Listening to Paul Louis Villani's new EP, The Other Side of Silence, feels less like pressing play and more like cracking open a locked diary found in a derelict building. It’s a messy, confrontational, and deeply private affair, where industrial-strength riffs grind against lyrics that feel surgically exposed. Villani doesn't write anthems for crowds; he seems to be recording the dissonant hum of his...

A record can move fast without chasing the obvious route. “EMA”, Sienná’s nine-track experimental electronic album, begins from that possibility. The Kyoto-born, Oslo-based artist builds its premise around ema, the Japanese tool used to communicate directly with the divine. From there, she turns images and impressions gathered in nature into songs. It is a high-concept frame, but it lands because the concept asks a practical question:...