Better Oblivion Community Center

• Song: Dylan Thomas

Better Oblivion Community Center is last week’s surprise collaboration from the songwriting team of Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers. It’s a harmonious fusion of alt-country and modern folk. Among the album’s standouts is “Dylan Thomas,” an homage to the Welsh poet and writer known for his idiosyncratic introspection and boisterous drinking — the latter ultimately leading to his untimely death in 1953.

Better Oblivion Community Center is available now from Dead Oceans.

Bellows

• Song: The Rose Gardener

“The Rose Gardener,” the new single from Bellows — the recording project of Brooklyn based songwriter and producer Oliver Kaib — examines the challenges of making art in the current climate of political divisiveness, comparing the creative process to the tending of a rose bud in the dead of winter. The record features support from a bevy of friends and fellow bedroom artists, including members of Gabby’s World and Florist.

The Rose Gardener is out Feb. 22 via Topshelf Records.

Duster

• Song: What You’re Doing To Me

In the late ’90s, San Jose trio Duster quietly perfected a blend of slowcore-meets-space rock style of music. Stratosphere, the band’s 1998 debut, is regarded as an emblem of the decade’s lo-fi, indie movement. After nearly 20 years of inactivity, Duster is back with Capsule Losing Contact, a box set containing two full-length LPs, their 1975 EP, demos, and previously unreleased singles, including “What You’re Doing to Me.”

Capsule Losing Contact is available March 22 via Numero Group.

Heather Woods Broderick

• Song: Where I Lay

Although known for her contributions to influential projects, including Horse Feathers, Sharon Van Etten, and Laura Gibson, the songwriter Heather Woods Broderick has found her own voice in the world of folk, releasing two delicate and gorgeous records in the past decade: 2009’s From the Ground and 2015’s Glider. This April, Broderick returns with Invitation, a memento of the singer’s time spent recording in the mist of the Oregon coast last year. In a press release, Broderick shared that “Where I Lay,” the album’s lead single, is “a poem about the impermanence of all things.”

Invitation is out April 19 via Western Vinyl.

Jackie Mendoza

• Song: De Lejos

With a playful combination of electro-pop and Latin-driven beats, Jackie Mendoza first caught our attention at last year’s SXSW music festival. Fans of the Tiny Desk series might remember “De Lejos” as Mendoza’s submission to last year’s Tiny Desk Contest, the NPR Music series that provides a platform for emerging artists from around the world. Recently signed to Luminelle Recordings, Mendoza is slated to announce her debut album’s release date in the coming weeks.

Mdou Moctar

• Song: Kamane Tarhanin

Growing up in a small village outside of Niger, secular music was strictly off limits for the Tuareg guitarist Mdou Moctar. Flash forward to 2018 where, while recording his first studio album, the artist bonded with Detroit producer Chris Koltay over their mutual love of ZZ Top. It’s easy to imagine the breadth of Mocatar’s musical influences. “Kamane Tarhanin,” the debut single from Ilana (The Creator), is a droning, hypnotic, and psychedelic meditation.

Ilana (The Creator) is available March 29 via Sahel Sounds.

Ilana: The Creator by Mdou Moctar

47Soul

• Song: Intro to Shamstep

This quartet of guys who are members of the Palestinian diaspora (two from Jordan, one raised in Washington, D.C. and one in Israel) layer the dabke beat — which has powered the dance moves of the Eastern Mediterranean for at least hundreds of years — with synths, raps, drum machines and ebullient choruses sung in both Arabic and English. With lyrics that are at once intensely political and sweetly universal, this is one “smart party band,” as contributor Rob Weisberg says.

Orquesta Akokán

• Song: Mambo Rapidito

This powerhouse big band, comprised of a blend of Cuban musicians and self-styled “Latin music freaks” from New York, revels in the lush, plush sounds that made Cuban artists like Machito and Mario Bauza famous at New York nightclubs and with American music fans in the 1940s and 1950s. When globalFEST decided to host this year’s edition at New York’s Copacabana nightclub — a venue with a history that stretches back nearly 80 years and boasts a long association with Latin music — the festival’s organizers decided that Akokán had to be the first group they invited this time around.

Jeremy Dutcher

• Song: Mehcinut

The kind of work that the Polaris Prize-winning Dutcher makes is perfect for a certain and very current artistic moment: dreamy and intensely ambient music that will appeal to fans of artists like Max Richter and Ólafur Arnalds. But there’s a whole lot more going on beneath the surface: Dutcher matches his classical vocal training with the language and songs of his First Nation people, the Wolastoq of eastern Canada — and performs achingly beautiful, time-crossing dialogues with his ancestors by sampling 110-year old wax cylinder recordings of other Wolastoqiyik singers in his own work. The ease of Dutcher’s sonic textures belie the urgency of his mission: it’s believed that there are only about 100 speakers of the Wolastoqey language in the world today.

Cha Wa

• Song: Li’l Liza Jane

This New Orleans band meshes Mardi Gras Indian krewe traditions with another revered lineage from their native city: funky horns. Cha Wa’s party sounds, and brilliantly colored, elaborately feathered dress could barely be contained by the small space of the Copa’s basement studio. (Literally: their headdresses were brushing the venue’s low-set ceiling.)

Amythyst Kiah

• Song: Darlin Corey

“Southern Gothic, alt-country blues” is what this Tennessee-based singer-songwriter calls her work, which is a fluid combination of her own, wry material and reverent (but bracingly fresh) covers of the music she’s inherited, from the folk song “Darlin Corey” to the work of blues masters like the Reverend Gary Davis to Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” But what will really stop you dead in your tracks is her voice, which manages at once to be butterscotch-rich and still cut like a knife.

Magos Herrera & Brooklyn Rider

• Song: Niña

An inspired partnership between the Mexican jazz singer and the classical-and-beyond string quartet led to one of our favorite albums of 2018, the ineffably lovely and very timely Dreamers, a collection of texts from great Latin American poets and songwriters. Heard live (and joined by percussionist Mathias Kunzli, who also appears on the album), their performances were just as deeply felt, but they’re much better suited to a cozy room than to a barely insulated “rooftop” space at the Copacabana that they were afforded at globalFEST. Even so, the musicians transcended the limitations of the space, and soared far above even the Manhattan skyline.

Dakh Daughters

• Song: Lyudyna

If you’re already acquainted with the Ukrainian group DakhaBrakha (that fierceness! those hats!), you might have an idea of what the female troupe Dakh Daughters — born out of the same arts center in Kiev — might have in store, with a similarly heavily stage-crafted presentation, this time with each performer’s face painted not unlike a porcelain doll. (Don’t let that mask of fragility fool you, though.) But this punk cabaret act is a more purely performative experience, melding theatrical monologues with intricately harmonized Ukrainian folk music.

Debashish Bhattacharya

This Calcutta-based slide guitarist is a perennial NPR Music favorite and Tiny Desk alumnus. He’s meshed his youthful fascination with Hawaiian steel guitar and love of the blues with the architecture and vocabulary of Hindustani (North Indian) classical music. The result is intoxicating — and, as you can hear in his 2013 Tiny Desk Concert below, brilliant.

B.C.U.C.

• Song: Yinde

This group from Soweto, South Africa (and more formally named Bantu Continua Uhuru Consciousness) mixes the rich musical legacy of Soweto — from ritual music to songs from churches and shebeens alike — with raps, funk and Afrobeat flow.

Gato Preto

• Song: Moçambique

Afrofuturism is now, in the hands of this Dusseldorf, Germany-based duo. They draw upon the sounds of Mozambique, Ghana, Senegal, Angola and Portugal to make pulsating, four-on-the-floor club beats.

Tempo by Gato Preto

Combo Chimbita

• Song: Ampárame

This New York-based band delivered a high-octane dose of a style they’ve dubbed “tropical futurism” to close out the night. They blend Afro-Caribbean sounds with cumbia, psychedelia and even a hint of prog rock, all metabolized by frontwoman Carolina Oliveros’ muscular voice and her frenetic playing of the guacharaca, a scraped percussion instrument.