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Elizabeth Fraser pumped air through the music of Cocteau Twins — yes, there was a lightness, but more of a cosmic thrust to her voice. Since the 4AD-signed dream-pop band broke up in 1997, Fraser has worked with The Future Sounds of London and Peter Gabriel, and sung on soundtracks like The Lord of the Rings. But her longest collaboration continues to be with Massive Attack — producing perfect singles such as "Teardrop" and touring together — and one of its members, Damon Reece, her partner in life as well as music.

Fraser returns with her first new music in 13 years, with Reece, as Sun's Signature. "Golden Air," from the duo's self-titled debut EP out June 18, is a pastoral romp painted in pastels. Ornately gliding around her voice like sonic rococo, the acoustic-driven arrangement unlocks aurora as densely sumptuous layers of swelling strings, water-dripped synths, psychedelic guitar and rushing drums ignite a rapturous performance by Fraser.

Joan Shelley's music feels especially suited to anxious times: The Kentuckian's voice conveys a special kind of soothing, her words reflect on comfort and home, and her musical accompanists amble alongside her with nimble, easygoing grace. Joined by the great Nathan Salsburg on guitar, with additional arrangements by producer James Elkington, Shelley makes folk music deepened by a sense of love, companionship, friendship and connection.

Shelley crafted her forthcoming album The Spur (out June 24) in the wake of the pandemic, as the world around her seemed especially unforgiving. Retreating to the farm she shares with Salsburg while pregnant with their first child, she naturally found herself drawing on — and writing about — the elemental connections that sustain her: her husband, the land around her, the musical collaborators who expand her artistic vocabulary.

In The Spur's title track, all those forces converge in gently soaring fashion. Shelley sings about her inspirations — "all my friends and my enemies, too" — while expounding on the ways they help feed a spirit of renewal and serve as "the spur in my side." No one makes music better suited for moments of hard-won comfort than Joan Shelley. Let her provide the soundtrack to your next reentry into the cold, hard world.

It's been a little over a little over a month since EARTHGANG's album GHETTO GODS dropped and already they're back, with "Everybody Ain't Sh**" off Dreamville's latest project, D-Day: A Gangsta Grillz Mixtape. Hype instrumentals, with deeply perceptive lyrics that often straddle confidence and arrogance, have become synonymous with EARTHGANG. No different here. In a world filled with fakers and pretenders, "Everybody Ain't S***" holds a mirror up to all the false pretenses and issues a warning: "Believe half what you see and none of that s*** you hear."

Olu and WowGr8 rap over a percussive beat laced with distorted mechanical whirring, with distinctive Atlantan bravado – discerning and brash: "Okay, he ain't s***, they ain't s*** / She ain't s***, guess we ain't s***/ Honesty ain't s***, the industry ain't s***." The track brazenly points out an uncomfortable truth we often avoid – everyone's pretending in some way to prove to each other that we're the s*** (whatever that may look like) when in fact, nobody is. So, as Olu says, "Live your life, f*** living it for likes."

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Piano drifts, lifts and flutters like leaves wet from spring rain — the notes float, but carry the weight of water. Musical figures feel familiar, but are never quite the same as they shift within the instrument's creaking wood and through the room's resonant body.

OHYUNG is better known as a producer of hyperactive hip-hop and pop music, but on a new double cassette, imagine naked!, plays with shapes of ambient sound. No two tracks explore the same mode, but there is a tether of tenderness throughout. The wandering, minimalist piano piece "yes my weeping frame!" carries a Harold Budd-like movement — romantic, bleary-eyed, a bit mournful — but always, always moving with a gentleness so desperately needed in a harsh world. The music video, featuring the dancers Kyoko Takenaka and Marie Lloyd Paspe in a single-take improvisation, reflects the same. This is music that caresses the corners, feels out the dust and fills the quiet, to paraphrase a line from the t. tran le poem ("Vegetalscape") that gives the album its song titles.

While the long-standing Massachusetts collective Sunburned Hand of the Man have been linked with more famous collaborators and psychospiritual brethren like Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr., the group has outlasted and even outshined many of its peers over dozens of releases across three decades.

"Mental Egg," from SHOTM's latest full-length Some Cream, Some Heat, finds the group in fine, slippery form: It's a roiling group drone that builds and decays on a bed of whirling, gurgling guitars, languid percussion swells and fever-dream voices wailing. The players on successive projects by Sunburned Hand of the Man may be in a state of constant change but the music retains the group's essential ability to divide: This five-minute slab of electric esoterica will surely be either a cryptic invitation or resolute impasse for contemporary audiences.

We've heard it before: whether it's love or the gig of our dreams, the thing we're searching for often finds us when we stop looking. "Such A Thing," a song from Alex Isley and Jack Dine, features a dreamy soundscape created to surrender to that divine timing. Rich, lush background vocals, glistening piano and simple drums provide the perfect canvas for Isley's colorful melodies as she sings, "Just one year ago / You couldn't have told me / that this was a part of my plans." Sometimes, we are all in such a rush to get where we think we should be that we don't consider that we're exactly where we're supposed to be.

"Mom and dad are really gone," Iggy Pop repeats, with the graveled voice of experience, in his poem of love, loss and regret, set to music by the Amsterdam-based harpist and composer Lavinia Meijer. Even if your parents are both still alive (I'm down by one), this unexpected and moving collaboration may pierce your heart and question your life choices.

Iggy Pop places career success ("I competed / And I defeated.") and parental love on the scale of morals and finds himself lacking. "I should have loved you more," he intones with the sting of guilt. Yet, in an affecting moment near the end, he's left with just his father who holds his hand and tells him, "You've made your dream come true." The music — glistening, urgent — and the poetry get an emotional boost in the accompanying video, where a shirtless urchin, a mini-Iggy stand-in, shows twin sides of toughness and vulnerability. At a time when the pandemic has inordinately threatened the lives of the elderly, this piece is potent enough to make you call out to mom and dad. Even if they are not still with us.

At first glance, Jensen McRae's "Adam's Ribs" seems like an intriguing exploration of the biblical creation story from Eve's perspective. It's a lush, dreamy look at the tale, and McRae's poetic prowess is totally on display. With lyrics like "This love letter begins / To Adam, from your ribs / So-called intelligent design / Without you, I would die," McRae gives voice to the painful brutality of the creation story. Her Eve is a desperate, grief-stricken and abandoned figure, begging for Adam to "claim" her "as his own." The instrumental passage, heavy with a plucking electric guitar line and luscious string section, is dripping in melancholy and only heightens the lyrical tension.

When you take a closer look at the song, though, McRae's facade of narrative storytelling crumbles away. The song and its lyrics become wholly personal. Her voice reveals what the lyrics may not; the vulnerability in her mezzo-soprano becomes overwhelming. The song reaches its apex during the bridge, where McRae's gentle crooning surges into a full-out wail and the string section takes over in a way that feels damn-near orchestral.

Listening to McRae on this track feels a lot like breaking a bone and having to sit with the pain. It's breath-taking, all-encompassing, even life-shattering if listened to at the right (or wrong) moment. In other words, it's a track I've welcomed to my Sad Girl Spring playlist with a bone-crushing hug.

Duster's music is hazy and atmospheric, the kind of fuzzed-out indie rock that seems like a natural soundtrack to watching a star explode in slow motion. The band released some music at the turn of the millennium, then went into hibernation without much fanfare, leaving its output to be discovered and rediscovered by waves of passionate space cadets like a secret transmission. In 2019, much of its catalog started being reissued by Numero Group; the band also released a new self-titled album later that year.

Today, Duster surprise-released another record of new music, called Together. "Retrograde," its second track, distills the essential elements of Duster's sound into a minimalist framework: a drum machine's steady rhythm; a melodic bassline; fuzzy guitar riffs that come into focus, then fade away. Its lyrics fit the mood, too: stars emerging from a dark sky; a moonlit path; friends who are waiting for you. Despite the song's lowkey mood, its final line approaches hopefulness: "It's not too late to change your mind and play in retrograde / to be someone / to be someone like you."

Harry Styles' "As It Was" bottles sunshine in a song, but with a dreary melancholy. The synth-heavy intro is perfect for racing down Pacific Coast Highway with the top down. The groovy electric guitar licks inject the song with an infectious energy. If you are sorely missing the reign of Tumblr music — think The XX, Passion Pit — then this is absolutely the song for you.

But take a closer listen to the first single from Harry's House (out May 20) and you'll find a poignant lyrical exploration of loss and loneliness: "Answer the phone / Harry, you're no good alone / Why are you sitting at home on the floor / What kind of pills are you on?" Styles slips in autobiography, too, perhaps the closest he's ever been to directly addressing his love life. Whereas Fine Line was coy in its references to heavy themes like loss, depression and drug use, this single seems to signal Styles' willingness to confront those topics head on, pretty unapologetically.

"As It Was" feels both risky and vulnerable in a way that's different from his solo work so far. If this is Harry Styles inviting us into his metaphorical home, it seems like it's a lot messier and more complicated than he's ever let on.

Black Pumas co-founder Adrian Quesada teams up with Puerto Rican vocalist Ileana Cabra (a.k.a. iLe) for "Mentiras Con Cariño," a smoky and psychedelic ballad that celebrates Latin music traditions while also modernizing them. As with his work alongside Eric Burton in Black Pumas, Quesada's production feels timeless and cinematic as he crafts a perfect backing track for Cabra's deep, alluring vocals."Mentiras Con Cariño" opens Boleros Psicodélicos, Quesada's upcoming tribute to the tradition of Latin baladas.

"I always wanted to pay tribute to that sound that I was already hearing in my head without realizing that people had already done it," Quesada writes in a press statement. "Balada changed the face of Latin music forever. If something like that happened today, it would be normal because everyone's connected on Instagram. Think how powerful this sound had to be for everyone to be connected through the songs. As someone who grew up speaking two languages and living on both sides of the border, I love how much music can transcend barriers and boundaries. It really is a universal language, especially back then."

"Burn your fire for no witness / It's the only way it's done," sang Angel Olsen nearly a decade ago on her breakthrough sophomore album, 2014's Burn Your Fire for No Witness. A folk minimalist on her earliest recordings, the singer-songwriter's sound has expanded and contracted across her career — candied, pop-leaning rock on 2016's MY WOMAN, synth-driven psychedelia on 2019's All Mirrors. But what's remained central to Olsen's work as a songwriter is her chillingly stoic sense of self-conviction, her songs' declarations of romantic and artistic independence.

In "All The Good Times," the opening track from her upcoming album, Big Time (due out June 3), Olsen makes witnesses of us all to a fire of a different kind – not an internal flame that drives the soul, but a scorching of the self. "I can't tell you I'm tryin' when there's nothin' left here to try for," Olsen sings, on the slow-burning, resignedly heartbroken country song in the vein of '60s Tammy Wynette. In between the music video's shots of Olsen's romantic memories are those of her crouched in the desert by a fire, to which she feeds old photos and notebook pages. Later, in her truck, Olsen leaves a version of herself in the dust, while simultaneously threatening to run down another doppelgänger. As Olsen's music continues to transform, presented here in the form of vintage country, so do the selves she chooses to perform – and those she burns to start anew.

Protest songs can document a moment as it happens, inspiring awareness and action, but they can also reach across time, telling stories as relevant now as when they were written. Ted Leo's written a few of these songs ("Mourning in America," "Bleeding Powers" among them), his fervor fiery and sensitivity keen.

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With a ragged rock and roll stomp like a self-contained Crazy Horse (Leo plays all the instruments here), "The Clearing of the Land" shows how the police state, purposefully skewed language, and state-sanctioned media gives oppressors systemic reason "to kill us all or drive us all, year by year, off the land." Oppression is a meticulous process, gradually building harm to communities until brought to crisis. Violence is never the first strike, but the evidence that demands reaction, often way too late. Layers of fuzz-fried guitar solos whip and wind through the last minute, but not before Leo asks us to wake the hell up: "In the end, friend, really what were you expecting? And who is it you want to be protecting?"

The song was written for Band Together: A Benefit for Ukraine, a compilation featuring The World/Inferno Friendship Society, Unsane, Pušča, Кат and others — a mix of punk, metal and folk artists from Ukraine and the United States, including a few tracks recorded post-invasion by artists living in war. All proceeds from the compilation benefit Razom, a New York-based non-profit providing aid across Ukraine.

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Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man isn't so much a documentary about human vs. nature but about human nature itself. Timothy Treadwell was a Hollywood actor who became obsessed with grizzly bears, lived among them with his girlfriend in Alaska and, ultimately, both died by bear mauling. "He wanted to be a movie star, and he presents himself as a big star, and I gave him the space to be the star, even the best music, the great music by Richard Thompson," Herzog told NPR's Scott Simon in 2005. "And I said to Richard, 'Richard, this is the star. Give me the great music.' And so he did that."

Thompson's instrumental score, centered around solo electric guitar improvisations and gnarled chamber compositions, has always stood out as his most grandiose and untamed across his several decades of music. "Treadwell No More," which appears on the Music from Grizzly Man reissue out May 6, is an opportunity to hear Thompson's spindly, tremolo shudder gaze into the gaping maw with equal parts fear and wonder.

Produced by Madlib, with vocals from his Lootpack comrade Wildchild, "Manifestin" is a heart-wrenching examination of racism and police violence. The song opens with a mournful dirge played by a small string ensemble, before the loose, swinging beat kicks in and Wildchild goes to work, his rapidfire flow articulating the horror a Black man feels when faced with any part of the police or justice system.

"Manifestin" pours the blood, tears and suffering of many into one furious and poignant song.

Do you remember when it seemed impossible to imagine life after high school? Self-described art-folk quartet River Whyless looks back at those not-too-distant years (for them, at least) through "Promise Rings," a new single from their forthcoming fourth album Monoflora, out April 8.

With bouncing keyboards, three-part harmonies, acoustic guitar and buoyant strings, the four tell a tale of friendship, family, romance and lazy days that were once their everything. Vaguely reminiscent of Harry Nilsson's "Me and My Arrow," River Whyless mask heartbreak and inevitable unraveling of the bonds of youth here. "All your books and pretty things you left / Your promise rings / Untrue and undying." Self-produced for the first time since its 2012 debut, the North Carolina band amplifies those lyrical themes with a sweetly nostalgic video, decoupaged from home videos of their younger selves.

When a rising jazz phenom gets the go-ahead to make a first impression on a major label, pyrotechnics is the standard mode. But Julius Rodriguez — a hyperacute pianist, drummer and now guitarist known to many in alternative R&B and hip-hop circles as Orange Julius — opted for a warmer glow. "Gift of the Moon" is the first single from his debut Let Sound Tell All, which Verve will release on June 10.

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Beginning with a woozy synth pattern and what sounds like the whir of field crickets, the song tumbles into gear about 20 seconds in, shifting from waltz time into a relaxed yet sharply syncopated groove. Tending that groove with bassist Daryl Johns and drummer Jongkuk Kim, Rodriguez sets a stage for some solo elaboration from trumpeter Giveton Gelin — in a wash of overdubs, as if to embody an improvising chorus. Some wordless vocals by Nick Hakim, Rodriguez's longtime associate in Onyx Collective, brings the tune to a close, if not a conclusion; this is music that prioritizes a vibe, rather than the mechanics of plot.

The name Disassembler couldn't be more appropriate. Christopher Royal King (co-founder of Texas post-rock band This Will Destroy You) and violinist and composer Christopher Tignor never personally met — even via phone call or video chat — to make their new album A Wave from a Shore. Living on separate coasts, they sent audio files, downloads and texts between New York and Los Angeles. Over a four-month period of tinkering, deconstructing and reassembling they came up with a meditative, electroacoustic oasis of calm for a battered world. "Dynasty" offers a poignant blend of tradition and technology. The music creeps in slowly from the ether, opening with shimmering waves of electronics, until a wistful six-note theme in low strings takes hold, providing a secure footing for the journey forward into the light.

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Few rock bands stayed as adventurous as Sonic Youth, and that was true right up until the end of its three-decade run in 2011. In/Out/In collects mostly instrumental jams from the 2000s, an era that split the difference between song-based guitar rippers and sprawling improvised noise. "Machine" comes from The Eternal sessions in 2008 and brilliantly showcases Sonic Youth's ability to be economical, yet still inquisitive. Steve Shelley drives the steady, cymbal-forward beat for a wily theme by bassist Kim Gordon and guitarists Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo. "Machine" chugs and sidewinds in start-stop variations with perfectly-timed feedback in a fashion that will feel familiar to any Sonic Youth devotee, but the melody finds an unruly earworm digging into the crooked crevices.

Andy Shauf has an uncanny ability to create characters. His subjects, full of depth and relatability, are ripe for exploring the human condition both large and small. In "Jacob Rose," the titular fellow lets curiosity get the best of him, and thoughts about the potential uses of kitchen knives lead to predictable injury. Shauf's embarrassed Rose represents all of us who possess seemingly innocent ideas that go just a little too far, until we're back to reality, nursing our figurative (or literal) wounds looking for a better excuse than, "I got hurt stabbing the backyard."

This #NowPlaying pick comes courtesy of the New Music Friday podcast.

You may have heard more of Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson's music than you think. His scores for the films Arrival, Mandy, Theory of Everything and Sicario have secured legions of fans. Three years before his sudden death at age 48 in 2015, he finished Drone Mass, a kind of electroacoustic cantata for string quartet, voices and electronics which may be his finest work.

The 45-minute piece unfurls like a ritual, with washes of high Renaissance choral polyphony mixed with traces of contemporary mystics like Arvo Pärt and beautifully terrifying electronic treatments implemented by the composer himself. "Take in the Night Air" begins with weightless distortion, intensifying as voices pop in and out, calling to each other. If you were hurtling through space, this would be the music of the heavens.

While this debut recording was made after Jóhannsson's death, an engineer located his performance sound files, incorporating them with the musicians (members of ACME and Theatre of Voices) to offer a composer's gift from the great beyond.

Just last year, Priya Ragu quit her day job. She had been working as a technical purchaser for an airline until just a few months before she released her debut mixtape, Damnshestamil, last fall. Named on BBC's Sound of 2022 list, the Tamil-Swiss artist surprised audiences with the force of her creative vision and her style, which combines Western and South Asian influences. She calls the eclectic sound she's developed with her brother, Japhna Gold, "Raguwavy'': a unique blend of R&B, soul and the traditional Tamil beats they heard in their household growing up.

Her newest single, "Illuminous," is an upbeat anthem where Ragu revels in her breakout success despite the barriers she's faced as a 35-year-old South Asian woman in the music industry. The music video leans into alternate visions of hero archetypes as we see Ragu "glowed up" as a knight in shining armor riding a motorcycle and flexing as a bodybuilder. Her lyrics flow effortlessly, buoyed by a chorus of voices, bright trumpets and an irresistible dancing beat. Ragu's joy is contagious as she proclaims to naysayers: "If you didn't see me then / Bet see me now".