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Up Late with Dumbells jangles and chimes, singing out fetching scraps of melody in exuberant harmony. The Sydney, Australia band is scrappy, too, bristling with rackety, guitar-slashing, drum-bashing energies, but there’s a sweetness here. They seem more like a Slumberland band than a Total Punk outfit, though to be fair, they’re on Total Punk’s offshoot label, Mind Meld.

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Kai Slater of Lifeguards brings the 1960s 12-string jangle to Sharp Pins, conjuring the bittersweet baroque pop magic of icons like the Hollies, the Byrds and Tom Petty. The Chicagoan band, out of the thriving Hallogallo scene, puts its own stamp on spiky melancholic garage pop, letting the windmill chords rip and the choruses billow around dream-fuzzed “Every Time I Hear” and softening a fierce and fractious energy with falsetto on the fey stomping “Lorelei.” The band shows its softer side on folky rambles like “Chasing Stars,” where a diffident, British-inflected melody winds hazily through sharp-edged flurries of resonant guitar, but the best cuts here balance fluttering tuneful-ness with slashing, bashing rock and roll. Case in point, “If I Was Ever Lonely,” whose splintering baroque licks peel off from straight up four-four anthemry; the song is both delicate and body-thumping, melancholic and oddly triumphant.

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French musician Sébastien Roux is an inveterate sonic explorer, utilizing an engineering background in computer signal processing to develop compositions, multi-channel sound installations, radio pieces and site-specific performances. Over the course of the last 20 years, he has released recordings like More Songs and Quatuor which use the individual parts of Beethoven’s “String Quartet No. 10” as the basis for an electroacoustic exploration of form and timbre. Inevitable Music #5 is a sonic translation of Sol Lewitt’s instructions for wall drawings composed for the Dedalus Ensemble while Musiques D'ordinateur is computer music developed from formal investigations into algorithmic procedures. Roux’s most recent release, Les disparitions (the disappearances) is a series of studies for viola, voice, cello and electronics which delve into the nature of sound and its decay; how does sound disappear and how does one perceive that departure?

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Photo by Jon Thom Moodie Tuesday

Martin Phillips got an unexpected second wind in the mid-2010s, after a second round of experimental treatment for hepatitis C proved successful. For the first time in a decade, the Chills singer and songwriter was able to write and perform and even tour, and he attacked this bonus round of creative life with fervor. The Chills released three albums of new material in quick succession, and with a band this good, Phillips began to think about the reams of older material he’d accumulated over the years.

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Photo by Graham Tolbert

The North Carolina-based Fust flexes its country rock muscles in this third full-length, its hangdog tales delivered in sweeping, twangy crescendos. The band, headed by guitarist and singer/songwriter Aaron Dowdy, has never sounded better, marshaling a wall of rustic sound built of three guitars (one pedal steel), a bass, fiddle, piano and drums.

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In the wonderful and frightening world of electronic music, whatever flavor the month might bring, there are clean sounds and dirty sounds. This distinction has little to do with home or professional production, especially now that high-end equipment innovations have graced lower-cost equivalents. The clean/dirty dichotomy is an aesthetic choice, something like a world view with just as many gradations. J.WLSN’s sounds are dirty, by which I mean grungy, a cultivated and grainy imprecision of pitch amidst sounds coming remarkably close to the whims and whiles of life as we know it. The opening moment of the ironically named “Lulled,” first track on J.WLSN’s new album The Rush, hits home like a hammer and then oozed outward to each side with the felicitous  fuzz, thump and goo of reverb-soaked technology in familial decay.

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The publicity shy artist known as Sun Home Audio wafts airy threads of folk melody over serene acoustic picking, letting solar winds of electronic distortion blow into placid compositions for texture and drama. The opening salvo on this six-song EP, “An Unearthly Offering” is ethereal with an undercurrent of chaotic entropy. It seems to become what it is as you listen to it, taking shape out of a primordial sea of folk-leaning sound, then dissolving into hiss and static.

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Photo by Timothy Musho

Fresh off a third outstanding duet recording with Nathan Salsburg, Chicago-based guitarist James Elkington has released a double album of acoustic guitar-based instrumentals. The generous helping of 27 tracks offers up a variety of sounds and textures that cohere into a kind of journey rooted in the library and folk music traditions of his native Britain. Sweetened with atmospheric electric guitar, electronics, and hints of percussion, the songs on Pastel de Nada (a pun on a Portuguese pastry called pastel de nata) are both inventive and easy on the ears.

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This third album from the British/German artist known as Anika is far more driving than 2021’s Change, its post-punk urgencypropelled by coruscating bass and smashing, bashing, skittering drums. That sophomore outing incorporates elements of trippy-hoppy dub and acoustic folk into its DNA; this one drifts less and kicks harder. It’s one of the best albums so far in 2025.

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