Amara-Fe has definitively shifted from the messy business of becoming into the absolute certainty of claiming with her new album, "A Queen’s Ambition". The rising solo artist, tethered to deep musical roots extending through Mission and Dallas, Texas, arrives fully formed here. There is a palpable weight to her cinematic R&B and electropop arrangements. You can almost feel her surveying her territory, setting borders,...

With his new single, “I Can Tell,” Brendan Pegg documents not the loud crash of a relationship’s end, but the awful, held-breath silence just before. This is a song that understands the atmospheric pressure drop that precedes a storm, the chilling moment you realize an unspoken truth has settled in the space between two bodies on a couch. Pegg’s voice isn’t performing for an...