This week’s guide is by CF Smith and contributors Words By Shoaib, Benny Thomas, Gavin Senaratne and Irfan Ayaan.
Every Friday on Twistedsoul, we spotlight a fresh batch of underground albums that deserve a little more shine. If you’re drawn to essential oddities, leftfield experimentation, and the quietly brilliant, this week’s six picks deliver exactly that, each one paired with a miniโreview to guide your listening. As always, enjoy the music and support the artists and labels who keep the world interesting. Check out our latest picks below.
Albums
Mary Halvorson & Ambrose Akinmusire – Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings
Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings brings together two of contemporary jazz’s most inventive voices in a setting that feels both intimate and limitless. With only guitar and trumpet at the forefront, Mary Halvorson and Ambrose Akinmusire create a remarkably rich soundscape built on trust, restraint, and spontaneous interaction. The album unfolds at an unhurried pace, allowing melodies, textures, and silences to carry equal weight as the duo prioritises atmosphere and genuine musical conversation. The album opens with ‘Prelude in the Ash ‘, a soft, mournful hush, Akinmusire’s burnished trumpet carrying a bittersweet weight while Halvorson lays down a tender, woozy undercurrent. Then ‘This Vivid’ snaps the palette wide open, diving into jagged, highโtension territory shaped by Halvorson’s warped effects and those visceral, looping vocal screams the duo threads themselves around. ‘Soundcheck’ offers a glimpse into the album’s understated beauty, pairing Halvorson’s shimmering guitar lines with Akinmusire’s warm, reflective trumpet phrasing. Halvorson’s angular guitar phrases weave effortlessly around Akinmusire’s spacious trumpet lines, creating a piece that feels exploratory yet deeply cohesive. Its quiet tension and subtle shifts make it one of the record’s most absorbing moments. Two other players feature on the album: Tyshawn Sorey, who provides drums and auxiliary percussion. You’ll hear him on the unsettled and brooding ‘Watersmoke‘. Equally compelling is ‘Blood & Sand’, which also features Sorey while revealing the emotional depth of the pairing. The interplay is patient and expressive, with both musicians allowing ideas to unfold naturally while maintaining a strong sense of direction. The other guest is cellist Tomeka Reid, who appears on the cinematic, dreamlike ‘Tangled Pretty’. Elegant, immersive, and endlessly nuanced, Slo-Mo Neon Luminate Hoverings is a masterclass in creative musical dialogue. Its subtle beauty reveals itself gradually, rewarding attentive listening and repeated returns with new details and emotional depth. – WBS
Krakatau – Terra Ijnota
If relaxedโmood jazz fusion is your sweet spot (it’s definitely mine), ‘Terra Ijnota, Krakatau‘s comeback album, a full decade in the making, arrives beautifully. Longโtime fans shouldn’t skip it; even with its “epochal shift,” the trio glide effortlessly through underground ’80s fourthโworld textures, contemporary jazz currents, postโminimalist patterns, and flashes of fiery Latin fusion. The band is made up of James Tom, Danny Smith, and Dylan Lieberman, whose palette spans piano, synth, programming, fretless bass, drums, and percussion. The album also brings in saxophonist Rob Vincs, trumpet player Reuben Lewis, and Brazilian percussionist Alcides Neto. Tracks range from the digi-minimalism and fourth-world atmospherics of (‘Terra ignota‘) to the melancholic ambient saxophone and synth dialogue of (‘In Memory’) and a three-part epic (‘Cosmetic Surgery’) that journeys through a long, complex post-minimalist arrangement into Latin fusion and contemporary jazz. It’s pure class all the way through, and by the time the 48-minute mark rolls around, I’m already wishing there was more. – CFS
The MerKaBa Brotherhood – The MerKaBa Brotherhood
Genre descriptions can help, but they often end up putting artists in tidy little boxes that don’t reflect the full scope of their sound. While the music draws from Pharaoh, Alice, and Sun Ra, it’s not jazz in any conventional sense; it spirals outward, into something free and exploratory. On first listen, The MerKaBa Brotherhood feels like wandering into some coded sonic environment. Roman Norfleet and Andre Raiah weave rhythm and texture into something deliberately abstract, where beats pulse as space signals and spoken messages hint at deeper structures beneath the surface. You get the sense that Northfleet and Raiah place each sound with intention, as if pointing toward meanings just out of reach. The duo draw heavily on esoteric themes and ancient mysticism, but they don’t make it feel academic or distant. Instead, you get an immersive experience that uses repetition and space to pull you into their orbit. It’s elusive, and that mystery is what I love about it, a weird and challenging album that invites exploration rather than offering immediate answers. It’s a shame tracks like ‘Angelic Beings’ and ‘Ancient Time Travel’ are so short. I’d have loved to hear these ideas stretched out. The longer journeys ‘Galgalim’, ‘Obelisks (Sun Clocks)’, and the stunning closer ‘Ezekiel’s Vision / A Mysterious Place’ are where the record takes off into its true celestial form, stretching out like deepโspace transmissions. So, my one complaint: twentyโone minutes and it’s gone, far too quickly, and now I’m craving more of this beautifully weird stuff. – CFS
Dijf Sanders โ Tangkoa II
Tangkoa II turns a trip to Vietnam into a vivid, mobile sound world. Dijf Sanders starts from field recordings and then reshapes them into rhythmic, colourful compositions. Snatches of street noise, voices, and local instruments are cut, looped, and layered until they become part of the percussion. Early tracks feel close and physical. You can almost feel the heat and crowded spaces behind the patterns. As the album unfolds, synths, drums, and processed samples add more width. Grooves become heavier, and melodies stretch further. The record keeps a strong sense of intimacy, though. Many passages sound like you are standing in the doorway of a scene rather than watching from far away. Collaboration sits at the heart of the music. Different textures speak to one another rather than competing. The result is a set of tracks that feel both documentary and dreamlike. Tangkoa II makes travel feel internal as much as external. – IA
sneaky jesus – For Better Future
Polish experimental jazz quartet sneaky jesus continues its confident, searching evolution with its latest release, ‘For Better Future’ The record loosens the band’s earlier groove-forward identity without abandoning their instinct for motion and collective spark to place a greater focus on atmosphere, long-form feeling and the emotional charge of players listening closely to one another. The album’s strength is its balance of openness and shape. The opening track, ‘Upiรณr w wizjerze’, builds slowly with an instrumental crescendo and subdued choral chants before an explosive sax solo. ‘Dzieล dziecka w sklepie z kruszywem‘ pushes the group into denser, more unstable territory, while ‘Mufasa‘ brings a warmer, rocking rhythmic pull. The standout, though, may be ‘Z sercem na rฤce‘ whose lyrical, almost nature-documentary serenity shows the band’s new emotional range. For Better Future is so interesting because it feels transitional without feeling unfinished. The acoustic weight of Franciszek Pospieszalski’s double bass and Michaล Wdowikowski’s fresh rhythmic presence give the album an earthy, live-in-the-room quality, while the compositions retain sneaky jesus’ restless imagination. It may leave you wanting a little more, but For Better Future captures a band stepping into a more spacious future without losing its mischievous pulse. – GS
Bill Orcutt & Mabe Fratti – Almost Waking
Almost Waking really got to me in that weird way where, while it’s playing, I’m not even totally sure how much I like it, and then as soon as it ends, I want to put it right back on. Bill Orcutt‘s guitar has that scraped-up, unruly feel, like it’s always a little bit on the verge of coming apart, and Mabe Fratti doesn’t tame that at all, which I’m glad about. She just sort of slides in next to it with the cello, and suddenly the whole thing feels sadder, prettier, stranger, more human. What I kept thinking was how crazy it is that this was built remotely, because it really doesn’t sound like it was pieced together to me. It sounds like two people listening hard, maybe harder than they do when they’re actually in the same room. Tracks like ‘Forced & Forced & Forced’ and ‘Arise from Graves and Aspire’ have this push-pull between Fratti’s smoother melodic instincts and Orcutt’s jagged, ecstatic playing, and instead of cancelling each other out, they sharpen each other. And then there are the vocal tracks, which kind of sneak up on you. ‘El inicio es cuestiรณn de suerte’ and ‘Todo puede ser error’ don’t fully reframe the album. Still, they make its emotional centre easier to grasp – Fratti’s voice gives the record this spectral, hovering warmth. At the same time, Orcutt proves he can be surprisingly graceful in a more melodic setting without losing that adversarial edge that makes him him. So yeah, after a few listens, I think what I like most is that Almost Waking never resolves into one thing: it’s tender, tense, skeletal, lush, all of that at once, and it feels better the less you try to pin it down. – BT
