On his expansive new single “Pieces,” Vancouver Island songwriter WiL confronts the quiet clutter of a fractured life and turns the debris into gold. Anchored by his deep, velvety vocals and fiercely idiosyncratic guitar work, the track begins in a state of brooding contemplation, moving with the cautious gravity of someone testing thin ice after a hard winter. https://open.spotify.com/track/1Ad1WMvlke4vTKEkSO8AfE?si=4fd67168e9a94a63 What begins as an insular alt-folk meditation...

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...