London jazz producer Alfa Mist has made a name over the past decade with his heady jazz fusion work, but Roulette is the first time he’s attempted a coherent overarching theme to one of his albums. Set in the future where resurrection is normalized and your past lives are used to prosecute you in the present, he wrestles with moral and philosophical issues alongside sweeping vistas of strings, jazz, and modern soul.

MIKE is on a generational run, flexing alongside his contemporaries while outrapping them at every turn. On Pinball II he paused a moment to have some fun with Brooklyn producer Tony Seltzer, who has been blowing up small clubs on his own for some time now. The pair bang out a mixtape-length project of bangers that suggest trap without ever falling into the rutted tropes of the genre.

Brash, straightforward post-punk from New Zealand that has the humor and absurdity of bands like Thank and Viagra Boys but the open honesty of a band aiming for bigger stages than the grungy clubs they’re coming up in. The life advice in question is the kind you should probably never take, but it’s affable and inviting all the same.

We’ve come to the point where it must be recognized that any given Boldy James record will have a certain minimum level of quality. James’ flow is such that he could deliver over a set of clattering trash cans and it would still be total head-nodder shit. As such, the worth of any given project is on the producer, and Chuck Strangers holds his own in a lineup that has over the past several years included The Alchemist (who did master the album) and Conductor Williams. Over a series of impeccably crafted, subtle beats, James’ flow works like the finest oils, ending before you know it but leaving you satisfied regardless.

Having spent twenty years in the wilderness (and frontman Andrew Falkous’ concentration on The Future of the Left), the re-formation of mclusky as a band arrived with a more muted reception than you might think they should have otherwise had. After all, Mclusky Do Dallas was one of the pillars of hardcore in the early Oughts. If the world is still here and so are we somehow escaped your attention – and it might have – this is your invitation to dive right back into the searing, deliriously funny world of Cardiff’s best.

Heavy metal in its purest form, Strung Out In Hell embraces the maxim first identified by my high school English teacher in 1999: “this is just sped-up Black Sabbath.” The riff-fest of the year, Margarita Witch Cult conjure up a dense set of guitar-driven doom, including a version of Billy Idol’s “White Wedding” that feels like it’s been playing for 1000 years in the dankest parts of Hell.

Hiromi plays piano like a hurricane in full blow. Her music is fast-paced, complicated, and intricate, but it also knows when to have fun. “Yes! Ramen!!” is as close to a ska piece as you’ll find in classically influenced jazz, while “Pendulum” mutates smoky torch ballads with the DNA of cool nighttime jazz clubs. Out There is a jazz record that knows when to take itself seriously, but knows damn well that it doesn’t have to all the time.

The sound of wind whipping along the great plains, bringing with it the seeds of new life. Here and there a rumble of thunder gathers in the distance, echoing across all that grassy emptiness. Somewhere, a meditative saxophone plays, urged on out of idleness by a playful guitar.

It’s easy enough to say that Ambrose Akinmusire is a trumpeter and he plays long-form jazz. It’s more accurate to say that he does a little bit of everything: jazz, hip hop, classical composition, observational soundtracks. Honey From A Winter Stone is just as much about the deep bass synths he layers under the frenetic drums as much as the way his trumpet stabs and hangs in numerous soul-rending ways. It’s post-bop shaped roughly into suites, the sound of life blossoming into previously unknown configurations.

NYC’s Guerilla Toss trade in that kitchen sink version of punk, full of meaty synths, big bass lines, and hooks so plentiful that the album basically acts like Velcro. Imagine X-Ray Spex signed to a major label early on, or a Superorganism that shook itself out of its psychedelic stupor.

Ty Segall and Corey Madden dive full-on into British Invasion, coming off like the lost record between Something Else by The Kinks and The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society. Instantly recognizable as having Ty Segall on board, in terms of moves even more so than voice, but somewhat different than he’s been going even on the latter-day textured records. A lot of indie groups have been digging backwards past punk to make the classics cool again, but Segall has been doing this since time out of mind.

Jazzy, soulful pop ripped from a previous century and set to dance a modern jig. We’re all a little sick of poptimism at this point, but Laufey makes pop for people who recognize that there’s a whole universe of pop music expression out there to draw from, and not just whoever sold the most records last year.

The wordiest man in hip hop delivers another clinic on flow and dense wordplay over a set of total head-nodder beats. He tackles the small stuff on his umpteenth album, examining the nearly-invisible factors that play into our daily lives, the ones that change us even as they pass by us unseen.

Modern West Coast energy collides with timeless East Coast grime to lay an early crown on one of Backwoodz’ newest duos. The antidote to an endless stream of sing-song Billboard-topping trap stars.

The ’20s have featured the R E T V R N that Britpop was always threatening. Blur, who never fully really went away, dropped another album and put on a brilliant Coachella set, even if the audience was too jaded and vacuous to get it properly. Oasis, upending established wisdom and providing another sign of the End of Days, reunited for a massive tour that somehow didn’t end in a fist fight, Jane’s Addiction-style. What better time, then, for the real answer to the Best Britpop Band to finally get their act together and release their first album since just barely after 9/11? More is much more introspective than either Common People, This Is Hardcore, or We Love Life were, full of tender Jarvis Cocker crooning and a certain wide-eyed but smirking gratefulness at being alive and still doing this thing nearly 50 years later.

Having made a name for herself as an off-kilter Daniel Johnston-type songwriter, New Zealand’s Sarah Mary Chadwick takes the opportunity here to strip back her music to its bare essentials. That means slow, spidery piano balladry paired with alcohol-soaked heartbreak, like Tom Waits before he discovered how much fun throwing everything into the kitchen sink could be. It’s not radio music, nor is it happy-go-lucky, but it does fit the mood when the storm clouds come rolling in and you can’t drag yourself out of bed.

Toronto’s Gloin provides tough post-punk with a dance edge. So many other bands do this, but Gloin’s dance instincts lean into the HEALTH side more than bands that ape Gang of Four. They should provide satisfaction for fans of Model/Actriz and Snapped Ankles, or for everyone who needs to be drenched in sweat and moving in a small dank club.

Daveed Diggs and company go full-on concept album cyberpunk, waving the flag right from the title and moving down into an electric reformulation of the dark, horrorcore-adjacent sound they’ve proven exceedingly adept at. The production they adopt here is, at its core, pre-old-school, digging into the vein that connects early ’80s hip hop pioneers with ragged rave-era electronics. It’s the soundtrack of period-appropriate Neuromancer, both the expensive two megabytes of hot RAM and the colony of dub rastas living in Lower Earth Orbit.

The Australian avant jazz group’s 20th album in 39 years finds them sprawling out to infinity, cashing in on their deft skill to make three and a half hours pass in far less time than a similarly lengthy set by, say, Swans. There are, at the end of all things, no other trios that can manage to play for this long and make every note and groove count perfectly, making them a group that defines the term ‘slept on.’

A litany of regret, longing, and finding both the humor and the joy in the working class struggle to survive. Ray Vaughn’s work resembles both JID and J Cole without falling into the didactic trap of either of them. It’s not a work of supreme confidence like other TD artists, but it is open, rugged, and emotionally vulnerable when it needs to be.

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