When we last checked in with Jack Cooper’s Modern Nature, he and his band were drifting into territory that suggested ambiance over sturdy form on 2023’s No Fixed Point in Space. But with the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Tobias and drummer Jim Wallis augmented by new guitarist and vocalist Tarra Cunningham, the UK band’s latest, The Heat Warps, finds Cooper in the most guitar centric zone he’s explored since the heyday of his old indie rock band Ultimate Painting.

The quietly revolutionary Talk Talk singer made one final album before calling it quits: his self-titled solo album debut, from 1998. While often overshadowed by the majestic experimentation of his former project’s late work, Mark Hollis harbors its own secrets and surprises, while building upon the work those albums began. As a final testament, it’s a fitting paradox, full of roaring silences and whispering explosions, a collection of whisper-thin abstractions that have been annealed into something durable and concrete.

Haruomi Hosono’s second solo effort, Tropical Dandy, now released as a standalone album for the first time in the U.S., shows the bassist and bandleader moving on from his folk-rock beginnings. A complex, eccentric and deeply committed commentary on exotica, sonic simulacra and tropical vibes, it’s full of contradictory constructions and proud artificialities that tap into something deeper than the merely real.

In the middle of the heaviest years of a military dictatorship, Ben Jorge wanted, in his own words, to “bring peace of mind and tranquility” to Brazilians. He wanted happiness and imagination, visions of utopia, the quickening of the heart. A Tábua de Esmeralda espoused this ideal of absolute joy through its sweet and comic gestures, making reference at the same time to saints and soccer clubs, Medieval magicians and cartoon characters, as if they all belonged to the same semantic realm …

Making good (and then some) on the promise of their debut, Secular Music Group’s Volume 2 is a gorgeous jazz fantasia that beautifully brings together Sun Ra, Jewel in the Lotus and the European Library Music tradition under one expansive umbrella. The Chicago-based ensemble records everything analog, live and direct to a four-track machine — an approach that might seem unnecessarily fussy at first. But the results are impossible to argue with.

There’s serious rock and roll firepower at play in this inaugural disc from three grizzled, amp-damaged veterans. You know Bill Orcutt from his noise-jamming youth in Harry Pussy or his more recent coruscating solo electric albums. Steve Shelley comes direct from drumming through free-form grooves with Winged Wheel and, before that, from his work with Sonic Youth, the acknowledged acme of cerebral guitar interplay. And Ethan Miller is the man behind the 21st century’s last practicing classic rock band, Howlin’ Rain and, before that, the sky-scorching Comets on Fire.

East of the River Nile is a masterpiece of haunting and hazy ambience from Augustus Pablo (aka Horace Swaby), whose plaintive melodica leads waft through these dubbed-out instrumentals like fragrant and heady strains of ganja mist.

Känguru feels less a product of its circumstances and more like a beam from some kosmische asteroid: four songs of heady, rapturous, meandering rock. They’re jammy but structured, punctuated by climaxes and build-ups, vibe shifts and open space. But it’s about the journey, not the destination: get on the ice floe and float along, man…