With a torrent you’re downloading from many unknown peers, one of which could be a rights holder lawyer who will log your IP and send a threatening letter to your internet service provider. With Soulseek you are downloading from only one peer.
With a torrent you are downloading and uploading chunks at the same time. With Soulseek you have options about what you share for upload. If you were to get in trouble legally on Soulseek, it would probably be for what’s in your shared library, not for what you downloaded.
However, it’s not super polite to download from others without sharing. Some users block uploading to peers who aren’t sharing anything. My advice would be to go to your local library and find a few rare CDs of local music. Rip them to MP3 at a good bitrate and share them. Or maybe classical music? I’m not a lawyer, but just think of what music you can share where the artist or record label isn’t going to sue you. Independent and smaller record labels are probably not going to sue you.