Whatever electric guitar pyrotechnics you’re seeking, you’ll find them abounding on The Messthetics’ self-titled debut. Is it riffs you like? Discover a whole compendium of them on “Serpent Tongue,” three and a half minutes of molten licks and spiraling solos, racing a relentless low-end pulse toward certain implosion. Or maybe you prefer your guitar heroes to lay back with some chill ambiance. Try “Your Own World,” just over a minute of shadowy noir; or “Once Upon a Time,” a moody meditation that unfolds with sheets of static and noise. And if you just want to swing, start at square one: On album opener “Mythomania” the guitar snakes through a rolling beat, descending into shards of dissonance before being reset by the drummer’s crisp break. The Messthetics is an exhilarating showcase of virtuosity and technique, made by musicians far too smart to rest on finesse alone: It might have taken them an afternoon’s time to blaze through an album’s worth of solos and loose-limbed jams, but instead they’ve sculpted and shaped their electric thrum into nine exquisite tunes that are awash in melody, powered by groove, and kinetic with the possibilities of chemistry and collaboration. It’s all packaged in an album with a big, clear sound, all three instruments roughly equal in the mix—a tell in and of itself: These songs were performed with jazz dexterity, but engineered to offer gut-punch rock and roll thrills.

The vocal-less power trio comes by their sense of boundaryless, genre-agnostic possibility honestly: Drummer Brendan Canty and bassist Joe Lally spent the better part of 20 years improvising a rhythmic language all their own within the hardcore trappings of Fugazi. Their rapport is critical but so is the disruptive presence of Anthony Pirog, an ax man with roots in jazz who gels perfectly with his fellow Messthetics even as he seems to keep them ever on a razor’s edge. “Mythomania” captures their high-wire balance of confidence and daring, craft and anarchy: It starts off nimble and swingin’, but the guitars become more discordant, the drummer’s pulse more haywire, until it all abruptly collapses into stomp and squall. There’s a showman’s flair to it, a real bravado in how The Messthetics are relentlessly tuneful yet take us just to the edge of chaos, and the rest of the album plays out with similar panache; between the three of them, these guys have done just about everything, and they’ve sequenced this record to condense decades of guitar innovations into a sleek suite with churning momentum and a seamless sense of mood. Listen to “Quantum Path, your local alt rock station boiled down into four minutes of pummeling, instrumental fury; its mayhem is the perfect set-up for the quick reset of “Your Own World,” followed by the taut ebb-and-flow of “The Inner Ocean,” where the guitars chime like early U2.

They save the biggest fireworks show for the album’s final few minutes: “Crowds and Power” begins as a headbanger’s ball before breaking into a dead sprint of thrash ‘n’ roll—yet even a song that’s meant to pulverize floats into passages of spacy exploration. The comedown, and the album’s lone break from the power trio format, is “The Weaver.” With a rumble of percussion, the hum of acoustic guitar strings, and even the gentle swell of a string section, the song benefits from the “Desolation Row” effect, wherein a record’s lone departure from crackling electricity somehow comes across as its rawest moment and its wildest curveball. Its placement at the album’s end is one final flush of inspiration. These guys clearly have chops, but the triumph of The Messthetics is that it’s a concise and absorbing pop record; virtuosity is never held up as an end unto itself.

They’re not the only ones who are packaging exploratory guitar work in elegant, explosive albums. Few guitarists have enjoyed careers as charmed or as diverse as Nels Cline’s, which includes regular shredding with Wilco but also an expansive back catalog of noise experimentations. In 2016 he released the big band-buffeted Lovers, a masterpiece of mood music and a heartfelt salute to Gil Evans, Bill Evans, and Quincy Jones. Now comes Currents, Constellations—recorded with a much smaller unit but once more leaning hard into straight jazz, nary a guitar freakout or dissonant patch in earshot. The band, christened the Nels Cline 4, includes Scott Colley on electric bass, Tom Rainey on drums, and Julian Lage matching Cline on guitar. (The two ax men have a buzzing Verlaine/Lloyd chemistry.) The record is all about knotty interplay, yet like The Messthetics, it’s an album that goes beyond virtuosity for its own sake: From its thick, dank sound there emerge gnarled riffs, nervous tension, and a twisted fusion of jazz improvisation with rock and roll energy. Pick any given track and you’ll hear a clear melody laid out with both ravishing beauty and frayed, beastly menace.

The menace comes mostly in the record’s steely opening salvo: “Furtive” crashes into being with the ominous splash of cymbals; Colley and Rainey sketch out a nervous, jittery rhythm, and the guitarists dance all around it with curled licks and razor-edged runs. “Swing Ghost ‘59” lurches and thumps like Frankenstein’s monster, its halting cadence suddenly opening up into irresistible mutant bebop in the song’s closing stretch. And speaking of halting cadences, “Imperfect 10” is a tight coil of off-kilter melody and rattling percussion, sounding like a Thelonious Monk tune as reimagined by Marc Ribot. These songs bundle nervous energy and dense guitar interplay into tightly tuneful packages, and their jolt of rickety energy makes it seem as though the whole album’s humming with loose electricity, even when things slow down a bit in the back stretch. “As Close As That” is a hushed continuation of Lovers’ wee small hours mood, while the set’s lone cover—Carla Bley’s “Temporarily”—is spectral and spare. Like The Messthetics, Cline’s record has an obvious and delightful outlier: Flowing with a pastoral, Veedon Fleece ambiance, “River Mouth (Parts 1 & 2) is part electric drone, part acoustic reverie—nine minutes of gentle ebb and bottomless tranquility. Just when you think you’ve heard every kind of guitar magic, a master like Cline hits you with another.