Millie Mountain’s "Tools" arrives with its guard up and its windows open. This three-track EP puts mental overload, social violence, harmful relationship patterns and the hunt for happiness in the same small room, then allows each concern room to breathe. For a new music release working across experimental R&B, neo-soul, trap soul and Afrobeats, it is a direct and emotionally alert statement. Mountain has already shown...

There is a dizzying, tarot-deck logic running through DreamGood’s sprawling concept album, "Paris Novella". Formed in 2009, the cinematic art-pop trio Mitchell Sloan, Joshua Heath, and Glenn Heath have long inhabited the borderlands between dancefloors and private dream states. Here, they dive straight into the theater of divination, psychic static, and existential reckoning. The record behaves like a handful of eccentric confessions pulled at...