Forrest Hill's sixth solo effort arrives as a compelling meditation on consciousness, connection, and the fragile threads that bind human experience. Beyond The Veil represents both a natural evolution and bold departure for the San Francisco Bay songwriter, whose previous work established him as a thoughtful chronicler of contemporary malaise.

Map of the Woulds have conjured something rather special with "The Old Songs," a track that manages to feel both utterly contemporary and strangely timeless. The Seattle trio carries the weight of nearly three decades of collective musical archaeology—from the Woods brothers' experimental jazz-buttrock outfit Heend through the ambient grooves of Neon Brown, to their legendary eight-year residency at the now-mythical Mr. Spot's Chai House, where they first encountered a young Woody Frank. This deep history of musical communion bleeds through every bar of their latest offering, lending it a lived-in authenticity that cannot be manufactured.

Boston's Joshua Pearlstein arrives with the kind of brazen confidence that either crashes spectacularly or announces the birth of something genuinely compelling. "Just The Feeling" firmly plants itself in the latter camp, delivering a piece of uncompromising electronic pop that refuses to apologize for its own darkness.

The Berlin-based Bromsen brothers have crafted a gloriously overwrought meditation on modern disconnection with "Data Highway," their latest collaboration with producer Robert "Reatsch" Eydner. Like a lovechild of early Human League and contemporary Chvrches, this track pulses with the kind of synthetic urgency that made the 1980s feel both utopian and apocalyptic.

The second single from Prince of Sweden's forthcoming album The Start of Something Beautiful arrives as a gorgeously disheveled meditation on abandonment and longing. "James, I Can't Stay" unfolds like a crumpled love letter discovered in a Parisian hotel room, its narrative emerging through layers of bourbon-soaked melancholy and continental drift.

There's a particular kind of ennui that afflicts the social media generation—a restless dissatisfaction with the endless scroll of superficial connections and algorithmic entertainment. It's this existential malaise that seventeen-year-old Hamburg singer Sabrina Nejmah tackles head-on in "Deep End," her debut single that doubles as both manifesto and musical maturation.

Lucas Berman possesses the sort of mordant wit that transforms tragedy into teatime conversation. His latest offering as Make Believe Love, "Delay Deny Depose," arrives with the subtlety of a brick through a boardroom window—and proves twice as effective.

Mary Beth Orr's The Singing Horn presents itself as an ambitious meditation on the ancient kinship between brass and larynx, a relationship that has haunted composers from Bach to Britten but rarely received such intimate, sustained examination. The Grand Rapids Symphony's third horn—a finalist for The American Prize in instrumental performance and multiple international competition winner—transforms her instrument into confidant, narrator, and sometimes adversary in a musical autobiography that never quite tips into self-indulgence.