It’s rare that covers albums live up to their billing. Typically, they are either boilerplate or staid and boring. Love, LA is not your typical covers album.

The ancient bleep and buzz of dial-up opens and closes Arab Strap’s eighth and probably best album. These bookends serve to humorously demarcate the online realm that much of this record inhabits, while also nodding at the advancing age of its creators.

Mdou Moctar (aka Mahamadou Souleymane) has come a long way since building his first guitar out of wood and bicycle brake cables as a teenager.

Kamasi Washington’s greatest triumphs are of ambition.

There is a certain rose-colored magic imparted upon adolescence by those who’ve left it behind. The days of youth are meant to be the best of your life, the days you will look back on and treasure long after they’ve faded into the rearview.

“I liked who we were together / I’m not sure who I’ll be apart,” sings Tracyanne Campbell, and suddenly nine years disappear, and the loss of Carey Lander feels painfully fresh.

Jessica Pratt knows how to keep people waiting. It’s been five long years since the release of Quiet Signs, a record that found her working in the studio for the first time and elevated her quietly mesmerizing songs to a new level of expertise and public awareness.

Released as a four-LP box set for Record Store Day 2024, The Beginning and Then Some collects Dwight Yoakam’s first three records, along with a bonus LP of demos and rarities that leans heavy on the 1981 cuts that ultimately led him to his first album.

Coming off equal parts celebratory and downcast isn’t the easiest of feats to pull off. But the duo of Maya Bon and Ryan Albert, operating as Babehoven, manage to tackle that with an expert level of aplomb.