What to listen to now: Alice Glass and Aaron Dilloway

A weekly roundup of must-hear music from The Times’ pop staff.

Alice Glass, “Without Love” (Loma Vista).

It’s been a long, slow burn waiting for a debut solo album from the former Crystal Castles singer Alice Glass. The singer endured an ugly separation from her old project (“I’ve been waiting for you to die.… Now I know this, you don’t own me anymore,” she sang on her last solo track “Stillbirth”).

Her new music comes with the urgency and vulnerability of restating her identity as an artist. Her latest single “Without Love” suggests the arduous work is paying off.

Here, Glass sings with a newfound melodic clarity and tenderness, all above an undertow of sub-bass, sinister trap drums and synth samples that warily slink around the song’s edges. Jupiter Keyes, formerly of Health, worked on the production, and that band’s mix of heaviness and ambience shows here. The creepily ravishing video, directed by Floria Sigismondi, is a goth-rave fantasia as well. — August Brown

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Aaron Dilloway, “Fact Mix 613” (Fact download).

As part of its long-running series of DJ mixes, the respected British beat music publication Fact commissioned the Oberlin, Ohio noise artist and Hanson Records kingpin to let loose with records from his curious collection. Rather than do what most Fact mixers do and make a seamless, well-constructed electronic dance set, Dilloway went all in on an odd series of “sound-alike” releases from the 1960s and beyond.

After encountering an 8-track tape of a fake Beatles band trying to replicate their hits, Dilloway writes in an introduction to the mix, he started gathering other such recordings. He describes them as “basically collections of cover versions of hit songs quickly recorded by random session musicians and designed to kind of trick people into buying them, thinking they are getting the ‘original artist.’”

The 65-minute mix moves vista to vista. Adds Dilloway: “Easy Listening Hawkwind! High School Foreigner! Disco Pink Floyd! Fake Bowie! Fake Zeppelin! Fake Wendy Carlos! Fake Jean-Michel Jarre! And even Fake Public Image Ltd!!!”

Highlights? Covers of the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” and Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” by bands that speak little English, and a ridiculously banging high school band take on Alice Cooper’s “School’s Out.” As the mix winds down, Dilloway turns to Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” — performed by a group and would-be Robert Plant who are trying really, really hard to nail it. Unfortunately, they don’t nail it. — Randall Roberts