January is a dead month. The spirit of happy holidays is gone with the wind, trees are bare in the streets and broken New Year’s resolutions hang on cluttered bulletin boards and refrigerators across the world.

It’s a time of silence in the entertainment world as well. Best of 2017 lists take up space that new reviews usually inhabit and leave readers running to catch up on what they’ve missed. Often enough, record labels understand this and hold their big releases for the spring and summer. What’s left is dead air space.

Yet this lull also provides a moment for smaller acts to shine. Several artists have charged into 2018 with guns blazing, each making their case for listeners to look forward during a time of reflection. This week’s playlist aims to collect tracks released this month that breathed new life into this cold month. They make a case that, even during entertainment’s slowest month, great artists are always racing to make their voices heard.

“Semicircle Song” by The Go! Team

To my ears, The Go! Team makes the musical equivalent of sunlight. Their trademark ingredients are the glowing melodic arrangements of 60s sunshine-pop records and the bustling, cheerful drumbeats of old school hip-hop. While their 2015 record, “The Scene Between,” still boasts their strongest songwriting, The Go! Team’s new record “Semicircle” is nothing short of delightful. The album’s most delicious moment, “Semicircle Song,” weaves steel drum and brass band around a shuffling beat and a bulletproof chorus. About two minutes in, it suddenly breaks into a spoken word section where a bunch of people introduce themselves and their astrological signs. The unabashed, inclusive joy in the track is infectious and spills generously across the album as a whole. It’s the perfect way to start a better, happier year.

“С баках моей страницы” by Misha Mishajashvelli

There’s quite a legacy of darkness in hip-hop, and as the form leaps across continents, that darkness mutates in thrilling ways. Estonian producer Misha Mishajashvelli’s style of hip-hop is incredibly noisy yet beautiful His 2018 record sounds like the sonic equivalent of the warplane going down on its cover. Distorted noise floods in waves over driving beats which give ways to delicate orchestral and opera samples ripped from dying vinyl. Opening salvo “С баках моей страницы,” with its grinding rhythms, intermittent sirens and scratchy middle eastern riff, provides a tantalizing look into the sonic worlds Mishajashvelli creates.

Jeff Rosenstock – “TV Stars”

Jeff Rosenstock is on a rampage. “Post-” marks the third of his records chock full of punky, relentlessly catchy rock songs that are infectious as they are human. Couched amidst high-tempo barnburners, the slower songs on “Post-” are strikingly gorgeous. “TV Stars” is one such detour. While a lyric like “TV Stars don’t care about who you are” might scan as obvious in most settings, Rosenstock’s theatrical arrangement of soaring falsetto and spotlit piano creates a perfect emotional contrast. It’s a wonderful moment that takes the exclusive nature of the entertainment industry and turns it into a moment of community.

Honorable Mentions:

“Feel Alive” by Tiny Moving Parts

“One Rizia” by Shame

“The Main Pretender” by Ty Segall

“Rorschach” by Typhoon

“Distant Star” by First Aid Kid