BENJAMIN BOOKER Lower (Fire Next Time) — As he worked on his third full-length release, New Orleans–based singer-songwriter Benjamin Booker looked out on a damaged world, and it shows. Lower is recognizably the product of the same person who previously put out soulful, bluesy records, but there’s a newfound nihilism deep at the core of his songs. Booker sought help for the album from producer Kenny Segal, best known for his work with L.A. rap acts, and the result is a series of tracks that so raw it’s like they were dragged across pavement. Album opener “Black Opps” is infused with plodding dread, and “Speaking with the Dead” is unsettling like a prolonged death rattle. There are times when Booker lets rays of hope break through the boarded-up windows of his psyche, as with the spectral ballad “Slow Dance in a Gay Bar” (“I am beginning to see the beauty all around me/ What this life can be”). The prevailing sentiment is much darker, though, typified by the deep grunge groove of “Same Kind of Lonely,” a track that includes audio from a school shooting juxtaposed against the cooing sounds of Booker’s daughter. Or there’s “Hope for the Night Time,” a boozy sob story that sounds like Tom Waits after he emerged from a flophouse where he’d been binging on Sigur Rós. If none of that makes Lower sound like a fun party record, it certainly suits the time in which it was released. It meets the moment. In that, it is a bracing, powerful work. Go deeper with “LWA in the Trailer Park,” “Rebecca Latimer Felton Takes a BBC,” “New World,”

FKA TWIGS Eusexua (Atlantic / Young) — It is absolutely grading on a curve to declare that FKA twigs comes across as almost accessible on Eusexua, her third proper studio album. The daring English performer had previously distinguished herself with releases that pumped pop and R&B through a warped gramophone horn and slither-shimmied to the what came echoing out. Coining the term that serves as the album’s title and defining it as a sort of icy female empowerment, FKA twigs relinquishes none of her unnerving suaveness as she relents to the idea that beats and melodies can be cleaner and clearer and still envelop the listener. The title cut is a little like Robyn tilting towards the delicate side of herself, a comparison that should make clear how easy it goes down. Again, this is all relative. FKA twigs is too instinctually iconoclastic to even give into to the post-post-disco equivalent of rhyming June with moon. She still delivers off-kilter wonders such as the splendidly fidgety “Room of Fools” and the malfunctioning spaceship sounds lilting through “24hr Dog.” It’s to her credit that these hairpin turns sit just fine against the wiry groove and electronica sleekness of “Girl Feels Good” and the spare ballad “Sticky.” She does the only thing a real can do: Everything she makes it truly, purely her. In addition to those already mentioned, get to know the following cuts: “Perfect Stranger,” “Keep It, Hold It,” “Striptease,” and “Wanderlust”