In the latest permutation of the adventurous L.A. jazz group SML, guitarist Gregory Ulhmann and saxophonist Josh Johnson are joined by bassist Sam Wilkes, for an album that both deepens and expands the SML project. Looking back to bebop and drifting through post-rock, with pit stops at Jaco Pastorius, Lyle Mays and the Beatles, Uhlmann/Johnson/Wilkes is unafraid to embrace the beautiful, even as it remains committed to experimentation and smooth radicalism.

With Prodigal Son, fingerstyle rambler Liam Grant continues his investigation into lineage and place with quite possibly the rawest, loudest acoustic guitar recording you’ll hear all year. Casting aside delicate precision, Grant offers up unwieldy and elemental excursions that reach from the well-trod terra firma and wreath themselves into a knotty concentric circle inside the heart of contemporary guitar soli.

Pavement albums often invite their own retrospection. Stephen Malkmus sprinkled the first two LPs with clues to his anxieties around his musical reception, but on their third album, Wowee Zowee, which is celebrating its 30th anniversary, Pavement is light on the lyrical breadcrumbs. Contemporary critics so badly wanted to read the album as a self-conscious turn away from success. But in reality, it was Malkmus and co. doing exactly what put them on the precipice of success in the first place: leaning into their own artistic self-assurance.

Tobacco City formed around Chris Coleslaw and Lexi Goddard, both singers, both guitarists, whose vocal interplay recalls the swirling laments of Oakley Hall. They are especially fine together in anthemic “Time,” where Coleslaw’s keening lead collides with the buzzing sweetness of close harmonies. But while they set up these songs’ structures, pedal steel guitarist Andy “Red” PK adds color in the wailing, crying, yearning tones of his pitch-shifting instrument.

A scary 32 years ago Londoners Seefeel unleashed their (predominantly) instrumental masterwork Quique on the Too Pure imprint. Effortlessly straddling post-rock and electronic realms might not seem a huge deal today, but back in 1993 it felt almost miraculous.

Okonski return with Entrance Music, revealing the flipside of the perpetual afterhours reverie of Magnolia. For their sophomore outing, the trio gently open the curtains to find themselves in the light of a new day, unimpeded by anything that isn’t melody or mood. Entrance Music drifts along like a perfect daydream, homey and lived-in, but maintaining a sense of spontaneity that leaves no doubt pianist Steve Okonski, bassist Michael Isvara “Ish” Montgomery, and drummer Aaron Frazer are attuned to the same ephemeral frequency.

Phi-Psonics is a spiritual jazz collective headed by Los Angeles-based composer and acoustic bassist Seth Ford-Young, whose prolific session work can be heard on releases such as the recent stunner by Takuro Okada. The uninhibited, meditative soundscapes of previous studio offerings The Cradle and Octava quickly made waves after catching the attention of Manchester jazz label Gondwana, flashing nods to A Love Supreme and a lush framework playing off of Ford-Young’s Mingus-inspired upright bass, lifting woodwinds and the Wurlitzer piano of Mitchell Yoshida.

Over the past decade, Destroyer has shifted seamlessly into middle age. Where restless, lesser artists might have manufactured reinvention narratives or settled into the indie oldies circuit (imagine the money to be made from a Kaputt 15th anniversary tour), Bejar and his muse have kept on truckin’: ken, Have We Met, LABRYNTHITIS, and now Dan’s Boogie. Not career-defining statements, but statements out of which a career is defined.