On “Overkill," Holly Humberstone is preparing to do something brave. Maybe you’ve had to be brave before too, so you’re probably familiar with how it works. Once you realize you can do it—the brave thing—time starts moving more quickly. You can’t backpedal; you’ll do the thing, or you won’t. For a while, each thought feels like a drop in a bucket that will eventually overflow.

That realization is exactly where we find Humberstone at the beginning of the song. She’s almost ready to spill big, unwieldy feelings to her partner, and she is afraid they will come across as too much—as overkill. But throughout the track, she shows us that she has a lot of things going for her. Like some of her indie-pop elders—Tegan & Sara, Empress Of, Robyn—Humberstone beautifully harnesses the power of stark simplicity in her lyrics. “You don’t have to say it back / I just want to know where your head’s at,” she tells herself in a frosty alto, and you can feel a waterfall of subtext fill every crevice. As the song goes on, the lyrical tone shifts gradually from restrained deliberation to decisive declaration, and the music follows. The musical climax—an immaculate syncopated drum hit at 2:20—is the sound of that final drop in the bucket; and the electronic swirl of twinkling stars that emerges in the track’s final minute is what tells us—and Humberstone—that tonight's the night.

Bushwick-based indie rockers My Son the Doctor have released the carefree anthem “Fork,” an upbeat ode to letting loose with your friends via 90s-style grunge rock and dancing like nobody's watching. The cool arrangement is stripped down to its garage-rock essentials but filled with an infectious energy. Tight, muffled drums, low, groovy bass, and shredding electric guitar strike a rebellious tone, imbuing the instrumentation with a loose attitude and giving vocalist Brian Hemmert room to shine. Clear and commanding, his voice is full of the kind of angst and yearning reminiscent of early aughts-era Modest Mouse or Spoon, and his lyrics are just as quippy and memorable: “So you croon your craft / Crack and scream the hits away / And I’ll pretend you’re my best mistake.” Upbeat and pulsing with a contagious energy, “Fork” is catchy and cool, and will make you want to have a solo dance party in your room. The track is only the second release for the quartet and precedes their debut EP Dad Time out at the end of the month.

The Sacramento-based indie skate rock quartet, Güero has for several years created fun music, influenced by and best enjoyed in the outdoors. Their most recent release, "Waiting" sets the scene for their upcoming album and encourages you to go back and explore the band's previous projects. This track brings you to a place of comfort and introspection as it builds to an exciting, rather unanticipated bridge—leaving pockets of space with stripped-down instrumentation along the way, which allow you to fill in the blanks with your own thoughts and sentiments. Güero'ssound flows in a very soothing, unceasing manner like the constant crash of a wave or the wind's incessant howling through the trees. This group's love for natural life is reflected in their music in a truly magical way.

Sketchy Lines is the moniker of Swedish artist Fredrik Kjellman. Evoking dark, sentimentalist singer-songwriter sounds, similar to Conor Oberst or Death Cab, Kjellman's music is a cohesive mixture of soft, post-punk rock and deep indie-folk. Kjellman's music harkens to the era of emerging folk/pop that amassed popularity for artists like Ben Folds and Sufjan Stevens. Sketchy Lines is still fresh, making music that feels familiar but intimate. His latest single, "Not Claiming Anything," is an easy-listen track about the appreciation of connection. Released on April 30, this song was dropped in the heart of the coronavirus pandemic, making its themes all the more piercing. Kjellman croons about wanting to take every risk for the possibility of new love. "I would spare no expense / I'd be placing a bet." Putting yourself out there, even amidst the social desperation of our time, is still a tall task. Sketchy Lines new single "Not Claiming Anything" is giving you permission to feel afraid of connection even if it's the one thing you're longing for. Listen to "Not Claiming Anything" wherever you stream!

“My Dead End Self” begins with technological reminiscence. The stillness around me is filled with the recognizable yet abrasive sound of a skipping CD. I am briefly teleported back to my childhood, recalling the countless hours spent playing the same albums on a purple boombox until they too developed that eerie but familiar skip. However, as the song continues, I am jerked from my reverie and tactfully reminded that, for all intents and purposes, CDs are extinct. We live in an age where music is produced, consumed and promoted on the internet, and the band Dirty Nice couldn't be any more aware of this phenomenon.

If the Talking Heads were a product of the late 2010s as opposed to the mid-1970s, they would probably sound just like Dirty Nice.With a sound that pays homage to previous new wave artists through skilled sampling and synthesizing, “My Dead End Self” is hauntingly existential, yet ironically emotive—"All I need in these dead-end times is a place to live my dead-end life." The track and its accompanying music video pulse with an impending sense of doom and engage in a one-way conversation with what seems to be the end of the world. While the track itself is only three and a half minutes, its message is profound and long-lasting, giving you something to think about long after the sound fades into the atmosphere.

On her stunning new EP, Drop 6, Little Simz demonstrates that confinement can be a conduit to creativity. While stuck inside over the last couple of months, she self-produced the collection and released it through her own independent label, Age 101. The first song, though humbly named “might bang, might not,” clearly bangs. Big bass booms and jazzy snares make up the track’s relatively simple but sonically huge production, creating the perfect smoky floor for Simz’s bars to float on top of. Simz stacks witty brag upon witty brag here (my favorite is that she not only “crashed the party,” she “is the party”), but at the end of the day, show is always going to be more important than tell. What she shows is that she’s (still) ready to claim her place in the GOAT conversation. She claims she “ain’t slept good in days,” but with flows that bob like a butterfly, subtle and quick delivery, and a confident sense of humor, maybe she’ll be able to rest more easily if more of us finally acknowledge that she’s one of the most talented rappers alive.

Los Angeles-based Ronboy brings together a DIY indie energy with highly produced soundscapes. "Wake Up" is the band's first single off of a gorgeous debut EP and it’s a tune that feels like a vision, the kind with half-remembered impossibilities and a hazy feeling that follows you around all day. The song is immaculately crafted, with a carefully built arrangement that draws us in layer by layer until we’re surrendering ourselves to the waves of synths and honey-dipped reverb-y vocals. Julia Laws, lead singer and bandleader, sings with a laid back, expansive sound. Its richness only adds to the general vibe of this track, described by Laws as "nostalgic and dreamy." If this is what dreams were always like we’d never want to wake up.