With their single "Numbers Game," Grey Jacks has managed to build a deceptively inviting room inside a house that’s actively on fire. The foundation here is a slithering, almost hypnotic rock groove, driven by the lock-step pulse of Teddy Minton on drums and Howard Rabach on bass. It has that cool, coiled tension reminiscent of late-90s Radiohead, a sound that gets in your bones...

Listening to Shotgun Driver’s new EP, “Jester Privileges”, is like finding a glitter bomb in a padded cell. The four songs present a disorienting, strangely compelling contradiction. On the surface, the alt-pop framework pulses with an upbeat, almost defiant energy; this is the slick, rock-tinged anxiety of a Machine Gun Kelly track built for open-road brooding. But beneath it, the narrative, carried by those...