The first new Yeah Yeah Yeahs song in nine years isn’t a guitar blast. It’s a solemn, cavernous synthesizer march with late-arriving guitars and other, often elusive sounds flitting above a steadfast bass line. The lyrics hand off a damaged world to a next generation — “the kids” — who “never had no chance” but might save things anyway. JON PARELES
Maggie Rogers, ‘Want Want’
There’s been a fun, late-90s pop-rock vibe to the two songs the one-time Pharrell-mind-blower Maggie Rogers has released from her forthcoming second album, “Surrender.” The wholehearted first single, “That’s Where I Am,” gave off some Natalie Imbruglia tones, but the intensity and crunchy guitar tones of “Want Want” are a little more in the key of Alanis Morissette. “I keep running away but when I leave you pull me in again,” Rogers sings on this tale of long-sublimated desire that finally finds an explosive expression in its chorus: “And I want you.” LINDSAY ZOLADZ
Denny Zeitlin with George Marsh and Mel Graves, ‘The Name of This Terrain’
A few years after he burst onto the jazz scene, and almost a decade before he would record the soundtrack to a remake of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” the celebrated pianist Denny Zeitlin took his trio into the studio in 1969 to work on a surrealist sci-fi concept album of his own, “The Name of This Terrain.” Bridging the space-age pop of the preceding decade and the jazz-rock era to come, the demos they made showcased Zeitlin’s always-impressive compositions, the snug versatility of his core trio (featuring the bassist Mel Graves and the drummer George Marsh) and — surprisingly — the band members’ orotund baritones. On the long opening track, they sing in portentous harmonies over a slapping funk beat, before things dissolve into untamed Strangelove dissonance. Zeitlin and his producer, Bill Young, were unable to find a label willing to back the project, and they left it for dead. But a half-century later, after some copies of the demo found their way into used-record stores, Zeitlin finally re-listened to it. He rightly decided that the original tapes were compelling enough to be released on their own, and the album is out via Now-Again Records. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLO
Revelators Sound System, ‘Grieving’
MC Taylor writes songs, plays guitar and sings in the Americana band he leads, Hiss Golden Messenger. Revelators Sound System, his studio duo with the bassist Cameron Taylor, is something else entirely: an open-ended instrumental group. The 10-minute “Grieving” begins as snappy, prismatic funk, with saxophones and keyboards drifting in and piling on over an increasingly busy bass, but midway through, the beat falls away, leaving the other instruments to keen and echo into a void. It’s the inverse of a typical jam; instead of building, it dissolves. PARELES
Kamikaze Palm Tree, ‘In the Sand’
A six-beat rhythm underlies dissonant guitar riffs, up-and-down keyboard lines, xylophone-like plinks and wordless vocals in the insistent, perpetual-motion “In the Sand.” Kamikaze Palm Tree is a duo that loves to multitrack, and “In the Sand” happily inhabits the intersection of clever, nagging and catchy. PARELES
Arp, ‘Eniko’
Alexis Georgopoulos, the electronic musician who records as Arp, sets up a ping-ponging stereo mix of synthesizers to begin the instrumental “Eniko” before its contours emerge: a syncopated 4/4 beat, a hopping bass line, a plinky melody that’s answered by sliding synthesizer tones and programmed drum syncopations. For all the sonic and spatial diversions, the track holds its shape. PARELES
The Mountain Goats, ‘Training Montage’
“I’m doing this for revenge!” John Darnielle declares in his eternally urgent bleat, barnstorming into another chorus like only he can. “Training Montage” is the opening battle cry from the Mountain Goats’ upcoming 20th (20th!) album, “Bleed Out,” an extended tribute to action movies. In the hands of a less imaginative and excitable songwriter, this might wear thin, but Darnielle has already proven to be an uncommonly inspired devotee to the narrative concept album, as evinced by such disparately toned Mountain Goats albums as their 2009 biblical meditation “The Life of the World to Come,” and “Beat the Champ,” a record-length celebration of pro wrestling from 2015. But perhaps this is the most logical thematic concept yet: With their driving energy, unrelenting intensity, and cinematic imagery, up-tempo Mountain Goats songs often feel like miniature action sequences. The playfully self-aware “Training Montage” just makes it explicit. ZOLADZ
Warm, slow guitar strums carry Kyshona’s voice — her lead vocals and gathering harmonies — as she urges someone to find themselves and speak out: “I think you know just what you want now/You’ve gotta say it out loud.” Kyshona doesn’t specify any agenda or identity, but it’s probably no coincidence that the song arrives at the beginning of Pride Month. PARELES
Beth Orton, ‘Weather Alive’
Beth Orton, who has been quiet for six years, plunges deeper into her past obsessions on “Weather Alive,” the first song from an album due in September that she produced herself. Those have included Minimalism, funk, English folk melodies, electronics, nature, sorrow, jazz and meditation, and all of them drift through “Weather Alive,” with Orton offering modal vocal phrases and marveling, “The weather’s so beautiful outside/almost makes me want to cry.” PARELES
Poliça, ‘Madness’
The gorgeously eerie title track of Poliça’s new album, “Madness,” basks uneasily in its own amorphousness. Edgeless tones of electronics, guitar and violin materialize and fade away, never quite claiming a beat, as Channy Leaneagh sings about a relationship that may be revelatory, penitent or toxic. “I came here to destroy,” she whisper-sings, and at the end, she asks, “Do we even love at all?” PARELES
JoVia Armstrong, ‘Meditations on Oya’
A percussionist whose credits vary from experimental jazz to R&B, JoVia Armstrong leaves the net of her influences billowing open on her new album, “The Antidote Suite,” which was recently commissioned as part of the art exhibition “The Black Index.” Created with her group, the Eunoia Society, the entire album has the humid magnetism of a weather pattern, and on “Meditations on Oya” — a paean to the Yoruba water deity, who has the power to bring rain and to carry souls to the afterlife — Armstrong’s Midwestern background shines through: The track sounds like a Chicago house track that wasn’t, with a laconically pulsing bass; lone, spaced-out piano chords; and distant, oohing vocals. Eventually, Jeff Parker closes the song with a distorted guitar solo. Playing above and around it all is Armstrong, using her self-built percussion kit, centered on the Afro-Latin cajón. RUSSONELLO
