▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Lindsay Lou, ‘I’ve Endured’
“I’ve Endured” is a longtime bluegrass standard written by Ola Belle Reed, who started performing in the 1940s. It’s a reminiscence about hardscrabble mountain living and an open question: “How long can one endure?” It will be included on “Bluegrass Women” by the guitarist and singer Lindsay Lou, an all-star album due Aug. 14 that brings together many of the women who have mastered string-band instruments. On “I’ve Endured,” Lou shares vocals with Sarah Jarosz (on octave mandolin) and Emma Rose (on bass), backed by Sierra Hull on mandolin, Brittany Haas (of Punch Brothers) on fiddle and Allison de Groot on banjo. Their harmony makes its own implicit statement of solidarity.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Nu Jazz, ‘In My City’
Wrenching hardcore vocals, jazz rhythms, math-rock patterns and electronic loops all fuel the music of Nu Jazz, a New York City sextet that includes members of Deli Girls, Wrens and the Narcotix. “In My City,” from the new album “Un Jazz,” swiftly and fiercely builds up an almost unbearable pressure, with a hurtling beat behind a welter of vocals and instrumental lines, as purposeful and packed as the most crowded urban intersection.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
Shearwater featuring Laurie Anderson, ‘You and Your Dog’
Shearwater provides a self-effacing instrumental backdrop for Laurie Anderson’s spoken words on the closing track from the band’s new album, “The New World.” “Do you remember that day we drove to the beach and the sea was gone?” Anderson asks, in what becomes a meditation on perception, friendship, reconciliation and loss. Shearwater’s accompaniment is a serene, slowly evolving minimalist group improvisation, with recurring, overlapping piano lines and a quietly plaintive clarinet. It hints at both foreboding and acceptance.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
What’s New in Instrumental Music
Arca, ‘Syncope’
“XXXXX,” Arca’s first album since her “Kick” series in 2022, is a sketchbook of sound-design inspirations, a long way from clear-cut songs. That doesn’t lessen the impact — preferably through headphones or booming club speakers — of tracks like “Syncope,” named after the medical term for fainting. The track harnesses visceral but uncertain beats and, near the end, nose-diving bass lines and machine-gun accents, to make the whole experience ever more jolting.
▶ Listen on Spotify, Apple Music or YouTube
The Durutti Column, ‘Your Shadow at Morning’
There’s a liminal delicacy to “Your Shadow at Morning” from “Renascent,” the Durutti Column’s first album since its guitarist and leader, Vini Reilly, suffered a series of strokes in 2010. Written and performed with the keyboardist Keir Stewart, the track is an elegiac, minor-key march. Stewart places a subdued chord on each beat, to be topped by Reilly’s wisps of acoustic and electric guitar — melodic but not quite melodies, drifting in and out of the mix like stray memories.
