Need gift ideas for a music lover? 12 albums to wrap up for the holidays

Championing a Pretender or embracing a Power. Getting “Higher” or going “Up.” Finding “Diamonds” or seeking “Rainbows.”

It all leads to music — new music fashioned for release at holiday time with the hope of earning a place within your seasonal shopping budget. The music business has long saved its most bankable projects for Christmas-time. This year will prove no exception.

There is more to choose from, though, than chart-topping sounds by Drake, Morgan Wallen and the unsinkable Taylor Swift.

To that end, here is our annual gift gifting guide of new popular music recordings hitting stores and streaming services this fall. Some come from artists we haven’t heard from in a while. Others present bold steps forward for comparatively newer names and a few rekindle the past by unearthing buried treasure as they celebrate time-honored albums.

Here then is a critic’s pick look at the sounds of the season to light your way between Black Friday weekend and all of the holiday shopping insanity that will roar in its wake.

Peter Gabriel: “i/o”

If you have allowed this prog patriarch to slip out of the ol’ memory banks of late, you’re not alone. Gabriel has not released an album of new compositions in over two decades – an eternity even by his own glacially paced recording standards. But the wait offers huge dividends with a set of robust, danceable affirmations balanced by more ambient, internalized incantations. With a title standing for “input/output,” the record is as exquisitely produced sonically and it is expressively composed and performed. A triumph. (To be released Dec. 1.)

Joni Mitchell: “Archives, Vol. 3 – The Asylum Years (1972-1975)”

The third installment in the empress songwriter’s archive series captures a career at a crossroads, both commercially and artistically. It covers four albums (three studio masterworks — “For the Roses,” “Court and Spark” and “The Hissing of Summer Lawns” and the concert document “Miles of Aisles”) that, in turn, chronicle a change of record labels (from Reprise to Asylum) and sound. The latter distinguishes itself prominently on this five-disc, 96-song collection, tracing Mitchell’s expansion of her folk roots into jazzier, more darkly orchestrated moodpieces.

Chris Stapleton: “Higher”

“Higher” marks the third instance where Kentucky’s top country/soul export has released a new studio album just before the holiday shopping rush. Of course, it helps that in each instance Stapleton had a pack of songs that expertly balanced the leaner accents of country tradition with a command of unfrilly Southern soul inspirations. “Higher” is another grandly emotive ride, from the doom and boom of “North Dakota” to the cinematic soul accents of “Think I’m in Love With You” to the solo acoustic confessional “Mountains of My Mind.”

Rolling Stones: “Hackney Diamonds”

The Stones have remained so visible in recent decades through a succession of stadium sized tours that one is apt to forget the seminal British rockers have not issued an album of new songs since 2005. As such, “Hackney Diamonds” comes to us with a blitzkrieg of marketing hype. While there is nothing terribly new stylistically here, the record puts a fresh sheen to Mick Jagger’s playful vocal growl and Keith Richards’ earworm-worthy guitar riffs. The gospel-esque “Sweet Smell of Heaven” with Lady Gaga, though, is stunning.

Cat Power: “Cat Power Sings Dylan – The 1966 Royal Albert Hall Concert”

A powerfully poetic songwriter, Chan Marshall, aka Cat Power, took to London’s Royal Albert Hall to perform not her own darkly evocative music, but the very setlist of tunes that got Bob Dylan branded as a folk heretic over five decades earlier. (And, yes, as history bears out, Dylan’s famous 1996 performance actually took place at Manchester Free Trade Hall.) Marshall’s arrangements are astonishingly faithful to Dylan’s original recordings (a practice even Dylan strays from) while the vocal color is the work of a Nico-style chanteuse channeling a legend.

Charlie Crockett: “Live from the Ryman”

As he again proved over the summer as one of the most commanding performers at Railbird, country revivalist Crockett doesn’t merely ape the sounds and traditions of a stylistic past. He discovers what makes them tick and then makes such inspirations dance to his own tune. On this immensely recommended concert album, such a practice means unlocking the swing and swagger at the heart of “Trinity River” and re-tuning the beat of a honky-tonk heart on “Welcome to Hard Times.” Great artists that make great studio albums inevitably outdo themselves when their songs take to the stage. That’s what happens on “Live from the Ryman”

Jason Isbell: “Southeastern” - 10 Year Anniversary Edition

A mere decade may not seem long enough to warrant an anniversary look back at an esteemed recording. But Isbell, who already released a set of exemplary new songs in June (“Weathervanes”), makes a solid case to revisit the album that broke his career wide open in 2013. Along with producer Dave Cobb, he fashioned an album that was soul-searching in its reflections of various country, soul, folk and punkish traditions. This new edition is augmented by an additional disc of demos and a strong 2022 concert performance of “Southeastern” in its entirety.

Robbie Robertson: “Killers of the Flower Moon” (Soundtrack)

That Robertson’s score for Martin Scorsese’s masterfully bleak “Killers of the Flower Moon” serves also as a postscript to a 60-year career is almost beside the point when you listen to this spellbinding music. Robertson, who died in August, summons a ghostly old-world quilt of sounds and melodies on mandolin, mandocello, zither, cello and desert-dry harmonica. Light years removed from his songs with The Band, “Killers” is the musical equivalent of an ancient photo, one frayed at the edges that still conveys vivid imagery. (To be released Dec. 8.)

Corrinne Bailey Rae: “Black Rainbows”

Who could have seen this one coming? Once the darling of a new generation of British soul-pop stylists, Rae gets heavy – very heavy - with “Black Rainbows,” her first album in seven years. The record is a jarring voyage through scorched ambience, loops of futuristic, electronic laced grooves with acidic guitar and vocals that sound like they were beamed down from the cosmos. And yet a sense of R&B warmth floats in and out the chaos, especially lyrically, within this wild, Prince-meets-Pink Floyd left turn into the outer limits.

The Pretenders: “Relentless”

“We don’t have to fade to black,” sings 72-year-old Chrissie Hynde at the mid-way point of “Relentless.” True to form, she and her newest Pretenders crew sound ageless in their senses of rock ‘n’ roll attitude and sheer musical gusto. One is tempted to say “Relentless” is a return to post-punk form, but Hynde and all the Pretenders she has kept company with through the decades, never seemed outdated. The songwriting/guitar alliance shared with James Walbourne over the last 15 years, though, enhances the ongoing sense of raw nerve on “Relentless.”

Wilco: “Cousin”

Where Wilco’s 2021/2022 opus “Cruel Country” was a homey, pandemic-era throwback to its elemental Americana roots, the new “Cousin” is all layered, electric weirdness that comes from a universe more akin to the band’s seminal “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” Ace-in-the-hole players like guitarist Nels Cline and drummer (and University of Kentucky grad) Glenn Kotche have more room to move here thanks to soundscapes promoted by producer Cate Le Bon. But the weary melancholia of frontman Jeff Tweedy still gives these musical lab experiments an unmistakable Wilco stamp.

R.E.M.: “Up” - 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition

For many R.E.M. fans, 1998’s “Up” was the getting-off point. With drummer Bill Berry recently retired, “Up” de-emphasized beat and, by-and-large, most traces of the jangly elemental rock charge that first ignited the landmark Athens, Ga., band in favor of a sleeker, more reserved sound. This new edition, augmented by a disc of live sessions cut at a time when R.E.M. wasn’t touring, reminds us of the quieter gems offered to those who stuck by the band – namely, the rich Brian Wilson melancholy of “At My Most Beautiful” and the dark pop/soul strut of “Lotus.”