Justin Jacobs

For South African pianist, singer and composer Thandi Ntuli, creating Rainbow Revisited was an experimental journey through time and space. It’s obvious from the album’s first notes—clattering keys leaping in different directions for nearly three minutes before Ntuli begins singing.

Few singer-songwriters of the last decade have built a fanbase as absolutely adoring as Maggie Rogers. There’s a throughline all the way up the ladder to Taylor Swift. While Rogers isn’t filling arenas with radio pop anthems, the emotional frankness of her lyrics, and her authenticity, both in song and onstage, falls in the same lineage as the pop icon—and that is a compliment, to be sure. On Rogers’ third LP,

Ryan Miller, the mustachioed singer of pop-rock act Guster, is on a quest—for an excellent salami sandwich.

Arooj Aftab knows what you’ve heard about her, and she’s here to change the story.

CONTRACTORS WITH A PLAN: With a well-defined goal or plan in place, HVAC contractors can’t expect their businesses to grow or become more successful. (Courtesy of Getty Images)

When’s the last time you danced with a stranger? Met a pair of eyes across a dance floor, cast any doubts aside and held out your hand?

If you’ve felt anxious about how technology is mutating us all into reactive, combative, screen-glued zombies, then you are far from alone. But most of us haven’t made a deliciously fun synth-pop album addressing that anxiety. That’s where Eric Slick stands apart.

For a player with such a stacked résumé, Dave Guy’s highly anticipated debut album evokes a very sensible response: “It’s about time!” The New York-based trumpeter has refined his sound over the years playing with the likes of Mark Ronson, Pharrell, Al Green, Amy Winehouse, Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings, Antibalas, Charles Bradley and more. These days, you can catch him with The Roots on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. But he hasn’t dropped a project under his own name until now—and the 12-track

photo: Holly Andres *** To anyone familiar with Portland, Ore., folk-rock icons The Decemberists, it will not come as a surprise that frontman Colin Meloy

As one of the few artists invited to perform at both the Bahia and Brooklyn editions of the genre-defying Afropunk Festival, Dawer x Damper have carved out a niche as young innovators on the bleeding edge of Afropunk’s founding ethos—that is, “the other Black experience.” But to get a handle on what really drives the wide-scope vision of Edwar Vergara, 29, and his younger brother Luis, 28, it helps to first explore their roots in the multihued metropolis of Cali— in particular, the rough-and-tumble barrio of Aguablanca.