The arrival of Puck's debut single, "Caricature," feels less like a release and more like a jailbreak. From the opening crackle, this is a song that’s been chewing on its own chains for some time. Galway's five-piece racket-makers have bottled a very specific kind of frenetic energy, the kind you get from too much coffee and staring at a flickering screen until society starts...

I spent a solid hour this morning watching dust motes suspended in a single shaft of sunlight, my entire nervous system held absolutely captive by Magdi Aboul-Kheir and his devastatingly immersive new album, "Slow Heat". The Germany-based journalist and classically trained pianist usually writes across a massive spectrum of genres, pivoting wildly from trance to late romanticism. Today, he has dropped an ambient, contemporary...