Plants channel sweltering summer nights and psychedelic heartbreak on “Hot Tonight,” the shimmering, dancefloor-ready focus track from their self-titled debut album, Strange Plants, out now.

From tales of love and loss to meditations on modern life and mortality, Strange Plants (produced by Robbie Crowell who’s worked with the likes of Sturgill Simpson & Deer Tick) is a genre-blurring collection of 12 songs with a strong sense of identity and a deep commitment to storytelling. Whether channeling MGMT, Jack White, or Supertramp, the band’s vision is clear: create music that feels good, hits hard, and sticks around.

Written in the aftermath of a brutal breakup and tracked in the sticky heat of a Nashville studio, “Hot Tonight” is an uptempo psych-pop gem soaked in disco shimmer and gritty rock edge. With its retro groove, warped textures, and key-changing finale, the track balances emotional weight with cathartic energy – equal parts pain and redemption. Or as the band puts it: “a breakup song you can dance to.”

“Right after the breakup, I was lying in bed at the peak of summer, just hot and bothered,” shares songwriter Matt Brannon. “No AC, no peace of mind. That’s where the title came from. I just kept staring at the ceiling.”

Packed with analog effects, reversed guitar solos, and a perfectly timed half-step modulation, “Hot Tonight” draws on influences ranging from “Hot Stuff”-era Donna Summer to “Another Brick in the Wall”-era Pink Floyd. The result is a sound that feels both nostalgic and unmistakably Strange Plants.

Following their debut release “On the Road,” progressive bluegrass collective Sourwood returns with “Wrong Carolina,” a rhythmically complex and narratively playful second single that blurs the lines between heartbreak and highway maps. The track explores the chaos of mistaken direction—both geographically and emotionally—fueled by one of the band’s most memorable musical arrangements to date.

“It started with this story [that bandmate Liam Lewis] told me,” says frontman Lucas Last, recalling a tour mix-up where Liam’s band mistakenly arrived at a South Carolina venue—only to find out they were booked at a bar of the same name in North Carolina. “He was also going through a rough patch with someone named Caroline, so I just mashed those together: wrong place, wrong time, wrong person.”

The song’s namesake, “Wrong Carolina,” plays with the ambiguity of place and person, letting the title line hit with layered meaning. “We wanted the lyric to feel deliberately unclear—‘I was in the wrong, Carolina’ vs. ‘I was literally in the wrong Carolina,’” Lucas explains. “It’s simple, but the ambiguity is where the real emotional weight is.”

Nova Scotia raised, Ottawa-based singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Malia Rogers unveils her debut EP, Chameleon, featuring the vast and heartfelt centerpiece, “Indefinitely.” Chameleon merges her East Coast roots with folk, bluegrass, and Celtic traditions to explore themes of identity, growth, self-compassion, and enduring connection. With a storytelling voice rich in vulnerability and nuance, the six-song collection offers a layered portrait of transformation – pairing past hurts with their healing counterparts.

“Indefinitely” offers a barefoot love song for the deeply known – a sweeping meditation on partnership, evolution, and unconditional devotion. Built on rhythmic acoustic textures, lilting mandolin, melodic strings, and a heartbeat of bodhrán, the track captures the feeling of the tide coming in – calm, powerful, and enduring. “I told my producer Neil Whitford that I wanted it to sound like the tide,” says Rogers. “There’s ocean imagery in the lyrics, and as a Nova Scotian living away in Ontario, the water makes me feel like I’m home. So does the love this song is written about.”

Written on the seventh anniversary of her relationship with now-husband Matthew, “Indefinitely” reflects on the idea that we become entirely new people over time – and how rare it is to evolve in tandem with another.

Indie artist goodheart returns with “Stuck in a Cloud,” a restless, upbeat reflection on emotional limbo. Blending shimmering indie-rock with raw lyrical honesty, the track captures the feeling of being somewhere between apathy and angst – what goodheart calls “a total blah.”

“I wrote ‘Stuck in a Cloud’ on a day when I was home alone for a week,” says goodheart. “I was feeling stir-crazy, but also too apathetic to do anything about it. I had set out to write a different song, but this one came out of nowhere – fast and fully formed.”

The title flips the expression “on cloud nine” into something more ambiguous. “Clouds can represent joy or gloom depending on the context,” she explains. “To be stuck in one is to hover in between – not exactly happy, not really sad either.”

Originally imagined as a slower acoustic piece, the track evolved in the studio thanks to drummer Connor, guitarist David, and bassist Ryan, whose bouncing bass line helped push the song into more dynamic territory. “That indie-rock backbone gave it a pulse we didn’t know it needed. Once that clicked, everything else came to life,” she says.