For Jess Ribeiro, the creative process often out outshines the finished product. The Melbourne-native (whose 2015 effort, Kill It Yourself, was shortlisted for the Australian Music Prize) recorded her third studio album, LOVE HATE, in the remote seaside town of Lyttleton, New Zealand.

Rose Elinor Dougall knows the trick to defying the laws of time and space. Nearly a decade ago, the former Pipette struck out to cultivate the enchanted garden of Without Why, where her Parisian grandeur and Krautrock cool belied the world-weary wisdom underneath.

Fourteen years on from Stephen Malkmus’ last truly solo record, 2005’s Face the Truth, we receive this missive from an alternate universe Malkmus in which, rather than being an awkward indie-pop legend fronting Pavement and later, to diminishing returns, The Jicks, he is a techno-worshipping, Berlin-clubbing hipster, laying waste to old-fashioned guitar rock through the power of raw beats.

Pitching somewhere between indie rock and jazz, the debut full-length record from New York natives Earthquake Lights is a truly beautiful thing. It is of those albums that comes along as if from nowhere and knocks you sideways with the kind of listening experience which we all dream about having, but in actual fact have very infrequently.

On Bryce Dessner’s latest orchestral triumph, El Chan, the musical polyglot navigates even more effortlessly within the classical music space—adding greater distance between his rock “roots” and his current creative output.

While it may not contain so many of the earth-shattering moments that A Silent Voice is so renowned for, Liz and the Blue Bird manages to make its much smaller story all the more potent and powerful.

Jace Lasek of The Besnard Lakes and Stephen Ramsay of Young Galaxy have come together to form the ambient duo Light Conductor, one so far removed from anything either of them have done before (to these ears at least) as to make it only right to call it a musical re-invention.

Exploring a sonic path away from the Sheffield scene where Joe Carnall has held court since the early aughts—when The Milburns, his post-punk quartet were releasing ska-punk singles, selling out local rooms, and eventually landing a deal with Mercury Records—he sent his new demos to his old mate Matt Helders, before heading to Los Angeles to record Good Cop Bad Cop’s self-titled debut.

It’s hard to find words for how painfully unfunny this film is, but the phrase “unholy garbage” keeps popping to mind.