Some songs are protests. Others are warnings. But a rare few are something else entirely: they are stories that transport you to another place, another time, another possible future. Ted Stanley’s “Shoreline” is one of those songs. It’s a piece of music that feels less like a song and more like a modern myth, a folktale carried softly across a rising tide. It’s a story...

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...