Lucy Dacus, 'Ankles'

"What if we don't touch?" Dacus suggests at the beginning of "Ankles," a preview of her fourth album, "Forever Is a Feeling." She continues, "What if we only talk about what we want and cannot have?" Then she gets very specific about her desires, from a love bite to crossword-puzzle help. Cellos chug repeated notes and string instruments shimmer like vintage Fleetwood Mac as Dacus basks in tenuous togetherness, crooning, "How lucky are we to have so much to lose?"

David Gray, 'Eyes Made Rain'

Gray's new album, "Dear Life," is filled with poetically ambiguous songs about coming to grips with the end of a long relationship. "No two hearts the same / through all this time," he moans in "Eyes Made Rain," while he realizes, "Now it's gone and we won't ever see its like again." The song revolves around a steady, comforting fingerpicking patter, but the high, tense rasp in his voice rips through it.

Marshall Allen featuring Neneh Cherry, 'New Dawn'

Saxophonist Allen, 100 years old, has long carried on the legacy of Sun Ra, the Afrofuturist visionary who claimed to be from Saturn; he has maintained the communal big band, the Arkestra, since Ra's death in 1993. "New Dawn" is the title track from the first album that names Allen as a leader — a debut at 100! — and it's deep in Ra's era-melting ethos. It's a leisurely, jazz-chorded ballad, composed by Allen, with lyrics by Knoel Scott that urge, "Arise and seek / Hear spirit speak." Cherry sings with fond composure over sustained strings and a rustling rhythm section, and Allen's alto saxophone solo scurries down polytonal paths, still frisky.

Galactic and Irma Thomas, 'Lady Liberty'

Two New Orleans stalwarts, singer Thomas and the band Galactic, have teamed up for an album due in April, "Audience With the Queen." Its first single, "Lady Liberty," harks back to the socially conscious funk of Allen Toussaint songs like "Yes We Can Can," with Thomas declaring, "Time to shuffle these cards that we've been dealt and free ourselves / If you don't do something, you know nothing's gonna change." The horns and bass line strut; the lyrics hunker down for a long siege.

OK Go, 'A Stone Only Rolls Downhill'

OK Go's latest single — from what will be its first album since 2014 — arrives, as usual, with an ingenious, playful, effort-packed video clip: a kaleidoscopic mosaic of intricately coordinated cellphone videos, directed by the band's lead singer, Damian Kulash, and Chris Buongiorno. Yet the audio can stand on its own. It's a glum, wistful look ahead: "I wish I could say it would all be all right," it begins. But amid cowbell taps, a woozy synthesizer line and prettily stacked vocal harmonies, the song is a confession of evaporating hopes, a bleak realization that "These things will be what they will."

JON PARELES, New York Times

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Larkin Poe, "Bloom"

FKA Twigs, "EUSEXUA"

Benjamin Booker, "Lower"

Mogwai, "The Bad Fire"