Nonesuch Records releases its second album from Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Caroline Shaw, Narrow Sea, on January 22, 2021. The title piece was written for Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish, who perform it on this recording: five parts, each a new setting of a text from The Sacred Harp nineteenth century collection of shape-note hymns. Also on the album is Sō Percussion's performance of Shaw's Taxidermy, which she wrote for the ensemble. A video for Part 2 of Narrow Sea can be seen here.

A remastered, expanded edition of the 2005 benefit album Our New Orleans will be released for the first time on vinyl on January 29, 2021. The two-LP set, also available then digitally, includes five previously unreleased tracks by Davell Crawford, Buckwheat Zydeco and Ry Cooder, Dr. Michael White, Dr. John, and The Wardell Quezergue Orchestra featuring Donald Harrison. A video of the late Dr. John recording the added track “Walking by the River” in 2005 can be seen here. To date, $1.5 million has been raised from the 2005 release to benefit the New Orleans Habitat Musicians’ Village.

Clint Mansell's haunting score to director Darren Aronofsky's 2000 film Requiem for a Dream, performed by Kronos Quartet, has returned to vinyl for the film's twentieth anniversary year, out now. The soundtrack was originally released on Nonesuch in 2000; the first vinyl edition was released for Record Store Day in 2016 with new artwork and two previously unreleased bonus tracks. The new 2-LP vinyl edition, which also includes the bonus tracks, features the original 2000 soundtrack cover art for the anniversary. "Brilliant stuff," says Classic FM.

Devendra Banhart's cover of The Grateful Dead’s “Franklin’s Tower,” first released as an Amazon Original in September in honor of the 45th anniversary of The Grateful Dead album Blues for Allah, is now available to stream and download everywhere. The song was produced and mixed by Noah Georgeson and recorded with his current touring band remotely in various studios and home studios.

Louis Andriessen’s The only one will be released on Nonesuch Records on March 5, 2021. This world premiere performance by the Los Angeles Philharmonic was recorded live at Walt Disney Concert Hall in May 2019, conducted by LA Phil Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen, with solo vocalist Nora Fischer. Two artistic discoveries influenced Andriessen as he wrote The only one: a collection of poems by the Flemish poet Delphine Lecompte from The animals in me, and the work of Nora Fischer, an Amsterdam–based singer known for developing dynamic creative projects that fuse classical and pop music.

The Magnetic Fields' new album, Quickies, is now available as a limited-edition 12” LP for Record Store Day's annual Black Friday event. This Record Store Day exclusive edition is available via independent record stores today on translucent magenta vinyl and includes the previously unreleased bonus track "The Witches Fly." Head to your favorite local independent record store's website to find out how to pick up yours and check for any COVID-related procedures.

Rob Mazurek's new album with Exploding Star Orchestra, Dimensional Stardust, is out now via International Anthem / Nonesuch Records. Mazurek arranged his pieces for eleven musicians, including Jeff Parker, and commissioned his long-time lyrics collaborator Damon Locks to draft original texts for the songs. The album recalls an array of Mazurek’s symphonic­ influences, from Béla Bartók to Morton Feldman to Gil Evans to Sun Ra to Pedro Santos to Bill Dixon to The Art Ensemble of Chicago. Opting to focus on tight ensemble orchestration over passages of open improvisation, he distills an orchestra of explosive improvisers into a graceful group exercise in melodic minimalism.

Portuguese singer Mariza celebrates the 20th anniversary of her career and the centenary of the late Queen of Fado, Amália Rodrigues, with Mariza Sings Amália, her first full album of classics, available in the US on January 29. Though Mariza has sung pieces from Amália’s repertoire since the start of her career, this is the first complete album pairing the work of the late, great voice of 20th-century popular song and the singer who helped bring fado into the 21st century. "This the best way I can find to pay my tribute to Amália," says Mariza, "and to thank her for the legacy and inspiration she gave us." Mariza celebrates the album release with a livestreamed performance via NYC's Town Hall on January 29.

k.d. lang's 2008 Nonesuch album, Watershed, declared "a masterpiece" by the Times, is now available on vinyl for the first time (December 4 outside the US). As the title suggests, Watershed represented a milestone in lang’s career. For the first time, she assumed the role of producer, as well as writer, singer, and multi-instrumentalist. “Watershed is like a culmination of everything I’ve done," lang said; "there’s a little bit of jazz, a little country, a little of the Ingénue sound, a little Brazilian touch ... I didn’t feel the need to be genre-specific because this experience felt so wide open."

Tristan Perich’s Drift Multiply, for 50 violins and 50-channel 1-bit electronics, is out now on New Amsterdam and Nonesuch Records. The piece, Perich’s largest work to date, is conducted by Douglas Perkins. Scored as one hundred individual lines of music, the piece blends violins and speakers into a cascading tapestry of tone, harmony, and noise. The violins perform from sheet music, while the speakers are each connected to custom-built circuit boards programmed to output 1-bit audio, the most basic digital waveforms made of just ones and zeroes. "Unapologetically beautiful," says The Wire. "Mesmerising," says Uncut.

The soundtrack to the Tim Burton–directed film of Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, first released on Nonesuch in 2007, receives its first-ever vinyl edition in a two-LP set out now. The film, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, is an adaptation by John Logan of Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s musical, starring Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and the late Alan Rickman. "Something close to a masterpiece, a work of extreme—I am tempted to say evil—genius," exclaimed the New York Times' A.O. Scott. "This Sweeney is a bloody wonder," raved Rolling Stone's Peter Travers, "intimate and epic, horrific and heart-rending as it flies on the wings of Sondheim's most thunderously exciting score."

The Black Keys release Brothers (Deluxe Remastered Anniversary Edition), an expanded version of their watershed 2010 multi-platinum, Grammy-winning sixth studio album December 18, 2020, in the United States and Canada and on January 1, 2021, in all other territories, via Nonesuch Records, on which the record is newly available throughout the world. To celebrate its tenth anniversary, Brothers will be re-released with three added bonus songs: “Keep My Name Outta Your Mouth,” “Black Mud Part II,” and “Chop and Change.” It will be available in three formats: a 7” box set, a 2-LP set, and a CD. The band has also released a promotional video for the release, directed by Bryan Schlam, which you can watch here.