To listen to Stevie Hawkins’ take on "A Song For You" is to have a conversation with a ghost in a dimly lit room after the show has ended. Hawkins, long the rhythmic engine for the song's originator Leon Russell, steps from behind the drum kit to the microphone, and the space between these two roles compresses decades into four and a half minutes....

With his new single "Grandmas Kitchen", Kainine doesn’t so much drop a track as he does release a scent. You hear it immediately—not a sound, but the olfactory ghost of chicken foot soup steaming up a windowpane, a warmth that seeps through the cracks of a brutally cold narrative. The East London artist has built a world here where the ambient comfort of a...