With "A Piece of Me," Western Australia’s Bailey Perrie offers up a pop rock grenade with the pin already pulled, cleverly disguised as a twisted love song. It thunders forward with a cinematic, arena-ready confidence that makes its raw, emotionally brutalist core all the more disarming. The effect is something like finding a tear-stained diary page taped to the side of a massive firework...

Winning has no shine in Brian Hunsaker’s “Final Score.” Brian Hunsaker’s fifth and final single before Where Dreamers Fall uses speed metal and power metal to face war’s aftershock. He frames conflict as a mental trap. The end keeps coming into view, yet no outcome feels clean. It suits listeners who want intense metal with a dramatic premise. It avoids a simple tale of triumph. The path...