For all its synth-pop aesthetics, “Cherry Blossom” still moves like the tastefully slick country music of Musgraves’s Pageant Material. When Kacey Musgraves started playing around with disco and hip-hop production aesthetics on 2018’s Golden Hour, there was a sense that she was preparing to follow the Taylor Swift path, taking incremental steps away from the pure country of her early work, which was exemplified by the small-town exhaustion of “Merry Go Round” and the encouraging allyship of “Follow Your Arrow.” On Star-Crossed, her fifth album, she’s still enamored with the power of a roots-rock groove. “Sad to Say” covers both the pain and the glory: “Had a hard life, hard life / Sad to say I know some glad to hear it / But what I pieced together and made from it / Build me strong enough to reach the most rarest summit.” They don’t make ’em like him anymore. On A Martyr’s Reward, his sixth solo album, the 48-year-old polymath makes peace with the past and reminds himself to enjoy the present. But they’re wise master classes in the craft. Of all the hip-hop acts making pared-down boom-bap out of New York lately - Griselda, Marciano - Ka is the most elusive and challenging. Like the early Wu-Tang classics, this music pulls from way beyond hip-hop and maintains an almost experimental starkness.

The Brooklyn rapper and producer (and firefighter by day) makes minimalist beats and writes raps that deal in pained street histories and grizzled war analogies. Listening to Ka will make you want to journey to a clandestine mountain yurt, live off the land, and study martial arts.

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