With their latest single, Kissing The Flint’s “Windscreen Dream” offers the kind of country rock you feel in your teeth—a low, satisfying hum of forward motion. This is a song built like a classic roadster; every part is an essential component of the kinetic engine. Huey Dowling’s guitars lay down the tarmac, Derek Urquhart’s drums are the steady thump of wheels on the joins...

A city can teach a person how to carry noise. The Liberties, with its old trade routes and close communal pulse, has long carried dense human music. From that inheritance, Zak Coghlan appears to have taken not only a taste for melody, but a belief that feeling becomes sharper when placed inside a story that can stand up under pressure. “Lead Balloon”, his new single...