The first few notes of Megapenny Music’s single, "Across the Miles," feel less like an introduction and more like a resumption. There’s a quiet confidence here, a melody that seems to pick up a conversation left hanging four decades ago—a detail about the artist’s hiatus that you can’t help but feel in the song’s DNA. Delphine Savatte’s voice enters not with a bang, but...

There are some songs that pose a question and others that feel like an answer. Shyfrin Alliance’s new single, “Colours of Time,” does something far stranger: it wrestles with a question so personal it barely knows how to form the words. It’s an exercise in trying to name the unnamable, that internal puppet-master who tugs at the strings of doubt and ambition from a...