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.

Even in his famously unpredictable catalog, Sturgill Simpson’s new album is a radical departure. Today, the country-rock subversive formally released Mutiny After Midnight, his second studio album as Johnny Blue Skies. After 2024’s Passage Du Desir imbued his discrete Americana stylings with the most melodic strains of classic Southern rock and a tender blend of humor and melancholy, his latest promised to radically sidestep expectations with “a dance record… The dance of all creation.”

“To be clear it is a protest against oppression and suppression,” Simpson expressed in a letter to his fans, “and the only tried & tested true antidote to that is pure, unfiltered, unapologetic, relentless disco-hedonism.”

He’s nothing if not a man of his word. Across the nine-track cycle available exclusively on physical formats and, unexpectedly, via YouTube, Simpson and his road-hardened Dark Clouds band of drummer Miles Miller, guitarist Laur Joanets, bassist Kevin Black and keyboardist and saxophonist Robbie Crowell strut hungrily into smoked-out dancefloors and zip their rough and tumble country tendencies into prowling disco rhythms. Over unrelentingly soulful and funky arrangements, drawing on a shared love of deep cuts like ‘70s fusion supergroup Stuff and Marvin Gaye’s 1981 concept album In Our Lifetime, the frontman pours out unflinching reflections on social upheaval and calls for resistance, reaching listeners’ hearts and minds through their bodies. Despite its highly unconventional, borderline-offhanded album cycle, the impactful messages and inventive genre fusions within betray deep intention. In these times, cutting loose is serious business.

With We Are Together Again, his thirty-first studio album, Will Oldham (as Bonnie “Prince” Billy) submits another meticulously sculpted collection of the honest and consoling leftfield folk he’s mastered through three decades of introspection. Under gathering clouds of dread, contracting to solo acoustic and opening up in rich symphonic swings, the storied singer-songwriter locates hope in community and in the same curiosity that continues to drive him. “We start small, continue small, like oak tree seeds or the sperm-and-egg concoctions mixologized by the parents of movers-and-shakers since the dawn of time,” he said in a release. “Plant these songs into your soul’s brain, into your existence’s heart and the trees will grow and fruit and flourish and nourish.”

Elsewhere, Shabaka has returned with Of the Earth, a spirited, effervescent follow-up to 2024’s Percieve Its Beauty, Acknowledge its Grace that shows the British jazz experimentalist and multi-instrumentalist reuniting with his saxophone after years spent exploring an array of flutes. Dutch Interior are as dreamily forthright as ever on their It’s Glass EP, seemingly emanating from a faith in the longstanding creative kinship charging their homespun country-slowcore. Natalie Jane Hill’s Hopeful Woman is incisive, wild, fullhearted, understanding and lined with storytelling so transportive to cast the listener out of their own experience, and carefully return them with a new gratitude for all life’s wonderful confusion and clarity. GUM, aka Pond’s Jay Watson, takes a trip into vivid moving landscapes of easygoing psych-rock, indie-pop, dub and subtle funk on Blue Gum Way.

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.