Listen: Bandcamp
Hermit: Love Island
This zany, perplexing, and intense work of beat experimentation comes from Hermit, a relatively unknown producer. Hermit manages to electrify the sounds of the L.A. beat producers like Madlib and Flying Lotus with sounds of deep house, old school R&B, chintzy synths, and rock. It’s a kind of electronic jazz that mashes styles and ideas together until they start impossibly sticking together to form something new. –Hubert Adjei-Kontoh
Listen: Bandcamp
Immanuel Wilkins: Omega
Last year, Joel Ross’s Blue Note debut, KingMaker, introduced a promising young vanguard of artists that included alto saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins. On his own Blue Note debut, Wilkins composes ocean-deep jazz epics. The quartet’s instrumentation is traditional, but Wilkins and pianist Micah Thomas telepathically weave sorrowful phrases into timeless narratives of struggle. On “Ferguson” and “Mary Turner” (both scathingly subtitled “An American Tradition”), the band wails with agony, but with “Eulogy” and “Omega,” their mourning is resolute: Tenderness becomes a foundation for a greater future. –Will Miller
Listen: Apple Music | Rough Trade | Spotify | Tidal
Imperial Triumphant: Alphaville
Alphaville might be the heaviest album to ever feature a barbershop quartet. The masked New York City black metal band Imperial Triumphant has always found unlikely textures to express the community and chaos of their hometown. On Alphaville, the proudly avant-garde group delves deep into jazz (the twilight piano of “Transmission to Mercury”), flourished with the occasional percussive interlude (the taiko drumming in “City Swine”). The result is wild and vicious, yet also deeply focused: It’s the sound of one of metal’s most adventurous bands following their muse past the point of sanity. –Sam Sodomsky
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
Imaginary Softwoods: So Extra Bronze Lamp
Mere months after reissuing his long-out-of-print 2016 album Annual Flowers in Color, John Elliott popped up unannounced with August’s So Extra Bronze Lamp, a strikingly beautiful collection of drifting synth studies and new age tone poems. “Mr. Big Volume” is beatless dub techno, “Remember Seeing It” might be a chipper Oval accompanied by a chorus of crickets, and “Innerglow Portal/Aqua Drawer Lamp” sounds like Cocteau Twins and Harold Budd’s The Moon and the Melodies remade for a world with a fraction of Earth’s gravity. These sweet, succinct bursts of supersaturated color are more pop-like than the far-out escapades of his former group Emeralds. Play it for a “slowed + reverb” fan and watch their brain’s pleasure center spontaneously rewire itself as a path to ecstasy opens up. –Philip Sherburne
Listen: Bandcamp
Jowell y Randy: Viva el Perreo
Puerto Rican reggaetoneros Jowell y Randy don’t quite consider themselves part of the genre’s “old school,” but rather intermediaries between OGs such as Don Omar and Daddy Yankee and the new school’s J Balvin and Bad Bunny. Their latest LP, Viva el Perreo, does its best to bridge this gap, flipping familiar samples into new arrangements, not unlike their show-stopping turn on el conejo malo’s “Safaera.” Bad Bunny produced much of the album, carrying the torch for perreo with beats that bump at just the right BPM for ass-shaking. Assembled remotely under quarantine, Viva el Perreo reveres reggaetón’s roots while facing firmly forward, championing fun, body positivity, and hope for a perreo-fueled, coronavirus-free future. –Matthew Ismael Ruiz
Listen: Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal
KMRU: Peel
When you’re stuck in the house for months on end, little noises—the whirr of an exhaust fan, the hum of a refrigerator—reveal themselves. Nairobi, Kenya electronic producer Joseph Kamaru’s debut for respected experimental label Editions Mego (Fennesz, Jim O’Rourke)…