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.

Released in the year of clashing sevens (1977), African Dub All-Mighty: Chapter Three captures Joe Gibbs and Errol Thompson—The Mighty Two—in their finest hour, mixing up a surreal and hypnotic set that still stands tall as a pillar of ’70s dub. Working from updated Treasure Isle and Studio One riddims, Thompson transforms each track into its own sonic chamber of mystery, where thunder, synths, cuckoo clocks, telephones, and doorbells point toward the future of dub while remaining deeply rooted in its past.

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.

Following the timeless Reset, Panda Bear and Sonic Boom return with A ? of WHEN, another playful act of musical curiosity. Steel drums, pedal steel, and harp loops from Mary Lattimore drift through an ever-shifting collage of samples and melodies, revealing themselves like sonic subtext. Optimistic without being naïve, it’s a record that meets experimentation with open ears and a sense of wonder.