Last month, NYC’s Starcleaner Reunion impressed us with the ecstatic song “The Hand That I Put Down,” an infectious Stereolab-indebted jam that serves as an intriguing preview of their upcoming EP Café Life (for an American band, they radiate pretty big European vibes). “Plein Air” shows a different side of Starcleaner Reunion, slower and dreamier, but just as hypnotic. At almost five minutes, the tune is an alluring sprawl that doesn’t lose its appeal at any moment, delicate but riveting in its ruminations. Based on these two tracks, it’s hard to tell exactly what Café Life will sound like, but it’s gonna be good. —Danielle

I’ve been plenty stoned plenty of times, but I’ve never been too stoned to cry. If anything, it’s the opposite — me on my couch a couple of nights ago, getting all hazy and misty over an old episode of Homicide: Life On The Street just because I’ll never get to live in early-’90s Baltimore again. On this lovely old-school duet, though, shimmering country-rocker Margo Price and arena-bluegrass superstar Billy Strings paint a convincing picture of a numb, itinerant existence where you’re always gakked up on something and too far gone to show any emotion at all. Price and Strings sing about that as if it’s a bad thing, but I don’t know, it sounds kind of nice. —Tom

Frederick Gibson has a wild-ass resume, helping to craft Brian Eno records and Ed Sheeran pop hits before finding festival-headliner dance-music superstardom on his own. You can hear that background at work on “backseat,” the glimmering closer from Fred again..’s new album ten days. The song has the hum and burble of near-ambient downtempo music, the reach of big-tent pop, and the propulsive forward momentum that a vast crowd demands. Sparkling guitars and a dazed breakbeat swirl around a chopped-up sample of the Japanese House’s downcast indie-pop track “Sunshine Baby,” and Fred shapes them into something new. The Japanese House gets a full artist credit, as does Scott Hardkiss, the ’90s rave pioneer who died more than a decade ago. The billing feels like an acknowledgment — Fred again.. channeling and shaping the sounds around him and the influences that run deep in his veins, reshaping old sounds and feelings, occasionally tapping into a psychedelically pleasant amber-nostalgia feeling. —Tom

No one is doing twangy, heavy-hearted epics like Merce Lemon right now. The singles from the Pittsburgh singer-songwriter’s upcoming Watch Me Drive Them Dogs Wild have been slow and straightforward, which doesn’t tend to be the most exciting formula, but she’s a compelling singer who knows how to execute a gradual buildup. In this case, the payoff sneaks up on you; it only takes “Crow” about two minutes to grow from humble acoustic strums to a distortion inferno, a sonic landscape that mirrors Lemon’s lyrics about a city coming back to life. Without seeming impatient, she skipped straight to the good part. —Chris

“I was wasting all my time on someone who couldn’t love me,” Soccer Mommy’s Sophie Allison lamented on “Blossom (Wasting All My Time),” from her debut album Clean. But by the song’s end, she changed course towards someone more worthwhile: “He’s the one I want to be with/ ‘Cause I can see him/ Blossom in the future that I’m dreamin’.” She realizes requited love is still in the distance ahead of her. Six years later, on Soccer Mommy’s rocker of a new single “Driver,” she’s arrived.

At the risk of leaning too hard into the metaphors, “Driver” is Allison behind the wheel of a relationship that’s blossomed into a full-on garden. “No promises to stay on route,” she warns with an attitude as biting as the track’s guitars, but the route doesn’t matter so much with a passenger like this: a guy who readily accepts her at her worst, who keeps her worries at bay, and who makes her smile effortlessly. “He’d never leave me now,” Allison sings, and all that time spent waiting disappears into the rearview. —Abby