Listening to aktenzeichen_T’s new EP, "Midnight Between Lagrange Points", feels less like putting on a record and more like unsealing a classified file. The artist's name, German for "case file number," seems to promise a kind of cold, bureaucratic evidence, and the Leipzig producer delivers—but the subject of this file is the messy, beating heart of human conflict. A case file rendered in kick...

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...