“For a while” sounds harmless until it is attached to a person. Then it can mean avoidance, longing, hope, or the kind of half-promise that keeps a conversation open long after it should have ended. Joely knows the phrase has weight. Her new 3:38 single, takes that compact title and gives it a deeply personal frame. She has called “For a While” the most personal thing...

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...