1) Brittany Howard, “What Now” / To borrow a title phrase from her band Alabama Shakes, Howard just keeps delivering sounds and colors, altering the way we see and hear in the most pleasurable ways. Howard’s latest boasts 12 sensational songs that work on the listener at the pure level of enjoyment (and the many, often hidden levels beneath).
2) David Nance and Mowed Sound, s/t / Emanating from the Nebraska Plains to the rest of us, Nance and Co. offer a strange, rough-hewn, ultimately sublime take on country-rock grooves. Perfect for the road trip you never planned on taking.
3) The music of Masayoshi Fujita / The Japanese (and now Berlin-based) composer creates wonderful weather systems in music, drawing natural and deliberate ambience from the resonance of his vibraphone.
4) Brandon Taylor, “Stalin, Lenin, Robespierre” for Granta / Any Brandon Taylor story deserves undivided attention; this one, about learning to live inside moments we only read about or observe in paintings, possesses great, sentence-level desires expressed and curiosities unspooled. The story speaks of the “most beautiful moment in all of English-language literature” and “just two people in a room somewhere in the whole vast world of seemingly like temperament” with equal soul and gravity.
5) Diane Oliver, “Neighbors and Other Stories” / Nearly 60 years after her death in a car accident at just 22, Oliver’s stories are receiving their rightful due; gathered here, they create emotionally-sound, detail-rich fictions that tell Bibles full of truths about Black America before and between movements toward greater civil rights.