IRON & WINE Hen’s Teeth (Sub Pop) — It’s easy to imagine Sam Beam engaged in one long jamboree, songs spinning out of him as casually as relaxed exhales. Kindred spirits move in and out of the circle as if beckoned by mystical forces. The muses call for elegantly lovely harmonies? Well then, in drifts the folk trio I’m with Her to give a warm vocal counterpoint that helps fill out the sixties pop of “Robin’s Egg” and the light, lilting “Wait Up.” Beam’s latest album under the Iron & Wine moniker, Hen’s Teeth, was recorded at the same time as his exemplary 2024 full-length, Light Verse. If the new album sometimes comes across less like a companion piece or an extension of the earlier work and more like Beam rooting around in his holiday sack for the gifts that weren’t quite as prominent and enticing last time around, his secondary material still towers over what most songwriters could craft. Consider the emotionally eloquent “Roses,” building into the folk-rock version of sonic clatter, or the cool ramble “In Your Ocean.” Singular as Beam is as a creator, there are moments here that recall other adroit troubadours of the past. The stealthily expansive “Dates and Dead People” is reminiscent of Paul Simon circa Hearts and Bones, and there’s a little Neil Young vibe to “Half Measures.” Beam isn’t just leading his own cool hootenanny, he’s plugging into a spirit of wry and joyful music-making that’s been happening since the first acoustic was strummed for the pleasure of a receptive audience. Chomp into following cuts: “Paper and Stone,” “Defiance, Ohio,” and “Grace Notes.”

LALA LALA Heaven 2 (Sub Pop) — Originally based in Chicago, Lillie West was a rover in recent years. She sought and found different experiences in New Mexico and Iceland before settling down in Los Angeles. The album that she delivers in the wake of this wanderlust, Heaven 2, is appropriately restless and grounded at the same time. Recording for Sub Pop for the first time — after several years on Hardly Art, which is essentially their field-team label — West, under the performing name Lala Lala, makes strange, wondrous pop songs that feel like they’re cracking open a soul to find a phantasmagoric light show inside, something the rough equivalent of staring at a disco ball through a kaleidoscope. There are signs of simple, straightforward songs there, but they’ve been thrillingly distorted. The inside-out new wave of “Arrow” is a fair primer for what she’s up to. Discordant invention abounds: “Does This Go Faster?” is like an electropop party anthem, and “Anywave” suggests Giorgio Moroder producing Massive Attack. “Scammer” has a slithery and a coiled intensity as it wrestles with a distinctly modern version of anxious existence (“You’ve been waiting on the line for a trophy/ Waiting for a sign that’ll get you free/ Every day I wake, that’s poetry”). West might have stopped moving for now, but a creative spirit like this is never truly tethered. Soar ever higher with these tracks: “Even Mountains Erode,” “Heaven2,” and “This City.”