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Welcome to New Music Friday, NPR Music's podcast dedicated to sharing the best albums out each week. We listen to dozens of new releases in advance, identify the ones we think you need to hear, and highlight our favorite five in a brisk mix of clips, context and commentary. The podcast is hosted by NPR Music's Stephen Thompson, and each episode features a member of the NPR Music Network of public radio stations. This week, our guest is Maggie Brennan, music director at WCBE in Central Ohio.

Nashville based musician and songwriter Tristen stopped by the WFPK studio before her recent show in Louisville. Her latest album is called Unpopular Music. She performed the song "Hey La" which she said was for kids who disappear in the wallpaper when they're around their parents. She talked about being a parent herself, preserving her kids' confidence, and a concept called "gray rocking".

We love when a Tiny Desk feels like a homecoming. redveil, a rapper and producer from Prince George's County, Md., moved to Los Angeles a couple years ago to further expand his musical ambitions. He comes back to the D.C. area, home of the Desk, with an evolved sound to perform a soulful set, turning his complex beats into jazzy, full-band arrangements.

Jack Antonoff has spent enough time behind other people’s massive albums that it would be easy, and very lazy, to treat Bleachers like the side door. The place he goes when Taylor Swift, Lana Del Rey, Lorde, and the rest of the pop-industrial weather system don’t need him for a minute. But that’s never really been the thing with Bleachers. Bleachers is where Antonoff gets to build the whole town, then burn down a few blocks, then host a block party in the ash.

Maya Hawke has made the kind of record that sounds, at first blush, like it might be a love album, which is both true and not nearly strange enough. Maitreya Corso arrives after marriage, after another lap through the Stranger Things machine, after a run of film and voice work that would make most people collapse into a hotel duvet and communicate only through room service.

Courtney Barnett is back with Creature of Habit, which is the kind of thing people say when someone has technically been around the whole time but hasn’t handed over the big, proper, everybody-please-gather-round album in a while. There have been covers. There was an instrumental record. There were signs of life. But this one is the real flag in the ground, and Barnett knows the expectation is simple enough, even if making records never is.

Natalie Alyn Lind didn’t exactly ease into the Yellowstone universe. There was no gentle handshake, no long runway, no ceremonial passing of the cowboy hat. There was a screen test in Texas, a phone call on the way home, and then the kind of sentence that sounds either like a dream job or a kidnapping. “They said, ‘You have two days, pack your stuff, and you’re moving to Texas for seven months,’” Lind says.

Paul Bettany and Will Sharpe knew the ghost in the room before anyone hit record. Amadeus already has a fairly gigantic shadow, thanks to Peter Shaffer’s play and the 1984 film that made Mozart’s genius look like both a gift from God and the universe’s cruelest practical joke. So why bring it back? Because five hours buys you room. Room for the wives, the rooms, the meals, the resentments, the private humiliations and the slow rot of envy.