The new album Southside Bottoms by Dawuna unpacks the emotional life of these communities with an extremely delicate hand, using a lens of minimalist, experimental r&b to bring this extinct ecosystem to life.

However, their new record Турукка киирии (Acoustic) peels back the metal furnishings on this band’s songwriting, revealing that the underlying forces moving their music actually derive directly from the traditions of their unique Siberian Turkic culture.

This concept of religious existential dread is expounded on the hauntological release Organum Psychosis by UgUrGkuliktavikt, with a sound rooted in dark ambient music and pulling samples of church orchestras, old hymns, and field recordings, inducing a feeling of spiritual terror in the face of incomprehensible eternity.

Singer-songwriter experimentalist The Disposable Lighters conduct a character study about this process on their new record Meet Mary Magdalen, a lo-if stream of consciousness that picks up steam just as it continuously derails.

All at once, a stampede of harsh realizations trample us, awakening dark memories from the good old days that remind us of the deception caused by nostalgic rose-tinted glasses, of the dark, unfamiliar forces that bring uncomfortably random misfortune to the world.

Rather than frantically searching, Jain explores the beauty and detail found in each present moment, allowing delight to flow forth from the beauty found in every passing second.

Deeply nihilistic lyrics tell the story of a speaker whose disillusionment with the inhumanity of the world extends inward and vice versa, creating a viscous cycle in which misanthropy and self-loathing reinforce each other.

Identifying the sun and other stars as the givers of life, Daisy Rickman fantasizes about uniting with these life sources, using their music as a stepladder to get them ever closer to the force that animates themselves and all of their ancestors.

Quaint, repeated melodies help lead intense bouts of noise through the passage, causing an upwelling of emotion that combats a stubborn thought loop.

Further personifying the insidiousness of these luxury apartments, experimental electronic group Lolina’s new album Unrecognizable tells an absurd narrative set in a world where buildings are used as weapons.

Channeling this pure positive energy, You Are Peace! You Are Love! by Lua Trilogy! and Mayfly Priestess laughs in the face of traditional dogmas to deliver a message of unencumbered humanism.

Musically complex and ideologically inspirational, the avant garde jazz record New Monuments pulses with the heartbeat of protest music, not only demanding change but actively participating in the construction of a better world.

Delicate, deliberate, and beautiful in every moment, the new record Bright Future by Big Thief vocalist Adrianne Lenker puts this generational talent's sonngwriting skill under a microscope.

The tesseractic Hit Parade of Tears blurs dimensional boundaries between Japan’s lost generation of underground artists, modern avant garde music, and a yet-to-be-realized future bizarre beyond imagination. 

Hypnotic, staccato sung vocals vary in tone and pace between verses and choruses, pairing well with a guitar sound that pulls from influences as diverse as surf rock, funk, and psychedelia, all while leaving room for some wonderfully strange and novel lead lines that give the record a distinct signature.

Despite its intense and constant distortion, Heartache to Heartache sounds extremely close and intimate, each element balanced to evoke this sense of deep emotion.

On their new record Cats, Dogs, and Dwarves, Polish jazz experimentalists MIDI 4 celebrate the tales where mild mischief is met with absurd retaliation and a deep forest of menacing mystery lurks just outside at all times.

From annoying interpersonal microaggressions to crimes that glow dully from the front page news, we encounter systemic, social, and personal problems in our everyday lives that we feel powerless to stop, all while we’re cursed with the mentality that the burden of change falls on each of us all the time.

Despite the interest in preserving cultural customs from around the globe, the deterioration of audio recordings means these works are becoming totally lost to the passage of time. Folklore 1979 by Milkweed is an album that reconstructs existing works by cutting up and rearranging segments of articles from Folklore Volume 90, a 1979 journal of folkloristics published by the Folklore Society.

Where one may expect Angell to continually circle closer to a specific sound that defines her, she instead turns her eclectic taste and ability into an identity in and of itself, giving all of these diverse sounds a distinctive flair.