Gothic metal has always been music that takes itself seriously — sometimes too seriously, collapsing under the weight of its own funereal grandeur. The genre is littered with the wreckage of projects that mistook darkness for depth and cathedral reverb for emotional truth. Cries of Redemption, the singular vehicle of Ed Silva, is a different proposition entirely. And *What Lies Beneath*, as interpreted by Argentine opera vocalist Martina Questa, makes the case with considerable force.

Pop-rock has long been the genre most willing to make a fool of itself in the service of emotional honesty, and Hailey Hermida, the Los Angeles singer-songwriter who began her craft at thirteen during the hollow quiet of a pandemic, understands this better than most of her contemporaries. Her new single "17" is not a polished meditation on adolescence. It is a scream recorded the day after a fight, a week before her eighteenth birthday, and it sounds exactly like that — raw, slightly dangerous, and absolutely alive.