A teenager's fright at a 1960 horror film, returned decades later as a score 替天后寫歌之前，他在飯店大廳一週彈六晚

Cécile McLorin Salvant, Metropole Orkest & Jules Buckley — With Every Breath I Take

For more than a decade, Salvant's signature has been her restraint: a piano trio, a single voice, an old song turned over until it confesses something new. This record inverts that. The Netherlands' Metropole Orkest, conducted by Jules Buckley, follows her now through a program of Ellington, Strayhorn, Sondheim, and Coward—plus a few of her own—newly arranged by Darcy James Argue. The risk is obvious: an orchestra is the surest way to inflate a jazz singer into a musical-theater spectacle. But Salvant has always grown cooler as the setting grows lusher; she lets the players build the room and steps in only on the exact syllable that matters. Recorded over two December days in Hilversum. My pick of the week.

Dylan Mattingly — The Wild Heart (Complete) [Contemporaneous, David Bloom]

Nduduzo Makhathini — The Myth We Choose

The South African pianist speaks openly about healing and philosophy, the sort of vocabulary that curdles in most musicians' mouths but stays grounded in his. His fourth Blue Note album turns on the idea that societies select their own myths through song. Sixteen tracks, co-produced by his son Thingo, with guests including Shabaka and Black Coffee—though the crowd is not the point. Makhathini's playing carries a sense of ancestral presence, each chord landing as though greeting someone unseen in the room. "Spiritual jazz" has become a lazy label, shorthand for slow tempos and reverb; he is among the few who actually put the spirit back. A record best met without the distraction of trying to keep up with it.

Tasha — You Are Spring!

Stereogum's album of the week, and an easy one to fall into. It opens with "Spring," an a cappella hymn shared with Jamila Woods and L'Rain, that ushers you into a world thick with summer sensation: air sticky on the skin, a kiss outside the subway, a phone call from a mother. Tasha made her last album in the wake of the Broadway run of Illinoise; this one retreats to acoustic guitar and a weightless croon, looser and brighter for it. Its strength isn't in any single dazzling line but in its nerve to treat calm as a position worth holding—the world hasn't ended yet, so finish the summer first. For a slow Chicago afternoon, or any hour you want to decelerate.

Félicia Atkinson — Sans Visage

Atkinson has rescored Georges Franju's 1960 horror film Les Yeux Sans Visage—the one about a surgeon harvesting faces for his disfigured daughter. She first saw it as a teenager, and decades on she has translated that unease into sound: whispers, a thin haze of synthesizer, the small frictions of objects, all of it compressed into a thirty-four-minute distillation of the original ninety-minute score. She has never been a writer of melodies; what she writes is an approach—you think you've nearly made it out, and it withdraws back into shadow. The LP arrives with an essay by Claire Cronin and drawings by Momo Gordon. Headphones, late, lights off.

Minyo Crusaders (民謡クルセイダーズ) — From Japan With Love

Splicing Japanese min'yō onto the world's dance rhythms is something this collective has done for nearly a decade, but here, for the first time, they invite guests in. The lead single, "Hanagasa Ondo," grafts a Yamagata folk standard directly onto the Colombian cumbia "Cumbia en Do Menor," and the two unrelated grooves lock together without a seam. Chitose Hajime lends her voice; the Colombian outfit Frente Cumbiero, longtime collaborators, supply the swing. The peril of this kind of global collage is always the souvenir-shop trinket, but the Crusaders earn their fusion because the playing genuinely moves—they aren't placing folk song behind museum glass, they're dragging it back onto the dance floor. Eight tracks, brief, every one of them standing.

Stephan Moccio — Scenes from a Velvet Room

Before the hits, Moccio played piano six nights a week in the lobby of the Four Seasons in Toronto; afterward he wrote songs for Céline Dion, Miley Cyrus, and the Weeknd. This fourth Decca solo album returns to those lobby years—jazz-tinged piano miniatures, low amber light, the clink of glasses. Branford Marsalis guests on three tracks, nudging the mood up a notch from background to foreground. It must be said that this strain of neoclassical lives dangerously close to the luxury-hotel playlist, and Moccio doesn't entirely dodge it; but when he stops reaching for "beautiful" and simply plays the memory straight, the thing lands. For a night with the volume turned halfway down.

Temples — BLISS

The fifth album from the Kettering psych band, and their first in three years, chases a phrase they keep returning to: "melancholic euphoria." That means packing the gleaming melodies of late-'90s dance into psychedelic guitar—loops, layers, a music that is plainly dancing yet shadowed by something lost. From "Jet Stream Heart" to "Megalith," the synthesizers carry noticeably more weight, and some will find it a long way from the orange-hued psych of their debut. But Temples have always been good at sweetness without the cloy; this time they've folded a little bitterness into the sugar. Ten tracks, built for driving, for dusk.