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...

Kelsie Kimberlin, a multi-talented musician and singer who was born in the United States but has strong ties to Ukraine, deviates significantly from the mould of the normal artist. Her work, despite the fact that it is clearly amusing, delves deeper than the surface, exploring serious social themes with multiple meanings that demonstrate her great awareness of the transforming power of music. Kelsie went on an...