Listening to Elena C. Lockleis’s new single, “Mind - Vs. - Heart,” feels like witnessing a civil war fought entirely within a single nervous system. The sound is an intimate knot of pop architecture, the kind Julia Michaels patents in her sleep, where a confession arrives not as a ballad but as a skittish, rhythm-driven pulse. You feel the frantic heartbeat right there in...

Anastasia Rydlevskaya makes rage feel methodical on Alchemia. Her fourth full-length album takes the four classical stages of alchemy and turns them into a hard-edged account of betrayal, trauma and feminine power. Nigredo, Albedo and Calcinatio, Citrinitas, then Rubedo each push the heroine into a new state. The result sits firmly in dark electronic music, but it also carries experimental pop and pagan motifs. That framing...