New Delhi, Aug. 7 -- As a professional music critic, my inbox is always overflowing with new music-advance copies of major label albums pushed by corporate PR, indie artists sending me their new EPs, even demos from teenagers just starting out on their musical journey. As much as I'd love to listen and respond to them all, there are only so many hours in the day, and I'm not 20 years old anymore. So I end up engaging in a form of triage, passing the emails, DMs and Whatsapp texts through a bunch of mental filters-have I heard this artist before? Is it in a genre that I usually write about? How much do I trust the friend or music publicist who recommended it to me?

It's a process that I've got down pat, and that I usually trust. But it's ...