Five songs. Seventeen minutes. A decade’s worth of emotional receipts. Vanessa Moussa’s self-titled debut EP finds the Sydney vocalist placing her own name on the cover after years of work alongside other artists. This compact indie folk and alternative blues release traces new love, heartbreak, hope, regret, then the choice to move on. Moussa enters this chapter with experience. ABC’s triple j Unearthed identifies her as...

Dylan Forshner's new EP, “Hopeless Optimism,” presents itself not so much as a collection of songs but as a series of candid diary entries set to intricately picked acoustic strings. This five-song journey from the Welland, Canada artist begins in a place of palpable internal wrestling, where the lyrics – and Forshner’s delivery – map out the grim territories of being overwhelmed, using substances...