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Bandcamp is an online music platform used largely by independent artists and record labels to stream songs and sell merchandise. It’s also a vibrant virtual community teeming with interesting sounds just waiting to be discovered. Each week, I’ll highlight three releases available on the site that are well worth your time and attention. If you find something you dig, please consider supporting the artist with a purchase.

Jeremy Dutcher

“Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa”

jeremydutcher1.bandcamp.com/album/wolastoqiyik-lintuwakonawa

On Monday, the nonprofit group behind the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, which annually honors great albums by Canadian artists, regardless of genre or commercial success, awarded its 2020 prize to Montreal-based rapper Backxwash. Her style isn’t really for me — you should check it out, though — but it reminded me of past Polaris winner Jeremy Dutcher, a classically trained operatic tenor whose 2018 album “Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa” features ambitious and beautiful baroque-pop arrangements of traditional First Nations songs. Dutcher got the idea for the album while engaged in anthropological research on the endangered language and culture of the indigenous community where he grew up. And thank goodness he did, because “Wolastoqiyik Lintuwakonawa” is stunning.

Homeboy Sandman

“Don’t Feed the Monster”

homeboysandman-mmg.bandcamp.com/album/dont-feed-the-monster

Over the past decade, vulnerability has become an increasingly accepted element of hip-hop. Drake wasn’t the first MC to give voice to his own insecurities in a rap song, but he certainly opened the floodgates and made it mainstream-cool to take a break from the braggadocio. On his new album “Don’t Feed the Monster,” Queens MC Homeboy Sandman practices radical vulnerability, peppering 15 tracks with vivid rhymes about trauma, stress, faith, fear, abuse, addiction, confusion, frustration and beyond. It’s incredible to listen to the man work through these issues in his sturdy, measured flow as a pack of killer beats by white-hot underground MC/producer Quelle Chris bounce in the background. This is hip-hop for grown-ups who’ve lived a life in the real world.

Sunken

“Livslede”

sunkendenmark.bandcamp.com/album/livslede

The roots of the extreme musical style known as black metal stretch back to Scandinavia, where bands like Bathory, Hellhammer and Mayhem emerged in the 1980s and ’90s playing a kind of heavy music that took the speed of thrash metal and augmented it with tremolo guitar picking, blast beats, strangled vocals and raw production. Black metal has since spread across the world and mutated into a hundred different directions, and Sunken, from Denmark, plays what’s known as “atmospheric” black metal. What does that mean? It means it’s heavier than hell, but also gorgeous, with majestic, melodic guitars splayed across the horizon and epic crescendos cascading down around your ears. The singing will still sound pretty harsh to most folks, but when everything else is so big and beautiful, it hardly matters.