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...

Post-punk and corporate jargon have seldom been this intimate. When Charts and Graphs dropped "Assume the Position," I wasn’t expecting them to twist a cubicle-bound lexicon into something that dances around your brain like your 1984 office nightmares had a rhythmic pulse. But here we are, shoulders bouncing while existential dread whispers in the ear. It's synthetic, it’s tangible, but it’s also claustrophobic. It's...