At some point during the recent hype cycle surrounding the Hard Quartet’s debut LP, Matt Sweeney popped up on our feed singing the praises of Terry Stamp’s Blue Redondo. Stamp, formerly of the English hard rock group Third World War, recorded Blue Redondo after he relocated to El Segundo, CA, in the late 1970s. Each of its 12 tracks are rough gems, hard-bitten but sweetly rendered loner folk bolstered by Stamp’s blues-soaked guitar and vocals, not to mention the occasionally eccentric production touch.

Styrofoam Winos—the Nashville-based trio of Lou Turner, Trevor Nikrant, and Joe Kenkel—follow up their 2021 self-titled debut with Real Time, an endearing and invigorating collection of shaggy southern rock and dusty, woolen folk. With a lo-fi, ambling ease, they cruise through road-weary choogles; swampy, faded funkers; harmonica swept confessionals; and meditative, noodling jaunts through the passage of time.

“I come crashing down like sunsets gleam,” Meredith McHugh sings in the opening minutes of Structurally Sound, the fourth and final album from Smoke Bellow. The Baltimore via Australia duo of McHugh and Christian Best do, in fact, break up in spectacular, brilliant fashion here – joining forces one last time on guitars, synths, percussion, bass, and vocals for an ecstatic record of funky angular post-punk, damaged motorik-infused disco, and minimalist art-rock.

“With the ETA band, there were all these other experiences dealing with music that people were composing. So, when we would improvise, all of that other stuff was informed in what we were doing.” Visionary guitarist Jeff Parker joins us to discuss The Way Out of Easy, recorded live at his residency at ETA.

Chu Kosaka’s Arigato is wide-open pastoral bliss. The natural extension of Happy End with a bit more of a singer-songwriter orientation, Kosaka pieces together what could be the finest example of American country rock through the lens of a Japanese perfectionism. Don’t let that fool you. The tunes are loose.

Robert Smith never aimed to create the definitive soundtrack for our current dystopian moment, but he may have done it anyway. The argument against? He wrote some of these songs more than a decade ago and has been playing them off and on at shows for nearly as long. But despite the temporal disjunction, if you’re looking for some way through early November 2024, bleak, magisterial Songs of a Lost World makes an ideal companion. It is wise, spiritually charged and not at all bent on insisting that “we’ll get through this” or “things will get better.”

Arriving after a four-year gap, the latest album from the acerbic Canadian indie rock band reveals a group in a state of graceful turmoil and artistic ferment. A work of stoned eschatology involving Yeats, Pushkin and a jet-ski-racing game for the N64, The Neon Gate finds Nap Eyes scattered but not disenchanted, committed to finding new ways to sound exactly like themselves.

Light in the Attic is set to reissue their stellar 2008 compilation of Caribbean-influenced music from the late 60s and early 70s Toronto music scene as selected and annotated by Kevin “Sipreano” Howes. This new, deluxe pressing comes with a 20-page booklet featuring detailed bios, essays, and archival photos that further reveal the backstage of this extremely fecund scene of soul, funk, disco, R&B, and reggae.