Following their role in the celebrated outfit Wax Machine, Lau is the sophomore offering from São Paulo-born musician Lau Ro. An enduring cycle of radiance, the windswept echoes of seminal Brazilian records like Clube da Esquina ripple through the record; a collage as sunny as it is meditative.

Horse Lords return with what may well be their strangest and prettiest album yet. Here the Baltimore-Berlin quartet adds Protestant hymn-singing, swamp boogie, early computer music and even robot funk to their signature brand of phase-shifting krautrock groove. It is an alluring, compelling mix that plays with themes of religious devotion and utopian longing. Fifteen years into their career, Horse Lords are still making some of the most radical, captivating music of our time.

Nearly a half-century after its release, This Heat’s entrancing, horrifying and ecstatic self-titled debut still lands like a vision of the end of the world, or at least the end of a world, its messages conflicting and coded but bracingly pure and full of possibility.

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.

Sixteen years on, Anika still feels loosely assembled, held together by bass, space, and the chemistry between Annika Henderson, Geoff Barrow, and the wider Beak> orbit. Recorded quickly and largely live, it arrived already weathered: post-punk stripped to its framework, with vocals seemingly recorded in an adjoining room.

In our particulate-dense media environment, a decade-plus silence takes on the weight of a gesture in its own right—an invitation to focus, to stay awhile. Structurally, Inferno is less interested in the tension-release of deep raving than in the discursive backroads of a philosophical sci-fi novel.

With Spontaneous Music Live, their new album for International Anthem, SML finally documents that experience in full: two sprawling, unedited performances recorded at Zebulon that capture the band shape-shifting in real time.

On his first solo album, Total Blue member Anthony Calonico continues to mine the Los Angeles instrumental trio’s refined, streamlined take on chilled-out lite jazz and pop ambience. But he also makes some moves, singing on several tracks with a slightly murmurous, no-big-deal felicity.