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...

Alli Brown's "Undeniable"… Hmm, where to even begin with this kaleidoscope of sound from Salt Lake City? It's like someone took the earnestness of a diary entry, crumpled it up, threw it at a dartboard of genres – pop, folk, country, rock – and then decided to set the whole thing to music. Did the dartboard land on "genius" or "glorious mess"? I'm still...