WEDNESDAY Rat Saw God (Dead Oceans) — The Asheville band Wednesday waste little time before showing how big they can go on the new album Rat Saw God. Both quick-hit opening track “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” (which runs just over a minute and half) and massive follow-up “Bull Believer” (which clocks in at more than eight minutes) escalate thunderously with guitar parts that pummel like the strips of canvasy rags in an automatic car wash. Making mighty sounds like that, Wednesday could position themselves as a pure powerhouse, a more approachable version of Sonic Youth, maybe. Instead, the group spends the record proving they can scoop just about any flavor of indie rock into their collective cone. For instance, “Formula One” is delicate enough to be the product of endlessly prolific shoe-dragging, soulful souls in Big Thief. The variations in the album’s sound are unified by the gut-punch lyrics of frontwoman Karly Hartzman, who excavates the wrenching challenges of modern life. The emotionally potent “Chosen to Deserve” is a key example, opening with the lines “We always started by tellin’ all our best stories first/ So now that it’s been awhile I’ll get around/ To tellin’ you all my worst” before racing through hairpin curves of personal experience. In the best way, the album is almost exhausting in its greatness. Get right with God by exalting before the following cuts: “Got Shocked,” “Bath County,” “Turkey Vultures,” and “TV in the Gas Pump.”

KARA JACKSON Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? (September) — In her full-length debut, Kara Jackson redefines what raw power sounds like on record. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? isn’t some scorched-earth, punk-pummeled set of songs. Instead, it often sounds like Jackson is intimately sharing her art in the corner of a dusty attic with pillars of light crossing through the space like they’re load-bearing, fully meant to keep the ceiling from collapsing. With her low, husky voice and songs delivered mostly with little more than stark acoustic guitar, Jackson can come across like Joan Armatrading if she’d gone through Rick Rubin’s nineteen-nineties boot camp for under-appreciated musical legends. That approach centers the emotions of the lyrics, whether based on longing or anger. The intricacy of Jackson’s songwriting is impressive enough to occasionally call to mind the easy certainty of Joni Mitchell (“Pawnshop”), but more often Jackson is fiercely, firmly her own person. The elegant title cut and the quietly seething “Therapy” (“Every man thinks I’m his fucking mother/ Good for milk and good for supper”) effectively make that point. In addition to those already mentioned, give your love to the following cuts: “Dickhead Blues,” “Brain,” “Free,” “Rat,” and “Curtains.”