Stream: New albums from Chris Pierce, Adrian Younge and Mia Doi Todd

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From left: Chris Pierce, Adrian Younge (by The Artform Studio), Mia Doi Todd (by Azul Amaral)

Catching up with three important albums that were released Friday — from Chris Pierce, Adrian Younge and Mia Doi Todd. Recommended:

CHRIS PIERCE, “American Silence”

Chris Pierce’s state-of-the-struggle is not just protest music for the ages — as relevant now (sadly) as it would have been in the 1960s — but it’s a pandemic miracle, recorded during socially distanced sessions with just the singer-songwriter and engineer Clay Blair. Unfussy folk music drawing its strength from Pierce’s resonant vocals, “American Silence” confronts racial injustice in sometimes chilling detail, addressing American complicity, mass incarceration and Black identity, as well as saluting the iconic John Lewis. Comparisons to the legendary Richie Havens are apt. There are still fires burning, as Pierce pointed out last summer, and “American Silence” should be part of the soundtrack to extinguishing them.

ADRIAN YOUNGE, “The American Negro”

If Pierce’s album is a solitary fist raised high, law professor-turned-producer Adrian Younge’s tour de force is a thousand of them. “The American Negro” intersperses classic (and cinematic) soul, funk and jazz with spoken-word tracks and poems, thoroughly dissecting racism in America. “It’s as if James Baldwin hooked up with Marvin Gaye to make a record produced by David Axelrod,” Younge has said. It’s the kind of work that could be part of college curricula, and the album is only part of it. As an addendum, there is the four-part podcast “Invisible Blackness With Adrian Younge” on Amazon, as well as the “arthouse-type” short film, “T.A.N.,” coming out this month on Amazon. Not just a triumph musically, “The American Negro” is a challenge all Americans should accept.

MIA DOI TODD, “Music Life”

The long-running L.A. singer-songwriter brings her typical magic to her 12th full-length, “Music Life,” an album nominally about her artistic path but which encompasses so much more. Whether singing about motherhood, Mother Nature or mythological wonders, Todd’s heavenly voice possesses a spirituality all its own. It imbues the album with a special reverence for both music and life.