Thirty years old this month, Stereolab’s 1996 breakthrough record Emperor Tomato Ketchup was equal parts transitional and revolutionary. Upon three decades of reflection, the retrofuturism bridgegap keenly foreshadowed the self-coined groop’s prolific trajectory, spanning all the way through last year’s comeback album Instant Holograms on Metal Film.

Bookish and wry, beautifully but mutedly arranged for guitar and piano, Belle and Sebastian’s second full-length was out of step with a music industry just recovering from grunge. It came from a group of people who shunned the publicity cycle, doing no interviews, releasing no singles and shunning TV and radio appearances. It came out late in 1996 on the small Jeepster label and very slowly built a following …

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.”

Released sometime in the late 70s, Tilaye Gebre’s album as a featured performer was taken from a one-take, single microphone live recording during their residency at the capital’s Ghion Hotel. Unfolding across nine, slow-burning tracks, the band feels woozily cool, locked in a groove that feels unconscious. There’s a telepathic current running through the players that fashions a sound both nocturnal and bright but a little grizzled by its stripped-down recording texture too.

One of the most striking records from 2025 finally gets its deserved vinyl release with AD93’s issuing of Dagmar Zuniga’s in filth your mystery is kingdom / far smile peasant in yellow music. The pluricultural artist’s debut was also assembled in a pluricultural environment, across Norway and Greece and Georgia, and found a rapid, cult-like admiration within a certain Brooklyn scene of lo-fi and experimental art—featuring Zach Philips, its success would eventually lead Zuniga to tour with Mount Eerie.

Tracked live to tape at Sessa and Biel Basile’s São Paulo studio, Krok captures the Belarusian outfit in a moment of transition, stretching the sinewy tendrils of their earlier work into something more expansive and self-possessed. Where their previous LP steeped itself in the gentle saudade of Brazil’s Clube da Esquina, Krok pulls the lens back as the palette broadens and horizons turn transcontinental.

Though there are antecedents to Dark’s sound—think Cream or Jefferson Airplane at their haziest—there’s something singular about Dark. Opener “Darkside” is lithe but muscular, and like early Sabbath, there’s a jazziness to it that suggests an alternate universe where Impulse put out the first heavy metal records.

New Orleans — birthplace of the syncopated rhythm splinter known as the second-line. Cut to 1974. Drummer and composer David Lee Jr. quietly releases his lone solo LP, the Afro‑futurist Evolution, privately pressed to just 400 copies on his own Supernal Records imprint. A percussive spiritual meditation in motion, the record folds intricate polyrhythms into hypnotic, repetitive loops that sound as urgent and on-point today as they did half a century ago. Four hundred copies. Infinite resonance.