Listening to aktenzeichen_T’s new EP, "Midnight Between Lagrange Points", feels less like putting on a record and more like unsealing a classified file. The artist's name, German for "case file number," seems to promise a kind of cold, bureaucratic evidence, and the Leipzig producer delivers—but the subject of this file is the messy, beating heart of human conflict. A case file rendered in kick...

For their fifth studio album, the Geneva-based indie rock outfit Sonic Rade shares "Berlin", an intensely resonant record heavily steeped in the aura of its namesake city. Relocating to the legendary Meistersaal the former Hansa Studios where acts like Bowie and Depeche Mode once operated the band allowed the physical walls of the room to hijack their live tracking. You feel those historical reverberations...