Lucinda Williams, photo by Danny Clinch

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.

Lucinda Williams has never been one to back down from a fight. Through more than four decades of fearless songwriting that’s defined Americana, she’s earned a reputation for peering past blunt assumptions and cutting through confusion in clear–eyed accounts of our shared conditions. Her voice is powerfully direct, and more urgent now than ever before.

With her 16th studio album, World’s Gone Wrong, Williams confronts the trouble in America’s social landscape with the kind of uncompromising and inspiring storytelling that only she can channel. Across nine new originals, and a soul-stirring cover of Bob Marley’s “So Much Trouble In The World,” her narrative lens is: Beyond an indictment of high-level hypocricies, she faithfully accounts for how it all affects the situation down here on the ground. A righteous outrage simmers under her plain-spoken storytelling, and through it all, she exhibits a duty-bound conviction in songwriting’s use to right the ship. At the chorus of the title track, which follows a nurse and a car salesman as they rally to face another day, she sings: “Come on baby, we gotta be strong/ Dark days are getting long/ Looking for comfort in the song/ Everybody knows the world’s gone wrong.”

On Scenes from Above, Julian Lage’s fifth Blue Note release, the virtuosic guitarist and composer reimagines collaboration. In a new quartet of old friends, linking past stalwarts bassist Jorge Roeder and drummer Kenny Wolleson with storied keyboardist John Medeski, Lage let friction and openness undergird alternately sedate, soulful, harried and hopeful songs. Rather than closely steering the conversation, as on 2024’s celebrated Speak to Me, the bandleader became a bandmate. “I came in with a desire to present this as an egalitarian thing,” Lage said. “My dream with composing, really, is to have something to talk about once we’re together.”

Elsewhere, Cat Power celebrates 20 years of The Greatest with Redux, a new EP that reunites her seventh studio album’s touring band for striking covers of James Brown and Prince, as well as a stripped-back arrangement of her original “Could We.” Sammy Brue honors his late mentor Justin Townes Earle on The Journals, lovingly writing, re-imagining and completing unheard songs he found in the notebooks entrusted to him by Earle’s widow. YĪN YĪN, the Dutch devotees of Southeast Asian music, return with another helping of infectious and delirious disco-soul workouts on Yatta! BBE Music’s highly anticipated tribute to Talking Heads, Naive Melodies, includes eye-opening covers from W.I.T.C.H., Georgia Anne Muldrow, Pachyman, Kenny Dope with Róisín Murphy, Theo Croker and more. German guitarist and producer JJ Whitefield’s improvisation on Birth of Consciousness conjures the transcendental, perfumed air of spiritual jazz’s early innovators. And today, at long last, Tedeschi Trucks Band have unveiled their sixth studio album, Future Soul with the high-spirited “I Got You.”

The latest batch of Relix Staff Picks also includes new music from Van Morrison, Shintaro Sakamoto, Kashus Culpepper, Carolina Chocolate Drops, Draag, Langkamer, Fabiano do Nascimento, Greg Foat, Courtney Barnett, and many more gems. Tune in here.