This week, our music roundup features staff selections taken from some of the early 2018 releases that we're most excited by.

Premiere: Calexico's Next Album Includes a Song En Espanol

As their band name implies, Calexico has long made indie-rock that straddles the border between the American West and Mexico. The wide-open spaces of the southwestern desert, the distinctive flare of mariachi horns, the evocative strumming of open-string guitar chords... these have always been a part of what made Calexico stand out in a crowded field. Now they're about to release their ninth album, The Thread That Keeps Us, full of songs about displacement, exile, and homecomings – not always happy ones.  But the music is often quite upbeat, and today, we premiere the track "Flores y Tamales" ("Flowers and Tamales"), which rides a jaunty cumbia rhythm and is sung entirely in Spanish.  
The Thread That Keeps Us comes out on January 26. (-John Schaefer)

Britain's Poppy Ackroyd To Release a Post-Rock Beauty

Poppy Ackroyd is a Brighton-based pianist, violinist, producer and composer. I was a big fan of her last album, called Feathers, and was glad to hear that the new one, Resolve, would be released on One Little Indian, best known as Björk's label. Ackroyd's music is a blend of post-minimalist motifs, electronic music production, and the cinematic sweep associated with the so-called post-rock movement. The piece called "Trains," from the forthcoming album, is an excellent introduction to her work, and the video by Jola Kudela is a bewitching, impressionist blend of natural imagery and shots of the inner mechanisms of the piano - often superimposed on each other. Essentially a short film, it's already won multiple awards, and the track itself has its own sense of landscape - and of being propelled through it.
Poppy Ackroyd's Resolve comes out on February 2. (-John Schaefer)

Starchild & The New Romantic's Debut Album

A recent touring musician on vocals, guitar, and keyboard with Solange and Blood Orange, the versatile Starchild, born Bryndon Cook, seems poised for a magnificent solo career when his first album Language drops in 2018. His debut single "Hangin On" draws from electro and R&B bass lines, while propelled by a commanding voice that alternates between yearning baritone and silky falsetto. 
Language is due out early 2018 on Ghostly International (-Alex Ambrose)

The DIY Spirit of Saxophonist & Bandleader Shabaka Hutchings 

Ubiquitous London-based saxophonist, bandleader, and composer Shabaka Hutchings (Sons of Kemet, Mercury-nominated The Comet is Coming, Shabaka and the Ancestors) has been thinking on the idea of ‘blackness’ in a post-colonial world, according to this interview in ezhmag.com. On this tune, "Black Skin, Black Masks," ominous piano chords and double bass anchor the opening conversation clarinet and bass clarinet (Hutchings) over a playful, pulsing, and adventurous drum groove. A repeating bass riff sets a stage for musical questions and answers by all, until the joyous restatement of clarinet themes. The work is set to be part of a compilation project, We Out Here, which celebrates some of the shakers in London’s young jazz scene. 
We Out Here is due out Feb. 9, 2018 on Brownswood Recordings. (-Caryn Havlik)

Philadelphia Choir The Crossing Sings An Ecological Cantata 

The tireless and marvelous Philadelphia choir The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally, is a chamber choir dedicated to promulgating new music. Their latest recording, If There Were Water, contains new works by Greek composer Stratis Minakakis and American composer Gregory W. Brown. “The Valley of Lost Names,” is from Brown's 35-minute cantata for 24 voices -  un/bodying/s (2017), setting new texts by poet Todd Hearon. The work takes on issues of displacement and ecology around the creation of the Quabbin Reservoir in western Massachusetts, using various water imagery. The vocal melodies at times conjure a calm pool as in the moon reflecting over “nothing but a body of unbroken water”, and yet there are other times where it sounds as if water is rushing down rocky terrain towards the sea, as small clusters of voices produce staggered hard consonant sounds.
The Crossing’s record, If There Were Water, is due out Feb. 23, 2018 on Innova. (-Caryn Havlik)

Swedish Fire! Trio Makes Jazz for Headbanging

Perhaps it's no surprise that I'm quite stoked about this sludgy-smashy instrumental doom jazz from the noisy Swedes of Fire! Trio: Mats Gustafsson (sax), Johan Berthling (bass) and Andreas Werlin (drums). On this preview track, the repeating hypnotic bass riff makes space for some burning baritone sax lines, as drums keep on driving amidst fun shifting accents. These folks are also the basis of the Fire! Orchestra, who are scheduled to release a new record in the fall of 2018.
Fire! Trio's record, The Hands, is due Feb. 8, from Rune Grammofon (-Caryn Havlik)

Munich-based record label NEOS & Ernst Helmuth Flammer's Chamber Works

The European avant-garde of music is alive and kicking ecstatically thanks in large part to the Munich-based record label NEOS (if you don't know...now you know). Championing major composers Helmut Lachenmann, Jörg Widmann, George Aperghis and Brian Fernyhough, NEOS's catalog is a must for all those whose breath abandons ship at the edges of compositional imagination. One of next year's most exciting new albums will be chamber works by Ernst Helmuth Flammer, a lesser known but no less potent German composer. There was no preview available yet, but sample NEOS's past album of his string quartets. (-Justin Sergi)