Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.

Justin Kleiner has built himself a world, and on "New Misty Morning" he finally lets you through the gate. Awaywhere has always sounded like a place glimpsed rather than a project announced, and this single is the first properly furnished room in it: bright, humid, faintly unreal, the kind of morning you only get in dreams or in the opening credits of a film nobody remembers the plot of.

Daydreaming, as a subject for pop music, carries an obvious risk: nothing much happens. The mind wanders, the kettle boils, the bus arrives late, and somewhere behind the eyes a whole cinematic romance unfolds without anyone else noticing. Annika Bellamy has built a single around exactly that gap between the mundane and the imagined, and she's found a clever way to make the daydream itself the drama, rather than just the excuse for one.

Somewhere between the pine barrens of southern New Jersey and the ghost of a saxophone conversation on Long Island, Matt DeAngelis has found himself a sermon dressed up as a rock single, and it's a rather magnificent piece of theatre. "Playing God" arrives with the swagger of a man who has spent two decades sharpening a pen against the whetstone of his own conscience, and you can hear every year of it.

Tre Nash & Jenesis have done something quietly radical with "In Tandem": they've made a breakup record and a love letter simultaneously, and somehow neither cancels the other out.

Grief has a sound, and so does the slow climb out of it, and Eric David Kendall — the man behind the one-artist project BUSKING AROUND — has spent his career learning to score both. "Hello My Dear" opens on the former: a piano figure that sits low and unhurried, percussion that feels more like a pulse than a beat, strings held back like breath before a confession. It is the sound of a room with the curtains drawn. And then, patiently, deliberately, Kendall lets the light in.

Grief has a way of redecorating a room without asking permission, and Tholly understands this better than most singers half his age. "Moonlit Habbit," released this February from a Lexington bedroom studio, arrives less like a single and more like a confession set to a beat you can't stop nodding along to — the sonic equivalent of crying at a party and having everyone assume you're just really enjoying the song.

Karen Salicath Jamali arrives at songwriting the way a painter arrives at a blank canvas after decades of knowing exactly what a brushstroke can carry. "Wild Birds Flying High" is spare almost to the point of austerity — a voice, an acoustic guitar, and the nerve to leave space around both. That restraint is the record's whole argument. Jamali, who spent thirty years as a visual artist before a 2012 accident rerouted her toward music, treats silence the way a sculptor treats negative space: not absence, but material.

Falling in love, properly and helplessly, has always been pop's most reliable subject and its most difficult trick to pull off without curdling into cliché. AINA manages it on "Nothing Feels Better" with a confidence that feels earned rather than borrowed, and the reason isn't hard to locate once you know how the record was made: she wrote it, produced it, played the piano on it, and shaped every vocal line herself, top to bottom. That kind of total authorship tends to leave fingerprints, and here they show up as a rare coherence between feeling and sound — the euphoria in the lyric isn't dressed up afterwards by a committee of session players and mix engineers, it's baked into the architecture of the track itself.

Family bands carry a particular kind of risk. Get it wrong and you end up with the sonic equivalent of a Christmas dinner argument nobody asked to overhear. Get it right, though, and you get something no amount of session musicianship can fake: people who have spent decades finishing each other's sentences finishing each other's phrases instead. *Sharp Comfort*, the new album from Woodstock, Georgia's The Bastas Project, belongs firmly in the second category, and it announces itself with the confidence of a group who know exactly what they've got.