THROWING MUSES Moonlight Concessions (Fire) — Moonlight Concessions arrives five years after the preceding Throwing Muses album, a fact that taken at face value obscures just how busy the band’s driving force, Kristin Hersh, has been in the meantime. The time in between Throwing Muses’ eleventh full-length saw the release of a Hersh solo album, also number eleven on the on-her-own tally, and the long-gestating sophomore LP by her band 50 Foot Wave. Impressively prolific in her songwriting, Hersh knows precisely where each new bonding of music and lyrics belongs when she crafts it. In the case of the nine selections on Moonlight Concessions, Hersh has noted they reminded her of what Throwing Muses sounded like when they were first starting out, before record company bigwigs started muddling with the band’s creative process to chase some mythical MTV stardom. That long-lost sound is lean, gnarly, and propulsive, like their Boston scene cohorts Pixies without the anxious need to impress the punk kids. There’s a barbed-wire certainty to the limber, low-toned “Summer of Love” and the fierce and flinty “Drugstore Drastic.” The intensity remains even when the volume is reduced, as on the stately, whispery ballad “Theremini.” Elsewhere, “Albatross” sounds like a rock song that’s been hollowed out, a quality that only strengthens the use of a metaphor of an ailing bird to explore a relationship on the decline. Hersh and her cohorts have always come across as smart and assured, which made their difficulty in fully breaking through to larger audiences and the appropriate level of critical reverence deeply frustrating. It’s a triumph for all discerning listeners that they kept plugging away. Moonlight Concessions is pure testimony of the value of that perseverance. In addition to those already mentioned, give in to the following cuts: “South Coast,” “Sally’s Beauty,” “You’re Clouds,” and the title track.

JAPANESE BREAKFAST For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women) (Dead Oceans) — When Michelle Zauner was set record For Melancholy Brunettes (& sad women), her fourth proper studio album as Japanese Breakfast, she was sitting on a much higher pop culture rung that ever before. Jubilee, her previous outing (not counting the 2021 soundtrack for the video game Sable), was a smash in the indie rock world, and her bestselling memoir, Crying in H Mart, earned her an even greater level of fame. All that acclaim could be stifling. Instead, Zauner has seemingly let it fuel her to push further with her musical art. Working with producer Blake Mills, who’s also signed his name to releases from Lucy Dacus and Perfume Genius this year, Zauner makes a conscious attempt to move away from the effusiveness of Jubilee in search of something, well, more melancholy. The lyrics often go dark (betrayal, fear, toxic masculinity) while the music is luxuriant, lovely, and precise. “Here Is Someone” evokes the most soothing seventies sounds, and “Honey Water” is as if Washed Out make their own Songs from the Big Chair. Much as the main Japanese Breakfast mode is something like the wafting ballad “Leda,” there’s a definite willingness to venture into unexpected places. “Men in Bars” is a light twanger that finds Zauner in a duet with Jeff Bridges, in full Kristoffersonian grumble-gravel charm. The album is highly polished and offhandedly bold. Zauner is clearly going to keep climbing that ladder. Wallow in these tracks: “Orlando in Love,” “Mega Circuit,” “Picture Window,” and “Magic Mountain.”