New Music Friday: Stream new projects from Waxahatchee, Nourished By Time, Jlin, and more

Katie Crutchfield's first solo album since 2020's Saint Cloud is the first she has written and recorded since getting sober. It's not an album reflecting on dark periods of excess, however, instead focusing on the peace that comes with a life no longer at the mercy of drastic highs and lows. This fruitful consistency anchors songs like "Lone Star Lake," where the drama extends to little more than a lie-in and a road trip. Elsewhere, Crutchfield writes tenderly about long-term relationships ("Right Back To It") as well as more explicitly confronting addiction and the changes in her social circle. Wednesday's MJ Lenderman plays guitar across the album including on "Bored." That song, a chugging country rock track that bursts with melody, neatly captures the way a clear mind alters perspectives. Tired of listening to a friend's problems, Crutchfield sings. "My benevolence just hits the floor / I get boooooooooored." Tigers Blood suggests that placid weariness is a mode that suits her. — David Renshaw

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Early last year, I saw Nourished By Time open for Dry Cleaning. The show was held at a mid-sized rock club, but the Baltimore artist brought the intimacy of a house show to the venue with his songs, bedroom electro-pop colored with dreamy R&B melodies. The music filled the room in an efficient translation of the spartan, soaring quality found on his breakout project, 2022's Erotic Probiotic. Catching Chickens, NbT's new five-track EP and his first for XL Recordings, goes bigger without losing any of the oddball spark. "Hell Of A Ride" sets the mood perfectly, opening the project with a combination of dusty indie rock riffs, jaunty house chords, and melodic raps about disaffected youth. It's one of three songs that explore the guitar, each one in very different ways: "Had Ya Called" is mutant psychedelic house-funk, while "Poison-Soaked" offers gothy shoegaze that sounds like a prayer. It's easy to wish Catching Chickens was longer even if the EP's format captures how NbT's music sounds: So much, done so well and so differently, in such a short amount of time. — Jordan Darville

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Jlin’s propulsive polyrhythms have always pushed the boundaries of footwork through their transforming textures and fluctuating movement. As complex and dense as they are kinetic, they’re pulsing, minimalist productions you can’t help but marvel at, wondering at times whether her stippling beats and teetering time signatures are actually bound by the laws of physics. Akoma is no exception. Jlin’s third album also sees her experimenting with other stylistic influences, resulting in a mercurial mix of 11 tracks with a number of superstar collaborators. From the type of sounds you’d expect to hear in a horror score (“Summon”) or an 18th-century gala being held in a sub-heavy club (“Sodalite" featuring Kronos Quartet), Akoma is her most accessible work to date. Listened from front to back, it’s an album where each song seemingly exists in its own little world. At least until you realize they’re blended so seamlessly into one another, Björk’s deconstructed voice on “Borealis” has somehow turned into Philip Glass’ ghostly piano on “The Precision of Infinity.” — Sandra Song

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Julia Holter has always made exploratory music, songs that feel like long walks around unfamiliar cities or dense forests. But Something in the Room She Moves, created from the confines of her home during deep COVID, spreads its focus across a much smaller area. Battling creative stagnation and engrossed in the responsibilities of new motherhood, the Los Angeles art-pop innovator could only look inward for novel ideas. Rather than overintellectualize her situation, however, she found inspiration in the sounds of her body: the heartbeat as pulse, the fluids as soundscape, sensitivity to light and its opposite as thematic ammunition. The album’s stunning opener “Sun Girl” was an intricate vision Holter had all but given up on, finding the power to articulate it only through regaining her sense of spontaneous play in a jam session. The project’s delirious centerpiece “Spinning,” on the other hand, imagines artistic creation as a blind, panicked process. For the most part, though, the songs’ lyrics are secondary to the sound worlds Holter creates by mixing her enrapturing voice and interwoven keyboard and synth lines with lofty woodwinds, sonorous fretless bass, oceanic backing choirs, and the smoothest bagpipes you’ve ever heard, courtesy of her small army of collaborators. Despite the circumstances of its creation, Something never feels claustrophobic; rather, it’s Holter’s warmest, most expansive work yet. — Raphael Helfand

Hear it: Spotify | Apple Music | Bandcamp