Passions run high, and so do musical ambitions, in the songs of Natasha Khan, the English songwriter who records as Bat for Lashes. “Never whisper you a great love story/Only scream and cry and moan,” she sings on her third album, “The Haunted Man” (Capitol). With the unabashed drama of songwriters like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel or Björk, she writes about desires and furies so great that all nature bends to them, and she often surrounds her voice with large and changeable forces. On “The Haunted Man,” orchestras, synthesizers, rock bands, choirs and exotic percussion are all at her disposal, materializing and disappearing at any moment. Yet unlike previous Bat for Lashes albums, which grew gimmicky and overloaded, “The Haunted Man” keeps Ms. Khan and her unexpectedly succinct melodies in the foreground, urgent and unguarded. It’s all still larger than life, but there’s a human voice at the core — and sometimes she whispers, too.

The Coup

Political anger and distance from the hip-hop mainstream don’t weigh down the Coup, the vehicle for the Oakland rapper Boots Riley’s smart, engaged lyrics since the early 1990s. “Sorry to Bother You” (Anti-), the Coup’s first album since 2006, riffles through pointed thoughts on class warfare, propaganda, intoxication and general rebellion: “Billionaires have squatted on the Magna cum lauded/Hollered ‘Take my wallet — make the people robotic.’ ” But the tracks are songs first, not manifestoes. The music is largely upbeat, even zany, with more than a hint of Outkast at its peak. (It’s too bad that this wasn’t the music that got designated “rap-rock.”) Mr. Riley’s rhymes are buoyed by funk and rock riffs from his co-producer Damion Gallegos’s fuzzy wah-wah guitars and wriggly Moog synthesizers, and they rally around snappy refrains shared by pert female voices. Mr. Riley remains hard-nosed, but he’s also willing to rap alongside kazoos.

Bomba Estéreo

Local rhythms channeled through electronics: It’s a worldwide recipe for dance music with outreach, yet every combination is different. Bomba Estéreo, a band from Bogotá, Colombia, founded by its bassist, programmer and producer, Simón Mejía, has been building modern party tunes on crisp Afro-Colombian rhythms like champeta and cumbia for more than a decade, while keeping an ear on possibilities across the African diaspora. The group’s singer and rapper, Liliana Saumet, offers frequent invitations to pleasures on and off the dance floor, while the tracks, mixing hand-played and programmed sounds, stay uncluttered but kinetic.

Bomba Estéreo’s third album, “Elegancia Tropical” (Polen) stretches in multiple directions. It forges alliances — via hybrid beats and flirtatious lyrics — with the Brazilian rapper BNegão and the Angolan and Portuguese group Buraka Som Sistema. It courts international listeners with the synthesizer swoops and pushy rapping of “Pure Love” and “Caribbean Power.” But for nearly half the album, Ms. Saumet also gets to drop her party-girl duties in lovelorn pop songs like “Bosque,” “Sintiendo” and “El Alma y El Cuerpo,” showing some tenderness as sinuous guitar lines share far more private grooves.

Lord Huron

The songs on “Lonesome Dreams” (Iamsound), the debut album by the Los Angeles band Lord Huron, head for wide-open spaces. Ben Schneider’s lyrics are full of quests and journeys; “Ends of the Earth,” for instance, starts the album with his inviting a girl to join him as he explores a boundless river, mountain and desert. His music sails above those geographic and romantic landscapes as a thoroughly tuneful, reverberant extension of folk-rock and country-rock, the Eagles and Big Country as diffused through My Morning Jacket. “Lonesome Dreams” smooths away some of the world-music undercurrents of Lord Huron’s EPs, reverting to pretty, multilayered Americana strumming and harmonizing; if the music grew much gauzier, it would cloy. But for most of the album, Lord Huron stays poised precisely at the edge of weightlessness.

A. C. Newman

As the main songwriter in the New Pornographers, along with his solo albums and past bands dating back to the 1990s, A. C. Newman has been so prolific that he risks being taken for granted: He’s the guy who can always spin out hummable pop melodies that would be right at home in the ’60s or ’70s, whether or not he matches them to lyrics that add up. But “Shut Down the Streets” (Matador/Last Gang) takes an extra step toward the heartfelt: “Is it too much to lose, or too little left to live for?” he sings in “Wasted English.” The melodies are still there, from gently scalloped waltzes to hearty power-pop choruses, and there’s a new layer of polish on the arrangements: intros that establish atmosphere along with hooks, richer and more elegant instrumental blends, the self-effacing vocal harmonies of Neko Case from the New Pornographers. And especially in “They Should Have Shut Down the Streets,” which mourns the death of his mother, Mr. Newman comes through as less facile or defensive, more open. It’s a tipping point.