Everything in Gemma Castro's new "Quiero Saber de Ti"—the idea, the lyrics, the music, the production and the video—was made as a counterattack against confinement both physical and psychic as she quarantined in her abuela's "strict Catholic house" in Guadalajara. She's always created her own space, and in some ways quarantine just gave her more possibilities to work with. (Slight warning: if you still have a job to go to and that job even more hideously oppressive and uptight than most jobs, you may want to save this for later. ►

This smoldering new track from Spain's Mohama Saz—out Dec. 11 on L.A.'s iconoclastic Mock label—is a slow-motion spin through several waves of psychedelia and the musical heritage of at several subcontinental cultural regions. Described to us as "Mediterranean Psychedelia," "Quemar Las Naves" is swimming in the east-meets-west-meets-analog-high-tech sound familiar to fans of Sublime Frequencies, Finders Keepers and those awesome-but-legally-iffy comps of rare 45s from Turkey, Lebanon, Africa and beyond. There's a particular mindscape where an endless desert meets a bottomless sea, and where the music is all about negative space and hypnotic rhythm, and that's where "Quemar Las Naves" walks the tideline at sunset. ►

Exotica is a bizarre and sometimes uncomfortably ... complicated genre-slash-phenomenon, but the sensation of being somewhere else is more than welcome right now, and nobody makes a living room seem like a distant lagoon more than L.A.'s Healing Gems. They make songs that sound like Moon Gas meets Ennio Morricone with happily saturated production dripping with cinematic effects and unpredictable instrumentation, often soundtracking deadpan lyrics about ancient curses, legendary ruins and dreams so real they override waking life. ►

You already know Ten-Headed Skeleton even if you don’t think you know Ten-Headed Skeleton—that’s the recent alias-slash-identity-reinvention of L.A.’s Michael Nhat, the ferociously independent outsider artist/rapper/producer/and probably more, with recent musical output including the “Suffocate On Honey” 7″ and his earlier full-length Evil Doing. But… ►

Sometimes listening to a song is like walking in on someone in the bathroom. It feels too intimate—something for an audience of one. That’s the energy of every song on Yung Student Loans' new album, I Stay Lonely (A True Romance), but never more present than on “GMSIL (Get My Life),” a slow-burn somber-trap jam for hard hearts. ►