With last year’s Live from the Woods at Fontanel, NEEDTOBREATHE brought the first phase of its impressive career to a rousing conclusion.

The album captured the band’s Christian-crossover, Southern-rock strengths so thoroughly that it was hard to imagine where Bear Rinehart (lead vocals, guitar), his brother Bo (lead guitar), Seth Bolt (bass), and Josh Lovelace (keyboards) would go from there.

Their new album, Hard Love (Atlantic), ends the suspense. Gone are the rootsy, jam-band textures. Replacing them is big-bam-boom production with an electronica sheen. Even Auto-Tune plays a role.

“Hard Love is us challenging ourselves to take some chances as a band,” Lovelace told me. “After our last record [the 2014 studio album Rivers in the Wasteland], which was more stripped back and organic, we wanted to do something completely new.”

The desire for a fresh start eventually led to the involvement of outside producers with star-studded resumés. “We produced a lot of the record ourselves,” Lovelace said. “[But] Dave Tozer, Ido Zmishlany, Jon Levine, and Ed Cash really took our sound to the next level.”

It’s a level that NEEDTOBREATHE’s fans seem eager to explore: Hard Love debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200. And even those nonplussed by the band’s latest stylistic choices will recognize such familiar NEEDTOBREATHE elements as big singalong refrains and eloquent, faith-rooted lyrics.

“Clear,” “Let’s Stay Home Tonight,” and “When I Sing” address the glories of romance, “Be Here Long” the brevity of life and the poignancy of loss. And in “Testify,” the Rineharts put words into God’s mouth without putting their feet into their own. “Give me your heart, give me your song, sing it with all your might,” sings Bear. “Come to the fountain, and you can be satisfied.”

“I think for those fans who have been with us since early on, there is a kind of built-in trust already for what we are trying to do,” said Lovelace. “We have never been a band that stays the same or doesn’t try new things. This frees us up to do what we feel is good and hope that the fans feel the same way. Our fans have always let us throw paint on the walls to see what sticks.”

A virtuoso’s life

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of the late violinist Yehudi Menuhin’s birth, Warner Classics/Parlophone has released 80 CDs in five box sets under the umbrella title The Menuhin Century. Their subtitles—The Historic Recordings, Live Performances and Festival Recordings, The Virtuoso & His Landmark Recordings, Complete Recordings with Hephzibah Menuhin—identify both the boxes’ contents and the many contexts in which Menuhin distinguished himself.

Most telling of all in this regard is the 22-disc box, Unpublished Recordings and Rarities. Only a musician capable of producing incomparably high-quality music gets to produce such a quantity of the previously unreleased and the previously unavailable on CD in the first place.

The chronologically sequenced discs follow Menuhin from 1929 (when he was 13 and recording technology was primitive) to 1983 (when he was 67 and the CD revolution was just beginning). Although listeners’ favorites will differ, Disc 21 (1980) deserves special attention.

On it, Menuhin and the harpist Nicanor Zabaleta play a program of 18th- and 19th-century music by Italian, German, and French composers. The sound of Zabaleta’s crystalline touch overlaid with Menuhin’s glowing legato is so beautiful that Warner or whoever owns these recordings in 2116 will probably reissue them on Menuhin’s 200th birthday as well.

Rinehart: Rick Diamond/Getty Images • Menuhin: associated press