At this point Dazy is no secret among discerning underground rock listeners. James Goodson created maybe his best-loved song by teaming with Militarie Gun, so it makes sense that he’s got another winner on his hands with “It’s Only A Secret,” a second collaboration with one of today’s best hardcore-people-not-making-hardcore bands. The track pairs Dazy with MSPAINT, toggling between Goodson’s Britpop-informed harmonies and Dee Dee’s shouted near-raps. Beneath that bizarrely pleasing interplay, the music makes space for acoustic guitar chords, ripping electrified leads, droning keyboard notes, and a tambourine-boosted drumbeat. The instrumentation is rather straightforward, but it seems to shift shape in real time like some artifact of the post-Dust Brothers ’90s, perhaps thanks to a whiplash-inducing vocal interplay that keeps you on your toes until the end. —Chris

So many people who encountered Cindy Lee’s Diamond Jubliee were entranced by Patrick Flegel’s transcendent fretwork and trans-dimensional retro pop vibes. That includes Noah Lennox, who recruited Flegel for the lead single to the new Panda Bear album. “Defense” is an ideal merger between the Panda Bear and Cindy Lee universes. Prioritizing sensation but not at the expense of technique, the song floats along, its surreal pop structures threaded with the kinds of brilliant guitar flourishes that stitched together Flegel’s opus. Despite the fraught relational dynamics described in the lyrics, the song feels is increasingly triumphant, building toward Lennox’s final promise of connection: “Here I come.” —Chris

Last year, Greg Mendez became an indie darling with his movingly elegiac self-titled album. In particular, I gravitated toward the sparse dirge “Sweetie,” anchored by a funereal organ. “Alone,” a taste of his new EP out today First Time / Alone, is similarly melancholic. Instead of an organ, the song is moored to acoustic guitar, the chords simple and familiar, exuding a sense of safety and poignancy. The lyrics are sensory as Mendez sings of pain in almost biblical ways: “I’m a lonely winter away from punishment,” he lulls. “Alone” encapsulates the cold, doomed feeling of isolation and despair, though it’s never quite sounded this beautiful. –Danielle

Would Taylor Swift show up for the remix? That was the big question, especially after Charli XCX and Lorde talked it out on the “Girl, so confusing” remix. On the original “Sympathy is a knife,” Charli addressed her own insecurities through the lens of a peer who sure sounds a lot like Swift. That not where she took things. Instead, the “Sympathy is a knife” remix pairs Charli with Ariana Grande, one of the few A-list pop stars anywhere near Swift’s realm. Over refurbished dramatic glitch-thump electroclash, Charli and Ari vent about all the haters who want to see them disappear — the inevitable mo’-money mo’-problems “knife” that comes with stratospheric success. The result, then, isn’t revealing or momentous. Instead, it’s a dizzy victory lap that runs Grande’s bajillion-dollar voice through robo-stutter filters and luxuriates in sore-winner pettiness. In retrospect, that’s the brattiest thing it could’ve been. —Tom

In 1985, a 21-year-old Bret Easton Ellis made his literary fiction debut with Less Than Zero, in which a college student named Clay returns to his Los Angeles hometown over winter break to find that his former best friend has become addicted to heroin and will do just about anything to get it. Greet Death’s new single “Same But Different Now” is much less graphic, but the Michigan band’s stark, sweeping shoegaze creates an atmosphere that feels bleak in its own right. The song, too, deals with crossing paths again with an old friend, only to realize that one of you has perhaps gone down a darker path: “I saw your face and started feeling down/ No time to waste to stick it out/ You know I hate the sound.” The track ends with a gnarled breakdown and a guttural roar, as if all the noise will close this window of passed time. —Abby