There is an endearing, unvarnished sincerity running through ErickOscar’s new album, “Hold The Light”, the kind that catches you off guard when you were expecting ordinary background noise. A Panamanian-born songwriter who has spent over three decades quietly building a life in the United States, ErickOscar approaches music not as a sterile exercise in studio perfection, but as an open workshop of personal history....

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...