A few weeks ago, a well-intentioned New Yorker critic tackled the hefty subject of race in music in a column about indie rock. Now, nobody wants to rekindle the blog tornado that column generated, but until this discussion also includes how consumers actually obtain music, any examination of musical miscegenation is mere windmill tilting. While some mp3 players and download sites place Chris Brown and Jackson Browne near each other on account of their surnames, the two artists still reside in different aisles at the record store. Where and how people get their music is what’s politically and culturally problematic — there’s a reason the Eagles’ “Long Road Out of Eden” is available only at Wal-Mart — not just the music itself.

As of today, there’s no better reminder of that fact than the new albums by Swedish garage rockers the Hives and Brooklyn musical chameleon Imani Coppola — both of which are titled, conveniently enough, “The Black and White Album.”

At first blush, the Hives’ “The Black and White Album” (Interscope) doesn’t sound like the reinvention that it is. Opening track “Tick Tick Boom” is the Hives’ usual sort of sing-along stomp, with guitarists Mikael Karlsson Aström and Niklas Almqvist deploying choppy riffs alongside the rollicking swagger of drummer Christian Grahn and bassist Mattias Bernvall. Vocalist Per Almqvist howls in his crisp, full-throated bombast like a better-enunciating New York Dolls-era David Johansen. Come the second song, though, something strange is afoot in the Hives’ typically nuts-andbolts garage rock. Hand claps, a T. Rex guitar hook, and Bay City Rollers’ background vocals dress up “Try It Again” in a bit of disco glam. “You Got it All … Wrong” comes right out of the gate at a full-Rezillos gallop, nailing such romantic pop-punk down to the “oh no” background chorus chants. And the almost doo-wop “Well Alright,” produced by the Neptunes’ Pharrell Williams, traipses down a jittery ska side street.

By the time the album hits the moody instrumental “A Stroll Through Hive Manor Corridors” — which revolves around the sort of electric piano and slow-crawling bass lines found in 1950s monster movies or in hotel bars — longtime fans of the band’s screaming and hollering good time may start to wonder if main producer Dennis Herring hasn’t polished the band’s hallmark growl down to a domesticated purr. No need to worry: The second half of the album is a downright funky and sensually sinewy affair. Mr. Williams also produced “T.H.E.H.I.V.E.S.,” a slab of Nile Rodgers funk set to a supermodel’s runway gait pace. A guitar-spiked techno beat gives “Giddy Up” its pulsating dance-floor heartbeat, over which Mr. Almqvist offers his best preacherman toasting. And “Puppet on a String” finds the Hives wandering down a piano and percussion cabaret route that does justice to early-’80s Tom Waits.

Tracks such as “Bigger Hole To Fill” and “Square One Here I Come” return to a more 1970s thrill — with flourishes of glam, disco, and bass-heavy funk peeking through the bar-chord rock — and calibrate the album’s overall attitude. On their previous three albums, the Hives stripped their elemental 1960s garage-punk punch down with a brash, twitching libido. With “The Black and White Album,” the band has begun to explore a decade when funk, R&B, and dance music not only competed with old-fashioned rock ‘n’ roll, but infiltrated it, too, and winningly broadens its full-tilt boogie in the process.

But where the Hives are still reaching to break free of their signature sound, Ms. Coppola’s “The Black and White Album” is a stunningly adventurous achievement — and one of perseverance. Pop music tried to push the 29-year-old New Yorker into the one-hit wonder bin following her 1997 video hit “Legend of a Cowgirl,” off her Columbia Records debut, “Chupacabra.” Luckily, Ms. Coppola is far more skilled and resourceful than your typical pop tart, and when the label dropped her in 2000, she quickly released the first of seven albums through her Web site. Ms. Coppola’s music has always mingled conscious hiphop, R&B, and cheeky pop — “Legend of Cowgirl” famously lifted its beat and sunburst 1960s smile from Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman.” But with “The Black and White Album,” she busts out a radically diverse work worthy of the Latin composer Tom Zé.

Like the 1960s Brazilian pop wizard, Ms. Coppola mixes every genre imaginable into her songwriting, and something fresh comes out almost every time — with each song serving as a mini essay from the singer-songwriter’s mind. Ms. Coppola’s new album fearlessly tackles the cultural spaces that separate the races, but like the biracial Ms. Coppola herself, the music isn’t simply part black and part white, but a refreshingly different color altogether.

Clearly, Ms. Coppola revels in showcasing her multifaceted inner muse. “Black and White” rumbles through thoroughbred rock one moment — as in the adrenaline-pushing “Woke Up White,” which rages against racial stereotypes (“I know black folks real well cause I watch me some Dave Chapelle”) — and Macy Gray R&B the next. “Let It Kill You” joyously dismantles a life of consumerism — “You can’t get enough cause you’re a bottomless pit / You’re a fly in a pig sty wallowing in it” — over an electric piano melody worthy of Donny Hathaway. And “Dirty Picture,” which rails against hard-core pornography and includes the seething kiss-off, “You just made a fat girl cry,” pulsates with dirty dance-floor beats.

That’s merely the tip of the successful experimentation here. “I Love Your Hair” brilliantly mocks vapid women as Ms. Coppola’s spoken-word and falsetto lyrics fall over an experimental wash of synths and percussion that’s pure art-school ambience. Even more seismically aggressive is the ribald “J.L.i.a.T.o.Y.O.,” a future-shock assault of haunting, tribal percussion that’s as bizarrely dizzying as Maurice Fulton and Mutsumi Kanamori’s utterly indescribable electro outfit Mu. The lyrics are equally, if strangely, effective: The title is an abbreviation for “John Lennon is a trademark of Yoko Ono,” and Ms. Coppola eventually shrieks, “Use your imagination, turn into a corporation, make that your final destination.”

The album opens with a jaunty introductory interlude called “Black and White Jingle #1,” on which Ms. Coppola outlines where she’s about to go. “I’m talking about what lies beneath the black and white / There’s a mass of gray, it is called your brain,” she sings in a gorgeous sotto voce. “So take a look at what you thought was black and white / And you will see that there was nothing there at all.” Ms. Coppola dazzlingly walks the walk she talks through the entire album, which adds up to an arresting work of breathless pop immediacy — no matter where record stores decide to stock it.