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.

Masayoshi Takanaka’s All of Me, originally issued in 1979, gathers material from the guitarist’s early solo run into a remarkably fluid sequence. Reissued for 2026 Japan Record Store Day and newly remastered at Abbey Road, the collection still moves with startling ease: polished AOR, tropical fusion, bossa drift, and instrumental pop unfolding in long, sunlit lines.

South London, early 1983. On For a Reason, Charles Bullen and Julius Cornelius Samuel pull away from the tightly wound scaffolding of This Heat into something slower, heavier, and more open-ended. Basslines circulate, rhythms drift, and dub space begins to overtake the frame. Forty years later, the record still feels uncannily present after dark.

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.

If The Way Out of Easy marked the emergence of the ETA IVtet as an entity separate from the site of the band’s origins, Happy Today serves as another milestone: It’s the first ETA IVtet record taped somewhere other than Enfield Tennis Academy. Capturing a 2025 set at the much-larger Lodge Room, the third album from guitarist Jeff Parker, saxophonist Josh Johnson, bassist Anna Butterss and drummer Jay Bellerose shows a band with more room to move and more space to listen.

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.