Listening to The Trusted’s new single, “Levitate,” is to willingly submit to a glorious, well-produced panic attack. From its opening moments, where frontman Tom Cunningham confesses to feeling like something to be discarded in the street, the track establishes a brutal vulnerability before yanking you into the dizzying orbit of another human being. It’s the sound of being so completely poleaxed by infatuation that...

On his bracing new single “Jolie,” New York City songwriter and guitarist Owen Steib channels 1990s college-rock bite to reckon with a devastating story of lost innocence. The 18-year-old high school senior constructs a fragmented, out-of-order mystery around an exiled girl caught in the wreckage of an irreversible, violent incident. Instead of spelling out the tragedy cleanly, Steib drops cryptic, evocative breadcrumbs a denim...