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.

The musical and psychic evolution of Matt “MV” Valentine traces a wide-ranging and gloriously unwieldy trajectory through sound and space for those intrepid enough to follow it. Spanning the earliest days of Tower Recordings, a bevy of solo albums, one of the most exhaustive and rewarding live recording archives you can dig into, and twenty-five years copiloting the fantastic voyage of MV&EE, Valentine has never stopped pushing the music outward and onward. And it doesn’t get any farther out than the freewheeling funkified flights of Wet Tuna.

It would be a mistake to take the simplicity of Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s songs at face value. Certainly, his tunes do have a pared down grace. And yet, listen closely and you’ll catch the embellishments, the flicker of saxophone, the soft cushion of strings, the flutter of flute, the smoke wreathes of communal singing. The center, as always, is Will Oldham, his tetchy, querulous voice, his warm way with melody, his startling, occasionally absurdist sprays of poetic imagery, but these songs are beautifully filled out by a cast of long-time friends and neighbors from the Louisville area.

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.

More stunning Takoma School ragas from Joshua Massad and Dylan Aycock, whose self-titled 2020 cassette has been in constant rotation over the past few years. This one is the duo’s vinyl debut — and as the title tells us, we’re invited to luxuriate in two long improvs, both stretching well beyond the 15-minute mark.

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.