Carlos Santana revved up his band with grooves adapted from Africa and the Caribbean, jamming live in the studio. He pushed his guitar tone to bite and claw, and — even better — he found a guest singer and lyricist who could ride atop that passionate ferocity: Buika, a singer from Spain with roots both in flamenco and in her parents’ birthplace, Equatorial Guinea. In multiple languages, Buika addresses hard times and the turmoil of love as Santana’s band ignites.

The debut album by the songwriter, singer, violinist and producer Sudan Archives (born Brittney Parks) carries the potential of her homemade EPs even further. Loops of her beats and her raw violin lines are still the core of her music, but collaborating producers add new possibilities: wilder counterpoint, psychedelic hazes, orchestral cushioning. As she sings about self-invention and self-discovery, she accomplishes exactly that in the music.

The Puerto Rican songwriter Ileana Mercedes Cabral Joglar, who records as iLe, gets combative on her second album, “Almadura,” which translates as “Hard Soul” and puns on “armadura,” Spanish for armor. She assails colonialism, machismo, hypocrisy and hate, and praises Pan-American solidarity and traditions, in songs that balance pugnacity, elegance and lithe rhythms. Vintage Caribbean styles like bolero and rumba get 21st-century twists.

Justin Vernon assembles Bon Iver’s songs ever so painstakingly, with a shifting array of collaborators, elaborate electronic manipulation and lyrics that often need decrypting. But what comes through all the convolutions is a paradoxically pastoral warmth: earnest, yearning melodies and music that rustles and burbles like a digitally enchanted forest.