Bruce Hornsby, photo by David McClister

Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch, presented by Qobuz: experience the difference with high-quality music streaming and human-curated selections from the platform that puts artists first.

Bruce Hornsby’s four decades of fearlessly extending rock’s horizons have been guided by his voracious taste for all types of music. From the beginning, his musical identity has been defined by gestures to folk, jazz, pop, classical, bluegrass, jam and more, cohering as an influential force of innovation in his personal and approachable songwriting. As he’s gotten comfortable in his new role as an elder statesman among artists raised on his music, his omnivorious instinct has only strengthened, and input from an ever-expanding community of collaborators helps him keep his open mind. “I don’t like to live in a vacuum or a bubble,” Hornsby shares in a new Relix feature.

“I like to see if anybody else feels like I do because there’s a very real psychological phenomenon in all this that I’ve known about for years and, alas, it’ll drive you crazy. It’s the phenomenon of hearing your music, or hearing anybody’s music, through other people’s ears.”

Today, Hornsby released Indigo Park, his ninth solo studio album, via Zappo Productions/Thirty Tigers. For his first project since 2024’s Deep Sea Vents, his connection with yMusic as BrhyM, the singer-songwriter and pianist rallied celebrated friends like Ezra Koenig, Bonnie Raitt, Blake Mills and the late Bob Weir, whose part on “It Might As Well Be Me (Florinda)” powerfully punctuates a long history of collaboration. Throughout the project, Hornsby draws on his deep knowledge of music’s technical and cultural intricacies to pressure-test convention, pairing unstable, enthralling melodies with lyrical depth and scrutinizing themes of memory and its elisions. He wrote the title track first, setting the album’s tone with a warped memory of a “great big entrance” gone awry at a 10th-grade party at Williamsburg, Va.’s Indigo Park Pool.

“It’s just an old bastard, looking back,” Hornsby reflected in a release. “To be honest, I’ve found a way, a path to grow old gracefully, with help from some newborn friends of mine.”

Six years to the day after the arrival of 2020’s Grammy-winning It Is What It Is, Thundercat has returned with his fifth album, Distracted. The singer-songwriter and pathbreaking bassist’s long-awaited follow-up turns his eclectic brand of leftfield funk and jazz fusion on the absurdity of the attention economy and its permeation throughout modern life. Through close collaboration with producer Greg Kurstin, the project strikes a balance between the lush freak-outs of 2017’s Drunk and the mournful overtones of It Is What It Is and features contributions from A$AP Rocky, Lil Yachty, WILLOW, Tame Impala and Channel Tres, as well as a posthumous verse from his friend Mac Miller on “She Knows Too Much.”

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Wendy Eisenberg, Bon Iver, Angine de Poitrine, U2, Charely Crockett, Sunn O))), Earl Sweatshirt, MIKE and SURF GANG, Elizabeth & The Catapult, Arlo Parks, Robber Robber, Los Retros, Codefendants, Nightmares on Wax and Adrian Sherwood, Kronos Quartet and many more gems. Tune in here.