Evan Myall was the guitarist and songwriter in San Francisco (but loved by L.A.) psych band Sleepy Sun, but now he's moved here with a new sound and a new name to go with it. Formerly Evan Reiss, he's reconfigured himself around his middle name for his debut solo album, due out this Friday on Royal Oakie. Myall's self-titled record is like the nighttime counterpart to Sleepy Sun's cosmic power. It's all shadow, silhouette, suggestion and space lit by starlight instead—an album like the somber post-SMiLE Beach Boys or Dennis Wilson's Pacific Ocean Blue ►

Yung Student Loans is K-Town’s most enigmatic rapper, making music entirely in a vacuum—trap-meets-emo-meets-Sleepy Brown. I Stay Lonely (A True Romance) is a very sad album about scorned love, delivered through a veneer of soft-sarcasm. The project practically screams ‘You can’t hurt me! I already hurt myself!’ Those words aren’t used at any point in this album, but they so easily could be.  ►

There were a lot of bands between Blue Cheer's Vincebus Eruptum and that first Ramones album that came from nowhere and had nowhere to go. They were too crude for prog, too early for punk, too heavy for garage and way too weird for good-time dive-bar party music, although they surely spent plenty of time in dive bars. Now it's fifty years later but that's still the place where L.A.'s Salt Lick come from, even if their new "California Mud" offers just a little bit of 'proto' and a whole lot of 'punk. ►

Last time we saw L.A.'s Kevin, their overcranked synth-wave song "Bike" found them doing down and dirty Screamers-adjacent weirdness in the asphalt back alleys of the city. But now it's a year later and they've ... ascended. ►

Every time Vinny Earley and his band-slash-autobiography Vaguess put out something new, it's like unexpectedly running into an old friend on the street—one of those times when you only get a few minutes to exchange why you're looking the worse/the better for wear before the gravity of the day pulls you both away. Now we live in a society where we have to do all that virtually, but that works for Vaguess still: whether in person or pixels, there's something about Earley's songs that slashes through any amount of distance. ►