There are records that feel like documents and there are records that feel like contraband. Live in Detroit 1986 sits firmly in the latter… a tape smuggled out of the room, dubbed and redubbed into soft focus until the hiss becomes a third rhythm section. Captured less than a year after Fela Kuti’s release from prison, at Detroit’s Fox Theatre during his first U.S. tour, the set lands with a charged, itinerant electricity: part exorcism, part declaration.

Masayoshi Takanaka’s All of Me, originally issued in 1979, gathers material from the guitarist’s early solo run into a remarkably fluid sequence. Reissued for 2026 Japan Record Store Day and newly remastered at Abbey Road, the collection still moves with startling ease: polished AOR, tropical fusion, bossa drift, and instrumental pop unfolding in long, sunlit lines.

May 1980, London: Dub poet Linton Kwesi Johnson drops Bass Culture on Chris Blackwell’s Island Records, the first of two LPs he’d release that year. Jamaica-born and Brixton-raised, the album finds Johnson distilling Babylon’s heavy hand into deep, subterranean basslines laced with incendiary street-level missives — “muzik of blood, black reared pain, rooted heart geared, all tensed up.”

Recorded in 1974, the album is the nexus of the musical and spiritual philosophies of Jamaica’s own heavyweight saxophone colossus, Cedric IM Brooks. Over the course of his career, Brooks divined a sound that combined Jamaican musical traditions and jazz that stood on its own ground amid the full bloom of reggae and dub in the 1970s, while also traveling a parallel route alongside the kindred ensembles of Fela Kuti and Sun Ra.

For 37 years, John Peel worked as a conduit, pulling unheard voices out of the static and setting them loose across the BBC dial. In 1977, one of those voices was This Heat, formed just a year earlier in a Camberwell rehearsal space. Frayed at the edges, with clipped rhythms pushed straight to broadcast, they didn’t sound like a band adapting to a Maida Vale studio so much as one ignoring the usual expectations of a radio session.

Like an unwavering sonic horizon, Orange delivers a vibrant and jangly collection of songs that weren’t just merely worth the wait, but feel like just the right amalgamation of musician Tim Presley’s prolific career to date. The first White Fence record in over seven years, the chiming guitars and Ty Segall back behind the drum kit and console convey a warbly and mysteriously optimistic guiding light. Hence the record’s namesake, the record offers a clear-eyed and bullish vibrancy in contrast to the downright foggy greys and blues of yesteryear.

If The Way Out of Easy marked the emergence of the ETA IVtet as an entity separate from the site of the band’s origins, Happy Today serves as another milestone: It’s the first ETA IVtet record taped somewhere other than Enfield Tennis Academy. Capturing a 2025 set at the much-larger Lodge Room, the third album from guitarist Jeff Parker, saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose shows a band with more room to move and more space to listen.

Three years and as many live albums have passed since Setting’s debut album. In that time, the trio of Nathan Bowles, Jaime Fennelly, and Joe Westerlund have sharply fine-tuned their form of exploratory electronic Appalachian drone music, and their new, self-titled album finds them on a heightened plane. The chemistry built between these three players over the last few years comes alive here in an even richer hue of their cosmic arboreal vision.