Michael O Connor Marotta

Fast Tracked: The Irish noise-making trio's crunchy and confrontational new single emits a controlled chaos about to burst at any point.

Fast Tracked: The English noise-slinging upstarts use grief as a means to power forward on a hyper-charged dose of modern alternative.

Fast Tracked: The Iraqi-American dark-pop siren lures us into a late-night spiral of passion, impulse, and autonomy.

New Sounds: It's a fluttering daydream of a tune taking us to an alternate reality where the band headlines Boston Calling '26.

Enough time has passed where we are ready for some early-2010s nostalgia, and that sentiment swirls through our faded n’ jaded headspace as we take Paycheque’s hypnotic new single “Temporary Love” out for an eager spin. The alluring new city-pop seducer from the Los Angeles duo of Alison Goldfarb and Jackson MacIntosh (TOPS, Drugdealer) has obvious call-backs to nocturnal ’80s synth-pop, in both sound and structure, but we also hear some glossy sonic DNA that transports us to a better time some 15 years ago when bands like Chromatics, Blouse, and Lower Dens were flirting within our glamour-smeared playlists.

Fast Tracked: The alt-indie project from Sabrina Teitelbaum offers a hypnotic survey of a fraying friendship and all its tension.

If there’s any lens through which we wish we could revisit life, it’s the hazy daydream nature of a grainy ’90s-era handycam video. That feeling of carefree bliss felt organic and natural, far from the modern-day subjugation of constantly being recorded and surveilled, and the idea of being in front of a camera wasn’t so embedded into our (self-)consciousness.

Fast Tracked: Life seems to be a lot better when the Swedish electro-pop duo is soundtracking our every move.

Fast Tracked: The British crew stake a claim to Song of the Summer consideration, if such a thing even exists anymore.

The month was soundtracked by new and notable efforts from Glazyhaze, IAN SWEET, Shark School, Ellise, and Paycheque.