“Minimalism” is not a word typically associated with New Orleans. Just the city’s name evokes color and heat, brassy music playing from every street corner. From music to food to funerals, New Orleans does it big. So it’s no surprise that when a NOLA-bred group breaks into public consciousness, they go all in.

Papercuts is a solo venture by multi-talented San Francisco songwriter/producer Jason Quever that has been in existence since 2004, if not earlier, but flying mostly under the radar as far as any broad exposure outside the indie world is concerned.

Sharon Van Etten returns with her follow-up to 2019’s Remind Me Tomorrow. Made during the pandemic in her home studio in her new hometown of Los Angeles (following many years of being based in New York), it feels like her most personal statement in quite some time, perhaps even echoing back to her early CD-R releases and sparse, claustrophobic, deeply uncomfortable uneasy listening, folk-inflected debut LP, Because I Was in Love, from all the way back in 2009.

Full disclosure, I am a fairly big fan of almost every musical adventure Jon Spencer has ever been involved in, from wild noise OGs Pussy Galore to the wigged-out Boss Hog to his legendary Blues Explosion. Sadly, that streak ends here.

In the music world, a new Radiohead project feels like a seismic event, commanding the kind of attention that few other bands can. As one of the most universally beloved and remarkably consistent elder statesmen in what can loosely be defined as rock music, Radiohead albums each seem weighty and purposeful, the product of years of careful craftsmanship.

Seattle’s The Head and the Heart are a band that mostly operates within a closely contained musical space. Their quasi-psych neo-folk is maybe too insular at times and stays a little too close to home when it seems they could push the walls out and be more expansive and exploratory, taking their songs in a more unpredictable direction and finding new musical territory to mine without losing the essence of what they are about.

Western fans of ’80s electronic pop who enjoy reaching for long-loved copies of old favorites may experience hearing the reissue of Yukihiro Takahashi’s 1982 solo album WHAT, ME WORRY? like enjoying a period piece that somehow slipped past them.

Mandy Moore, she of This Is Us and film fame, has always maintained a rather discrete profile as a pop rock songwriter with a flair for the picturesque. In Real Life, Moore’s seventh full-length effort, continues that modest tradition with a nuanced but safe record that, if nothing else, is mildly pleasant and simplistically enjoyable.

People in Cars, the third album by London band Curse of Lono was heavily impacted by COVID-19 and, like a lot of others, its trajectory was affected, as was the band itself, when the members acquired day jobs and leader Felix Bechtolsheimer was forced to proceed as “more of a solo project.” He rallied his faculties and pushed forward and made “the record I needed to make.”