When you’re going through a breakup, you don’t just have to mourn what once was — you have to mourn what could’ve been. New York indie rockers bloodsports attempt to reckon with the relationship between past and future on “Rosary,” the new single from their upcoming debut album Anything Can Be A Hammer. “Plans that we made seem to never happen that way,” vocalist/guitarist Sam Murphy sings over a gritty slowcore chug, evoking a lost timeline of relationship milestones as much as the commitments we make to do right by our loved ones. The somber, spare first half of “Rosary” gives way to a burst of guitar noise around its halfway point, as if to signify that nothing is as predictable as it seems. —Abby

Good lord, another indie band making shoegaze-tinged, slowcore-informed country-rock? Surely these trends will run out steam soon. Except, as the new Shallowater song proposes, maybe they won’t? “Highway,” the lead single from the Houston band’s new album God’s Gonna Give You A Million Dollars, is an epic saga worthy of peers like Wednesday and Greet Death. Shallowater slowly, surely build up atmosphere in the opening minutes, making you wait a while before the track explodes into a blaze of glory. That sonic immolation is the grand payoff, the moment I’ll be waiting for whenever I catch this band live. When the cacophony dies down, Tristan Kelly leaves us with one last indelible image of the song’s alienated subject: “Sundays you’d stick out in the congregation/ Sittin’ at the front of the room/ Singing ‘Be Thou My Vision’ out of tune.” —Chris

Patrick Flynn has the kind of impassioned, commanding voice that works in all contexts. Whether he’s shouting his head off in Have Heart or singing vulnerably in Fiddlehead, he has a way of making the listener feel as if he’s communicating solely to them. His new band How Much Art is not too different from what he does in Fiddlehead, but there’s some synth action from Justin Mantell that really spices it up. Pat Flynn and synths? Sign me up. There are also some harmonies he performs with Maddi Nave that really bring the song to another place. “PR” is a great first song, so it’s great news that more material is on the horizon. —Danielle

What will be the moment you finally break? “Pick Up That Knife,” the latest single from Wednesday, laments the steady accumulation of daily indignities and laughable catastrophes. One of them is bound to be the last straw, or so it seems. “Sometimes it feels like it will never end,” Karly Hartzman seethes. The track pulls a full Jekyll-Hyde transformation, easy Southern rock morphing into a feral rock explosion akin to the Smashing Pumpkins at their noisiest. “Did you’d think we’d make it?” Hartzman softly asks, once the track cools back down. Wednesday brush shoulders with collapse, only to find resilience in embracing every freak occurrence from a cough drop-chipped tooth to a puking incident in a Death Grips moshpit. Even when they’re reliving less-than-proud moments, Wednesday sure know how to redeem life’s shit sandwiches by turning them into a killer song. —Margaret

A kinetic, star-studded music video is a cheat code, but “Stop Playing With Me” is an energy bomb even without the visuals. Like so many of the heaters on Don’t Tap The Glass, the song is designed for ecstatic physical release. From its relentless strobing synths to its nasty synth bass to its crisp backbeat, the production is somehow breezy and aggressively hard, qualities mirrored by Tyler’s torrent of boasts. He samples “King Of The Beats” here, a title he’s got as much claim to as anyone in his generation. —Chris