Listening to Elena C. Lockleis’s new single, “Mind - Vs. - Heart,” feels like witnessing a civil war fought entirely within a single nervous system. The sound is an intimate knot of pop architecture, the kind Julia Michaels patents in her sleep, where a confession arrives not as a ballad but as a skittish, rhythm-driven pulse. You feel the frantic heartbeat right there in...

Badtaste, the creative vehicle of Czech-German artist Anna Kristina, has dropped a conceptual diptych titled "Hedonism, Sobriety." Now operating out of Paris, the singer, songwriter, and dancer has constructed a release that thrives on friction. It is a project that looks directly at the messy, often contradictory nature of human desire and refuses to tidy it up for easy consumption. The music operates in the...