It’s not all that easy to dig the gems out of Taylor Swift’s two-hour diary dump of a new album, but they’re in there. After a week, the one that keeps me coming back is “The Black Dog,” the first of the many bonus tracks. If you’re looking for lore, there’s plenty there, as Swift e-stalks an ex to an apparently-real London pub and imagines the conversations he’s having with girls who are too young to recognize the Starting Line song playing over the speakers. The songwriting is florid, but it’s structured and focused, and it mashes down hard on pleasure centers. These days, Swift is awfully comfortable with her low-register mutter — old habits die screaming — but she reaches for some real notes on this one, and those notes land hard. The music behind her swells and swells, stopping the tension just short of release. The Tortured Poets Department is almost certainly Taylor Swift’s worst album, but it remains amazing that the century’s biggest pop star can treat songs this strong as throwaways. —Tom

Never would I have guessed this was an Elephant 6 offshoot. Derek Almstead and Emily Growden boast abundant E6 affiliations, but “Walk With A Shadow,” their new single as Giant Day, moves with a streamlined whoosh that feels worlds away from the ramshackle grace of Olivia Tremor Control or the revved-up intensity of Apples In Stereo. This music is sleek and precise, as if assembled with instruments surgical in addition to musical. In Almstead and Growden’s harmonies looms a different kind of darkness than that which haunts Neutral Milk Hotel. But the song offers something better than a nostalgic rehash of late ’90s Athens, Georgia: sharp, propulsive pop-rock that doesn’t bother gazing backward. —Chris

Corridor’s new album Mimi is out today. Earlier this week, the Montréal band teased it with the single “Jump Cut,” a restless burst of post-punk whose sound zigzags with colorful movements over the course of four minutes. The vibrant guitars are joined by hallucinogenic vocals that operate like instruments, which are later replaced by high-pitched, warbling synthesizers; the song soars with an effortlessly trance-like quality, hypnotic and psychedelic. —Danielle

Gel have never been a singles act. The individual songs aren’t what register. What registers is the total feeling of the experience, throwing yourself around the room while the self-proclaimed New Jersey freaks bash out a series of impassioned minute-long hardcore punk teeth-gnashers. That may be changing. “Mirage” is a song worth remembering on its own. For one thing, it lasts three minutes, “Freebird” territory for this band. They get a lot in there, too: Feverish riffs, soul-torching screams, and echo-drenched shred solo, a pulverizing breakdown, even a little bit of shoulder-shimmy syncopation. (Is that a tambourine in there?) Even as they grow sharper and more confident, though, Gel have lost none of the immediacy that made them basement champions in the first place. Frontflip off your own roof to this. —Tom

Nilüfer Yanya is a master of texture. Across two full-length albums, her guitars have slipped and staggered, her drums have hemmed and heaved, her synths have squiggled and sparkled. She’s great at manifesting a vibe and maintaining it. On new single “Like I Say (I runaway),” she conjures up another icy-cool collision of sounds. Yanya’s lower register provides the mooring for a guitar that goes from soft to crunchy to skeletal, and she offers up an enticing tease for whatever’s coming next: “It’s coming through my speaker/ It’s coming through your bedroom/ I know you’re gonna meet her/ She’s coming to your rescue.” —James