Three New Singles That Hold Their Own Ground

This week a handful of songs landed with more than just a release date attached. They carry a mood, a sharp lyric, a production choice that sticks. Dent May’s title track from his forthcoming LP “The Big One” is one. The LA-based Mississippian has always made lush, retro pop that glides straight out of the 1970s, but here the calm feels deliberate. Facing the apocalypse, May doesn’t flinch. There is no livewire dread, no new wave panic. Instead he wraps existential collapse in silk. The effect is not distance so much as a strange kind of composure, a cool that fits the music better than a freakout ever would.

Getdown Services take a different route into the ear. The British duo’s “I Can’t Die Like That” could have stayed a knowing, deadpan synth-funk exercise, the kind they do well enough. But they throw in a bluesy guitar riff that would make Keith Richards pause. It reframes the drawling, panting vocals and suddenly the harmonies arrive. The song gets a spine it didn’t need to have, and it works.

Nick Hakim’s “Real Here Now” is a hushed piano ballad built from the ache of missing people who are gone. The Queens singer and multi-instrumentalist wrote it with his own family losses close, and the lyrics are small, specific scenes: a sister learning magic, talking to a grandpa in the attic. Over five minutes the song stretches into a wider meditation on holding memory. It never overreaches. The weight is in the restraint.