“Carpenter,” a song by Vagabon, aka Lætitia Tamko, co-produced by Tamko and Rostam, is her first newly created solo music since her 2019 critically acclaimed self-titled album. “‘Carpenter’ is about that humbling feeling when you desperately want to be knowledgeable, you want to be advanced, you want to be mature, forward thinking, and evolved,” Tamko says. “It’s about being confronted with your limitations. It’s about that A-HA moment, when a lesson from the past finally clicks and you want to run and tell someone who bore witness to the old you, ‘I finally get it now.’”

Hurray for the Riff Raff, aka Alynda Segarra, performs “LIFE ON EARTH,” the title track to their 2022 Nonesuch debut album, in this new version with their friends and fellow New Orleans musicians, the Preservation Hall Jazz Band. Segarra describes the album track, which the New York Times’ Lindsay Zoladz named the Best Song of 2022, as “a psalm to all earthly beings.”

Classical singer Julia Bullock makes her solo recording debut with Walking in the Dark. On the album, Bullock and London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, conducted by Christian Reif, perform Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 and a song from John Adams’s El Niño. She is joined by Reif, on piano, for a traditional spiritual and songs by Oscar Brown, Jr., Billy Taylor, Sandy Denny, and Connie Converse. Bullock is “one of the singular artists of her generation,” says the New York Times, “a singer of enveloping tone, startlingly mature presence and unusually sophisticated insight into culture, society and history.”

The Staves celebrate the 10th anniversary of their 2012 debut album, Dead & Born & Grown, with the release of this 180-gram recycled colored vinyl edition. Produced with Glyn and Ethan Johns (The Beatles, The Rolling Stones), Dead & Born & Grown was met with great critical acclaim and set the Staveley-Taylor sisters on the way to becoming one of the UK’s most celebrated indie exports. The recycled vinyl is made from 100% PVC recycled material, using waste material and clippings from previous record pressings, resulting in a unique color combination for each LP.

This first studio recording of Tyondai Braxton's Telekinesis—an eighty-seven-piece work for electric guitars, orchestra, choir, and electronics—features the Metropolis Ensemble conducted by Andrew Cyr, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus conducted by Dianne Berkun Menaker, and chamber choir The Crossing conducted by Donald Nally performing what the Guardian calls "a superpower-themed symphony … a titanic composition." Braxton cites the Japanese manga classic Akira as a thematic guide, with its story of a young boy's discovery of his telekinetic powers and his inability to control it, leading to his own destruction. The Times exclaims: "It's remarkable."

Drummer, composer, and producer Tom Skinner (The Smile, Sons of Kemet)'s album Voices of Bishara is the first recording under his own name. Its title references cellist Abdul Wadud's 1978 album By Myself, which was pressed on Wadud's label, Bisharra—an Arabic name meaning "good news." Voices of Bishara began life when Skinner asked some musician friends to join him for a Played Twice session at London's Brilliant Corners, in which a classic album was played in full through the venue's audiophile system, and a live ensemble improvised a response. That night focused on drummer Tony Williams' 1964 album Life Time; the music they conjured inspired Skinner to write an album's worth of new music.

The Blue Hour is a song cycle born of a collaboration among five composers—Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, and Sarah Kirkland Snider—commissioned and performed by the chamber orchestra A Far Cry, who are joined by singer Shara Nova. Set to excerpts from Carolyn Forché’s epic poem On Earth, the music follows one woman’s journey through the liminal space between life and death via thousands of hallucinatory and non-linear images. Exploring memories of childhood, war, love, and loss, The Blue Hour amplifies the beauty, pain, and fragility of human life from a collective female perspective.

Rhiannon Giddens wrote “Build a House” for the 155th anniversary of Juneteenth in 2020; she performs it here with renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma and multi-instrumentalist Francesco Turrisi. The song, which then inspired Giddens’ children’s book of the same name (out on Candlewick Press), tells of African Americans who were forcibly enslaved and brought to the US to build houses they were not allowed to live in, tend to families who were not their own, and sow the seeds that fed a nation—while being left with only scraps themselves. It depicts a family’s resilience in the face of violence and sorrow.