Every Friday, Relix surveys the wealth of new music released over the past seven days and selects dozens of standouts for the Relix Staff Picks playlist. Read on for the highlights from this week’s batch.

Bill Callahan works from a distance. Through some 30 years of writing and performing songs that marry the pastoral candor of folk tradition with indie rock’s taste for obscurity, he’s stood just near enough to pick apart underdetermined corners of the human condition, but removed enough to control the dosage of his interiority. Alongside his unaffected vocals, arm’s-length poetics have been a cornerstone of his catalog, distilling his deeper meaning into oblique character studies and willfully fragmented glances. But time has a way of breaking down old habits.

My Days of 58 is Callahan’s most personal record to date, if you know how to approach it. With his ninth solo studio album under his own name – and 20th including his releases as Smog – the venerable singer-songwriter maintains his recent trajectory of contemplating more far-reaching and fundamental questions, but now grounds them deeply in his own experience. Insights on his family, home and chosen vocation pile up from journalistic notes on life as it comes to him. He sees himself in the world, and the world in himself, and never imparts the sense that he’s speaking from any perspective but his own.

He’s strikingly forthcoming, in his way. In small moments scattered throughout his observational meditations, he seems to notice his narrative distance and reach through it by snapping into clarity. On “Empathy,” after voicing the realization that he’s just like his father, he steps forward to intone: “I added these lines last/ I don’t know if they’re true.” If his delivery seems dry, spend some time with it, and you’ll hear a closeness waiting to reveal itself; in pauses, long exhales and flights up an octave, he’s awestruck, uncertain and devoted.

“Hobo stew is always the idea — throwing together who I have at hand instead of following a recipe,” Callahan said of a recording process with guitarist Matt Kinsey, tenor saxophonist Dustin Laurenzi and drummer Jim White that privileged intimacy, spontaneity and improvisation:

“I’m always learning. I know very little after all these years. I go by gut mostly, but sometimes forget all the possible considerations to consider. The goal of every record at the recording part of the process is to get thrown out of Eden. Every session starts in Eden but you have to get out of there at some point.”

Buck Meek is back with his fourth studio album, The Mirror. On his follow-up to 2023’s Haunted Mountain, produced by his Big Thief bandmate James Krivchenia, the singer-songwriter and guitarist feels around the hazy contours of love and intimacy with a wide-eyed reverence for their mercurial undercurrents. Longstanding collaboration is similarly essential to Bill Frisell’s fifth Blue Note album, In My Dreams, for which the celebrated jazz guitarist tapped into decades of chemistry with a new supergroup of Jenny Scheinman on violin, Eyvind Kang on viola, Hank Roberts on cello, Thomas Morgan on bass and Rudy Royston on drums.

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Nothing, Langkamer, Fabiano do Nascimento, Shintaro Sakamoto, Group A.D., DJ Harrison, Courtney Barnett, Victoryland, and many more gems. Tune in here.