From Q2 Music, watch an intimate concert inspired by Nico Muhly’s exciting, intrigue-filled opera Two Boys, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.

Photos: Ebru Yildiz for NPR

Valkyries, golden rings, the holy grail… Wagner was epic, not to mention complicated. For the bicentennial, we asked an expert about the five musical episodes that keep the composer’s extraordinary dramas in our lives today.

Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

Julia Holter “World,” from Loud City Song (out Aug. 20)

From Q2 Music, take a tour of composer Jherek Bischoff’s childhood home: a tiny sailboat docked in a Seattle harbor.

How does a very rich and eminently successful artist with a superstar-all-from-a-home-movie girlfriend call us out? ‘Black Skinhead’ is somebody banging on your door in the middle of the night, hurtling out of Ye’s metal-plated face, predicting reactions before it’s halfway over. He rides an industrial-sounding, stadium-sized beat, calling Chicago, ‘Chiraq’ in a grainy echo. He associated himself with Malcolm X on ‘Good Morning,’ but then it was a joke. This time he’s serious. He says he’s going 400 mph, which we believe – he’s taken corners on two wheels on live TV before.

— Frannie Kelly on Kanye West’s two new tracks, which point fingers in every direction, include himself

First Listen Live! Watch Queens of the Stone Age perform …Like Clockwork in its entirety, then tackle an assortment of older material, in a sold-out show at The Wiltern in Los Angeles on May 23.

Photo: Nora Lezano

Seeing The National live in concert can be an intense and cathartic experience. Seeing the band play new songs in the cozy confines of The Cutting Room Studios for WFUV takes that experience to a new level. The band is in fine form here, as it performs “Graceless,” one of the many stand-outs on Trouble Will Find Me, which is out today.

Ray Manzarek, the keyboardist behind The Doors, died Monday from bile duct cancer. He was 74. In a story about the band’s breakout “Light My Fire” on NPR’s All Things Considered, Manzarek says, “Western civilization ends here in California at Venice Beach, so we stood there inventing a new world on psychedelics.”

So this is great: Twin sisters Katie (Waxahatchee) and Allison (Swearin’) Crutchfield cover Grimes’ “Oblivion” for Rookie Mag.

Joined by three excellent collaborators, Mohammad Reza Shajarian gives what amounts to a brief master class in the art of singing. Watch the Iranian icon — and one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices — unleash torrents of swooping, soaring, goosebump-inducing sound that’s still perfectly controlled at age 73.

Photo: Marie McGrory/NPR