With "A Piece of Me," Western Australia’s Bailey Perrie offers up a pop rock grenade with the pin already pulled, cleverly disguised as a twisted love song. It thunders forward with a cinematic, arena-ready confidence that makes its raw, emotionally brutalist core all the more disarming. The effect is something like finding a tear-stained diary page taped to the side of a massive firework...

Kansas City’s TYYE has delivered “whole thing,” a single that glides into your ears with the frictionless cool of a late-night drive but leaves behind the kind of emotional residue that sticks to your ribs. The R&B production is impeccably smooth, a sleek chassis of polished beats and pop sensibilities; The Weeknd taught it how to dress for the city, and a hint of...