SAMIA Bloodless (Grand Jury) — For her third full-length release — and first as a Minnesotan following a relocation to Minneapolis — Samia decided it was time for a concept album. There’s no fanciful character threaded through the baker’s dozen tracks of Bloodless, nor is there a plot of magic spells or interstellar tomfoolery to keep track of. It does open (after the briefest of intro tracks) with a song called “Bovine Excision” that takes its title from Midwest lore about cattle mutilations and features densely inscrutable lyrics that are like in-jokes wrapped into a rubber band ball (“Rice wine, lime-flavored Lays/ Passing go to sit in driveways”), so it’s not like Samia is going with cutesy, graspable pop here either. The concept is more about shared feelings of longing, introspection, and realization across the songs. Working with new neighbors such as Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus (who co-produced the album) and Raffaella, Samia offers a collection of charmed and charming indie rock that hews to expectations while engaging in tingly experiments with range. “Fair Game” and “Sacred” have a little country lilt, like Samia heard the last couple Maggie Rogers releases and said, “I want in,” and “Spine Oil” has a chugging beat, lush sonic contours, and forthright lyrics that put it within echo distance of the National. Samia caps the whole endeavor off with “Pants,” vibrant tour de force that builds to a tender epic before transmogrifying into a teeny-tiny folk pop number. Samia makes big statements with Bloodless, the clearest being that she’s a formidable creative force. Pump the following cuts straight to the heart: “Lizard,” “Carousel,” and “North Poles.”

SUNFLOWER BEAN Mortal Primetime (Lucky Number) — There’s a secret hiding in plain sight on the track “Champagne Taste,” the irresistible slice of buzzsaw glam that opens Mortal Primetime, the fourth studio album from Sunflower Bean. For years, Champagne Taste was the alias the Brooklyn-based band used whenever they wanted to play a local show on the sly to stress test their new material. Putting that name right at the entry point to their latest album can be interpreted as a shedding of old guises that speaks to a fortified confidence in their own being. Exhibit B to that theory is that Mortal Primetime represents the first time Sunflower Bean produced their own record, albeit with assistance from longtime Weezer and Panic! at the Disco knob-twiddler Jake Sinclair. They’ve made an album slick enough that the most ready comparison for single “Nothing Romantic” is the arena-ready rock-pop of Pat Benatar in her MTV prime. If the album sometimes threatens to become all gloss and attitude, there’s a deeply embedded commitment to songcraft that allows the trio to move freely among subgenres, notably excursions in the bygone days of AM radio hits that were simultaneously sunny and melancholy. Bassist and regular lead vocalist Julia Cumming does right by girl group group greats on “Look What You’ve Done to Me,” and guitarist Nick Kivlen takes over the main singing role to bring just the right tone of wavery wistfulness to the retro-pop ballad “Please Rewind.” With the band’s classified code name revealed, it seems unlucky there will be any more Champagne Taste gigs in the future. That’s okay. Sunflower Bean is more than enough. In addition to those already mentioned, tune to these tracks: “I Knew Love,” “Take Out Your Insides,” and “Sunshine.”