At 27, the Austin, Texas–based singer-songwriter Harrison Lemke is too young to have experienced firsthand the rapture fanaticism of the 1970s.

Nevertheless, as the titles of his 2013 single “We Wait” and his 2015 EP Sound Check at the Eschaton imply, hopes and fears associated with the Second Coming haunt the 93 observant and soul-searching lo-fi folk (and sometimes rock) songs that he has recorded and released on six albums, four EPs, and two singles over the last six years.

It’s an impressive output by any standard.

Delta

Mumford & Sons

Poetry, as it has been said, is like love in that almost anything that one says about it is true. But is almost any music to which a poem can be set somehow “true” as well, if only to the poem’s spirit?

The singers and musicians behind three new albums apparently think so.

Working the Long Game

Bill Lloyd

Republic Records’ various-artists soundtrack to Bob Persichetti, Peter Ramsey, and Rodney Rothman’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse does for state-of-the-art pop music what the film does for state-of-the-art pop cinema: prove that the hippest and coolest technological gimmickry can be put at the service of something other than low-balling tripe. Not one of its 13 cuts veers into profanity or celebrates greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, or sloth.

Wake the World: The Friends Sessions

The Beach Boys

Unlikely though it seems, given how infrequently entertainers make headlines for keeping the Ten Commandments, the former “new Dylans” Loudon Wainwright III and Bruce Springsteen devote much of their latest albums—the eponymous soundtracks to their respective Netflix one-man-shows Loudon Wainwright III: Surviving Twin and Springsteen on Broadway—to honoring their fathers.