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.

Forty-five years after it was first released, the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight sounds better than ever. The glorious chime of Robyn Hitchcock and Kimberley Rew’s guitars, the buoyant rhythm section of drummer Morris Windsor and bassist Matthew Seligman, the interlocking vocal harmonies, Hitchcock’s surreal and bewitching lyrics … it all adds up to a bona fide masterpiece.

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.

If there exists a more perfect reggae album than Rastafari to symbolize the rejuvenating, re-energizing power of spring we have yet to hear it. Turning 50 this year, this is far more than sound-system music, this is reggae as art form.

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.

Laid down on a four-track recorder over two sessions at the Ras Hotel ballroom in Addis Ababa in 1976, Ibex Band’s Stereo Instrumental Music is a foundational, if little-heard, document of Ethiopian music.

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.