“I wrote your name with a can of spray/ I wrecked your car trying to get away,” goes the first line of bar italia’s alluring new single “Fundraiser.” The details are hazy because this is pure, messy, nonsensical emotion. As the whimsical guitars build and the drama skyrockets, Nina Cristante admits, “Don’t think I’ve actually met you/ Not even in my dreams.” “Fundraiser” is bar italia at their most fun — wreaking havoc without purpose, only here to offer us atmospheres made for dancing and yearning. —Danielle

As bloodsports tell it, their new single “Calvin” was written effortlessly. The gritty latest single from the New York band’s upcoming album Anything Can Be A Hammer materialized out of a few “simple riffs” bandleader Sam Murphy “had in [his] head for awhile,” and it wasn’t long before they had a full song fleshed out with wall-of-sound production and stream-of-consciousness lyrics that came to Murphy in a dream. For those of us still chasing the high of hearing Doolittle for the first time, “Calvin” goes down just as easy as it came together. —Abby

I love the Smiths. You love the Smiths. Joyce Manor love the Smiths too, and therefore we’ll all have a lot of love for their new single. The beauty of “All My Friends Are So Depressed” is the way it translates Morrissey’s maudlin croons and Johnny Marr’s clean-lined jangle into Barry Johnson’s own songwriting language. It sounds enraptured by The Queen Is Dead, but it’s also the sort of new wave/rockabilly/pop-punk tune only Johnson could write. If a new Joyce Manor album is coming, this is an extremely good start. —Chris

Steve Lacy sings with conversational indolence, and he tends to sound great on blissed-out, expansive tracks. “Nice Shoes” qualifies, but it qualifies in a very different way. This time, Lacy, producing himself, surrounds his voice with a constant eruption of chopped-up jungle breakbeats. The roiling chaos fits the general stoned confusion and the horny immediacy of Lacy’s lyrics. When people rap over drum ‘n’ bass, they usually go fast and hyper-technical, as if to prove that the track won’t defeat them. Lacy kinda-sorta raps on “Nice Shoes,” and he goes the complete other direction, letting his voice float lazily over the churning currents. “Nice Shoes” feels like a song at war with itself, pulling hard in opposite directions. It’s fascinating. —Tom

Most emotions are too big, too complex, too fluid for words. Attempting to verbalize them like trying to catch a bubble, a precarious act better left undone; it’s more beautiful if you simply watch it float away. The emotions Dijon explores on his fantastic new album Baby are universal — falling in love, wanting to expand your family, romantic euphoria — but he doesn’t make them sound ordinary, even though they might be familiar. On “Yamaha,” one of the album’s immediate highlights, Dijon manages to convey the explicable rapture of intimacy — sexy, joyous, and gloriously sincere.

Dijon is among the lot of innovative musicians like Mk.gee or Nourished By Time that rework sound into a post-nostalgia mosaic. Individually, synths or drumbeats or vocal coos might resurrect certain genre fads of past decades. But put a dozen samples and retro sounds together and you get something that conjures the past without directly echoing it. This is the pure magic of “Yamaha”: a swirl of twinkling Wham!-like synths that feel lifted from the climax of a wholesome ’80s film, an air-puffing metronome reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman,” and a sentimental, baby-making drumbeat. It shouldn’t work, but it does — spectacularly. ——Margaret