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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.

Kathleen Edwards, “Total Freedom,” kathleenedwards.bandcamp.com/album/total-freedomKathleen Edwards spent the 2000s writing world-class folk-rock songs, releasing four critically acclaimed albums and playing shows for thousands of people across the world. And then, in 2014 — spurred by a confluence of creative burnout, depression and personal turmoil — she suddenly walked away from music and opened her own coffee shop in her hometown of Ottawa, Canada. Now, after an extended period of rest and recharge, she’s back with her fifth album, “Total Freedom,” which reveals that Edwards hasn’t lost a step. These 10 songs are as emotionally honest and effortlessly melodic as any of her previous work, and her return is one of the best music stories of the year.

Suite 309, “101 Notes on Jazz,” suite309.bandcamp.com/album/101-notes-on-jazz

Here’s a weird one! And to be clear: This is a comedy album. “101 Notes on Jazz” is 60 tracks of fake radio bits filled with straight-faced silliness, absurd phrases and inside jokes for no one, set to quiet background music and delivered in that ubiquitous public radio voice that we all know and love. The voice belongs to Raymond C. Scott III, who absolutely nails the sort of smooth but halting cadence employed on, say, NPR promos, even as he rolls out bizarre sketches about a soap factory burning down or a shoe left behind at a hot dog roast or a young Martin Eastbrook putting a bees nest in the bell of his horn and blowing. This is outsider hilarity at its finest.

Windhand, “Soma,” windhand.bandcamp.com/album/soma

Doom metal is a tricky genre to love and/or appreciate. There are great doom bands, of course — Candlemass, Yob, The Flight of Sleipnir, Black Sabbath and so on — but for every one of those there are a dozen whose music is more an assemblage of powerful amps, distortion pedals and interminable riffs than, y’know … actual killer songs. So let’s take this opportunity to highlight probably the best doom album of the past 10 years: “Soma,” the 2013 breakthrough release from Richmond, Virginia’s Windhand. With six suffocatingly heavy tracks stretching in length from six minutes up to a half-hour long, “Soma” is a low-and-slow slab of sludgy awesomeness and home to the greatest guitar tone in the history of humankind.