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...

The title of Rusty Reid’s new single, "Attitude Change," has the sterile ring of a corporate warning, which makes the desperate, heart-on-the-floor plea within it all the more jarring. This is the sound of the final straw, a melodic ultimatum delivered while someone else in the room is looking at the baby, or the TV, or anywhere but at the person whose love is...