No matter how much he has on his plate, Wilco’s prolific frontman Jeff Tweedy still sets aside part of each Friday to discover new music. “If you’d told me when I was 12 or 13 that every Friday I could listen to basically every new record that came out, I’d basically lose my mind,” Tweedy says with a laugh, over a phone call before a show in Italy in support of his band’s tremendous new album, Ode to Joy. “Sometimes I form opinions about stuff that isn’t for me, like modern country, that I’m just curious about. It’s insane sounding, but I try to listen to everything.”

His choices for this installment of Big Ups reflect his relentless curiosity: below, you’ll find everything from goofy, lo-fi punk to somber organ meditations, and from lush left-field hip-hop to abrasive drone compositions. Yet the six records below have one thing in common: they all exemplify what Tweedy considers a sort of gold standard in music: “The first thing I’m drawn to is whether an album immediately strikes me as having its own internal logic—is it its own universe?” he says. “I automatically think, ‘Have I heard a record like this before?’ If I haven’t, I’m much more likely to continue to listen and see how much that feeling is sustained.”

Ode to Joy itself more than fits that bill. The album largely does away with conventional rock and folk song structures; instead, it embraces spare, impressionistic arrangements—often led by booming, elemental percussion—to create one of the moodiest and most haunting records in Wilco’s catalog, more movingly understated than the experimental Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, and darker than the uptempo Americana of Sky Blue Sky. “For this record, we tried to intuit rock music pretending we hadn’t heard any…we’d tell each other what we wanted to hear,” Tweedy says. And while he is quick to acknowledge that the band didn’t exactly “reinvent rock music,” it does sound, to a certain degree, like they reinvented Wilco.

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