well-made lock securing a door. It’s pop music, certainly, groomed and gleaming, yet beneath the surface bubbles a fierce kind of self-possession that’s less about demanding attention and more about curating who gets past the velvet rope of your own contentment. Coming from someone known for empowerment...

Before a guitar chord can become an argument, it usually begins as a private disturbance. A television flickers in a locked-down room. A former sailor sees an old enemy image placed beside a strange public gesture of peace. That is the uneasy ground beneath "War Killer," the Reetoxa and it gives the track its charge: not polish for its own sake, but a human reaction...