Ava Valianti captures the agonizing, beautiful purgatory of sixteen on her new single, "Sophomore Slump". The Newbury, Massachusetts songwriter has tapped directly into the crushing gravity of adolescence, a phase where a trivial misstep somehow fractures your entire psychological reality. https://open.spotify.com/track/20fIdhi8sFspbb6FAzHXCr?si=27a8aa904ccb4a5b There is a distinct, humiliating vulnerability in breaking down in front of someone else. You desperately crave the safety of their connection, yet you burn...

The club environment operates on its own internal clock. Minutes stretch into hours under the strobe lights, and hours compress into fleeting moments when the bass hits exactly right. It is a strange temporal distortion that electronic music producers have chased for decades. With his latest single "Time", Austin Feldman attempts to capture that exact phenomenon. He builds a track that feels less like a...