Owen Young’s “Three” EP is like finding a worn, familiar photograph in an old box, only to discover the person in the picture is wearing a lampshade. It’s deeply personal, yet jarringly relevant to the world spinning outside my window. We are dealing with themes of impermanence, the kind that makes you check if the stove is off, twice, every time. You can tell...

Listening to Shotgun Driver’s new EP, “Jester Privileges”, is like finding a glitter bomb in a padded cell. The four songs present a disorienting, strangely compelling contradiction. On the surface, the alt-pop framework pulses with an upbeat, almost defiant energy; this is the slick, rock-tinged anxiety of a Machine Gun Kelly track built for open-road brooding. But beneath it, the narrative, carried by those...