Most music that arrives with the label “meditative” feels like an instruction to relax—a gentle but firm command. Karen Salicath Jamali’s “Angel Gabriel’s Light,” however, doesn’t instruct; it simply arrives. Listening to this single for the first time is like walking into a room to find the light has changed color, subtly and without explanation. You don’t question how it happened. You just stand...

With his new single, “I Can Tell,” Brendan Pegg documents not the loud crash of a relationship’s end, but the awful, held-breath silence just before. This is a song that understands the atmospheric pressure drop that precedes a storm, the chilling moment you realize an unspoken truth has settled in the space between two bodies on a couch. Pegg’s voice isn’t performing for an...