NILÜFER YANYA My Method Actor (Ninja Tune) — Nilüfer Yanya’s third album, My Method Actor, opens with a grand sense of purpose. Opener “Keep on Dancing” swings with the arched-eyebrow verve of Robyn at her slyest. It’s followed by “Like I Say (I Runaway),” which features Yanya playing intricate guitar lines that draw on a dozen influences at once while an insistent rhythm tugs the listener along like a banner behind a biplane. Working again with producer Wilma Archer in a collaboration that grows more seamlessly simpatico with every release, Yanya crafts a set of songs that are so fresh that it’s as if she’s inventing new form of mashed-up pop on the fly. She understands that boundaries exist only because she sees them when she soars right on by them. “Ready for Sun (Touch)” is enveloping, like a Portishead tracks that’s been simmered in Kara Jackson‘s inverted folk songs, and “Call It Love” is cool enough to suggest vintage Sade infested with Peter Gabriel’s synth edginess. The spare, percolating “Made Out of Memory” demonstrates Yanya’s unique alchemy; it sounds broken and empowered at once (“Drawn and erased, done asking the dust/ There’s nothing around so what you waiting for?/ I’ll dig my own grave, I don’t give a fuck”). Yanya invents with care and quiet intensity. It’s a honor to hear her as she finds her way. Experience the art of the following cuts: “Method Actor,” “Mutations,” “Call It Love,” and “Just a Western.”

KATY J PEARSON Someday Now (Heavenly) — For her third album, Katy J Pearson created a community. The English singer-songwriter ensconced in a comfy Welsh studio with a backing band largely populated by fellow members of the Heavenly Recordings galaxy of stars. Someday Now is an engaging throwback to the entirely unashamed merging of pop and rock that ruled the charts a few decades back, albeit formed with a decidedly modern sensibility. “Save Me” is the emblematic cut, sounding like the song Stevie Nicks would deliver if the twentysomething version of her arrived today after spending her teenage years absorbing Regina Spektor records. “Grand Final” is like Bananarama after a full-scale indie-rock makeover, and “Siren Song” is the sort of track Rickie Lee Jones delivered in the nineteen-nineties, after she’d given up all illusions about ever landing another hit. When the glossy folk-pop of “Someday” hits, Pearson sounds like the most magnetic performer at the coffeehouse, the one who sends new devotees scurrying to the merch table to buy up everything they can. Among producer Nathan Jenkins’s previous credits is Carly Rae Jepsen’s The Loneliest Time, and there’s a similar elegant ease to be found on Pearson’s album. It goes down easy. Don’t wait until someday to check these tracks: “Those Goodbyes,” “Maybe,” “Long Range Diver,” and “Sky.”

NUBYA GARCIA Odyssey (Concord Jazz) — Nubya Garcia’s status as modern jazz royalty is in no danger of being usurped with the release of Odyssey, her sophomore album. Garcia is a tenor saxophonist who’s assembled a group of crackling collaborators, including Sheila Maurice-Grey on trumpet, Rosie Turton on trombone, Joe Armon-Jones on piano, Daniel Casimir’s on bass, Sam Jones on drums. She also bolsters several songs with luxuriant orchestrations provided by the groundbreaking Chineke! Orchestra, a European group dedicated to assembling a more diverse group of musicians than are usually afforded space in concert halls. Garcia presides over this assemblage of talent like Prospero conducting dynamic weather. The tracks are often expansive in their sound, such as the vibrant, exploratory “The Seer” and the thrilling “Solstice,” which sets racing percussion in contrast with yearning, probing horns. Even as the group moves as unit, Garcia makes pace to showcase the individual musicians, as when Armon-Jones’s tender piano playing takes prominence on “Dawn.” The material transforms further on the few tracks that include vocals: “Set It Free” takes on a funk-soul edge when Richie Seivwright from KOKOROKO starts singing, and “We Walk In Gold” takes its cues from Georgia Anne Muldrow’s voice and surfs to the edge of the universe. The album closes with the spectral, steady, firmly assured “Triumphance,” and that song title is fitting. Enjoy the epic poetry of the following tracks: the title cut, “Water’s Path,” and “In Other Words, Living.”