Mike Mettler

Ian Anderson has never taken his foot off the creative gas when it comes to both producing new music and harvesting the wealth of catalog material from Jethro Tull, the groundbreaking prog/folk hybrid band he co-founded in 1967.

That said, considering just how active an artist Anderson has been over the past six-plus decades, it might surprise you to learn the stalwart British collective's latest release, The Zealot Gene (InsideOut Music) is in fact the first new Tull studio album in more than 19 years.

By the time November 1980's Gaucho rolled around, Steely Dan were more than ready to close up shop and take a self-imposed two-decade hiatus. Indeed, Gaucho's sparkly veneer was a fitting then-final coating on the acclaimed jazz-leaning but genre-defying band's first decade, fully encapsulating the dark-humored observational worldview of its principal creators—bassist/ guitarist Walter Becker and keyboardist/vocalist Donald Fagen—to a literal T.

"I heard a bunch of things in it I had never heard before."

That's Rob Baker, guitarist of Canada's still-favorite sons The Tragically Hip, recounting the feelings he experienced upon hearing the recent, fully completed Dolby Atmos mix of his band's seminal February 1991 release, Road Apples for the very first time.

Could May 1970's Let It Be possibly be The Beatles' most underrated core studio album—and is such a thing even possible? To be sure, when Let It Be initially dropped as the free-thinking 1960s gave way to the much grittier 1970s, the album was seen as an imperfect endpoint for a once-in-a-lifetime epoch in popular music—whereas September 1969's Abbey Road, which was actually completed after the Let It Be sessions but was still released eight months ahead of that album, actually serves as a better-suited final exclamation point and nod to their fans as the final, definitive statement of the fully active Beatles era.