Listening to Highroad No. 28 navigate the emotional geometry of "Likethelast" feels a bit like watching a bruised prizefighter suddenly break into a joyful, intricate tap dance. It is disarming, slightly confusing, and entirely magnetic. Andrew JC, the sole architect behind this sonic landscape, has constructed something that defies the dusty expectations one might hold for an outfit born in the late 90s alternative...

Sophia Mengrosso’s new album, “Unforgiven”, doesn’t so much start as it does detonate, a thirteen-song treatise on survival. Her voice, a thing clearly trained for gilded halls and velvet curtains, instead wails from within a foundry’s clang and fire. The result is a bizarre and beautiful collision, the sonic equivalent of discovering a lost Caravaggio painting lit by a flickering fluorescent tube in a...