As sprawling and combustible as this entire album seems, all of the musicians maintain a deadly, razor-sharp focus, and the whole thing is powerful and full of purpose and conviction. Completely unbelievable.

These kinds of lyrics paint pictures that can be simultaneously morose and inspiring, avoiding the stock repetition of 2010's mainstream love songs by imbuing them with the bold creativity and vicissitude of songwriting in the '80s and early '90s. All in all, Lo Moon is an impressive debut.

An album that cooks up a dreamy meld of contemporary indie-New York atmosphere and a trippy past seemingly frozen in time.

Mint Field's gloominess is very real and relatable, and their debut is a truly remarkable work of art.

Impossible Star is another strong showing from a veteran outfit that has continually resisted categorization or commercialization, and has remained innovative as well as relevant.

Anenon's music sometimes seems to explore contrasts, but it does so in a manner that is easy to follow and absorb, and his music ends up being relaxing rather than challenging.

Kuti and Positive Force don't let up at all during One People One World. Impeccably sequenced, it runs from strength to strength, dazzling with expansive sonic textures, killer arrangements, and a musical genre palette that exists seemingly without boundaries. As a recording artist, Kuti has been reliably consistent, but this date is his masterpiece.

He may have traveled a long way from the glory days of Felt, or the almost-success of Denim, but even when his life has turned dicey, his gift for cracking amazing jokes in one line, then dropping devastating emotional bombs in the next, has never deserted him. It's out in full force on Mozart's Mini-Mart, and the record is nothing short of a rollicking joyride of eccentric brilliance.

All at Once is just as clever, impassioned, and purposeful as we've come to expect from this band, and it's a truly rewarding listen.

Although there are ominous qualities to some of the tracks--blunt drums, clanging noises, refracted and probing synthesizers evoking not-so-fun houses and slasher flicks--this is brighter than Two/Three. Sweet and synthetic woodwinds and strings, sublime piano loops, and other delightful wrinkles are more common than the creep-out components.

This volume charts Jansch's development as a songwriter as well as an interpreter who remains devoted to his roots while restlessly expanding the reach of his oeuvre This music has aged exceptionally well.

Full of heart, courage, and passion, Widdershins finds Grant-Lee Phillips going from strength to strength after The Narrows, and it ranks with his best solo efforts.

Tracks like the glammy "Mekong Glitter" and the instrumental "Heathrow" both hanging on long enough to outstay their welcome. Overall, though, Insecure Men's melting pot of pop is straight-up fun with some deceivingly clever craft to it.

The Low Anthem have explored this minimalist, moving stylistic space before, but never so relentlessly and affectingly. Almost completely stripped of virtuosity, The Salt Doll may alienate certain traditional roots fans but has the potential to bewitch musers and wanderers.

As a whole, Hundred Acres is a pleasing listen with a warm-hearted, pastoral feel, even if its nuances sometimes get lost in the cracks.

Tahoe is far from being simple, and is much more emotionally complex than the average ambient album.

Given the level of the performances, the majority of the guests evidently approached this as a Kendrick Lamar album, not as a soundtrack. Black Panther: The Album serves both purposes well.

Maturing past their screamo years was a necessary endeavor, but on Wait for Love, PBTT feel a bit stuck in phase two.

Silver Dollar Moment is a stunning debut, and if it doesn't quite reinvent the wheel the way that The Stone Roses did, it does have a uniquely sweet spirit and lighthearted beauty all its own.

Onion is mature and contemplative compared to Shannon & the Clams' earlier efforts, but it's music that comes from a place of celebration and love, and these songs will make you dance and sing along--and that's what this band has always done best.

Sometimes, Luke LaLonde's yawp pierces through this stylish murk, as if he's impatient with these mannered arrangements, but this tension also provides a perhaps necessary counterpoint to Born Ruffians' newfound earnestness; it adds color and dimension, keeping the songs from seeming po-faced and giving Uncle, Duke & the Chief just enough jolt to be unpredictable.

By the Way I Forgive You is a different beast than its predecessor, a record with more texture, shade, and ambiguity: it is clearly the work of a maturing artist and it's all the richer for it.

While See You Around recalls work Watkins, O'Donovan, and Jarosz have done before, none have made an album quite as exquisitely shaded as this.

The stark and brutally frank "I Don't Want Children" impresses with its sonic intimacy, as does the mercurial "Sundog," one of a few selections that utilizes the sounds of the remote location's flora and fauna--wind through the trees, birds chirping, and dogs barking in the distance--lending the proceedings a bucolic, almost Terrence Malick-ian vibe, and adding even more mystery to what is truly a singular piece of work.

Sprawling and complex as In a Poem Unlimited's structures and styles are, it's U.S. Girls' most immediate collection to date, in terms of both sound and message.

One for the Ghost shows that Astor's creative rebirth wasn't a fluke, and it's good that he's making albums on a regular basis once again.

It is desperate, important, and powerful music and it might just be the best album they've ever made.

While it may be inspired by Sandy's fallout, Landfall's reach runs to a sea of loss, chaos, and confusion. It's an elemental mystery of quietly epic proportions made exceptional through clarity of thought and feeling.

Produced by Mark Crew (Bastille, Rationale) and Catherine Marks (the Killers, Wolf Alice), the album features much of what has endeared the Liverpool trio to fans; especially vocalist/guitarist Matthew Murphy's literate, tongue-in-cheek self-awareness, which remains firmly intact.

While longtime fans may want to replace their original LPs with these quality pressings, this set is well worth the investment for anyone interested in guitar players, blues, and British folk.

An album typified by serene, earth-loving optimism, even when romantic heartache is in play.

All this feverish digital desperation makes the already clamorous M A N I A feel positively cacophonic: it may only be 39 minutes but it's one long ride.

A set that is less scattered stylistically--dominated by tropical house and trap stylings--yet less consistent quality-wise.

His gentle pleadings and luring lines evoke lightheadedness, and at times lack enunciation, like he was just wheeled out of oral surgery and had his water laced with an aphrodisiac.

It is rich and gorgeous, elegant because of its exacting nature, an aesthetic that suits the film to a T.

Perhaps Carrabba still writes lyrics in broad terms, but this willingness to sculpt his sounds on the softer side indicates that he's discovered a way to sustain this allegedly adolescent music well into his adulthood.

With its mix of intriguing sounds and occasionally underwhelming songwriting, Always Ascending feels more like a first effort than the band's actual debut did. As it stands, it's a somewhat shaky but promising start for the revamped Franz Ferdinand.

Fallon unapologetically mines bygone eras for inspiration, but he does so with the care of an archaeologist on the biggest dig of his life.

The masterful way Wasser balances challenging moments like these with more familiar fare makes Damned Devotion one of the most complete, and daring, portraits of her artistry.

For an album whose lyrics often feel despondent, this record feels like a gracefully administered tonic.

Heartache is likely the most mined substance in all of pop music, but Williams applies such panache to the material that it's hard not to get wrapped up in all of the delicious melodrama.

Twin Fantasy leaves no doubt that Toledo is a strikingly gifted and thoughtful songwriter who also has a firm grasp of how to make his material work in the studio, and isn't afraid to think on a grand scale.

Since this is a series of five-song EPs, Human Problems isn't paced like an LP, which is a benefit. Perhaps there are moments that drift, such as the mellow bachelor pad neo-instrumental "Everything Is Now," but they're designed that way, offering color and texture to music that already had a surplus of both.

Keyboardist Cleo Sample and singer/songwriter Kendra Foster are among the variable cast that joins that trio, so the set unsurprisingly has the densely layered, spaced-out, and fiery qualities of D'Angelo's Black Messiah.

Necessity might be the mother of invention, and their lack of training certainly gives their music a wonderfully eccentric slant, but that's just as likely due to their restless imaginations as it is circumstance.

John Tejada's fourth full-length for Kompakt is a succinct, incredibly focused album of complex, melodic techno tracks.

Unlike many lost albums of demos or unreleased recordings, Beautiful Despair actually stands alone as a really good, sometimes great TVPs album, and that's down to Head's recording and Treacy's reliably weird and wonderful songs.

The band purportedly balance their compositional process between writing songs on their instruments and utilizing electronic production programs that they then translate to live instrumentation. As a result, these songs have the wave-like flow of electronic dance tracks but with the expansive, acoustic atmosphere of classic ECM recordings.

Equal part greasy, Sabbathy hymns ("Shipwreck," "Orca") that connect with the subtlety of a windpipe massage, and epic, semi-orchestral blasts of Spaghetti Western art-rock ("Curse of the Red Tide," "Ballad of the Deep Sea Diver"), Legend of the Seagullmen delivers all the thrills of a big-budget B-movie with the sonic might of a broadside cannon.

On average, it's not one of Son Lux's catchier albums, but it is spellbinding, strange, and moving, and still as far away from expectations for a piano, guitar, and drums trio as any in existence.

Transangelic Exodus is a scrappy yet poignant rock & roll narrative of inner conflict and acceptance; its songs are a confessional and confrontational commentary on a historic period when so much is possible, even as fear, hate, and paranoia still hold the reins of power. Its energy, vulnerability, rage, and crafty poetics are awe-inspiring.

They sound like a band treading water, desperately looking for their place in the modern pop landscape and never deciding whether to go pop or stay totally weird. This indecision leaves them stuck in the middle of the road, which isn't a very interesting place to be.

The Deathrays deliver the sonic equivalent of a fighter jet buzzing a control tower, and while they may not bring anything too new to the White Stripes/Black Keys power duo model, they've certainly proven that they belong in the same arena.

Conceptually muddled, qualitatively uneven fifth full-length.

These old-fashioned album rockers are so loud and awkward, they overshadow the excellent singer/songwriter album that lurks at the core of I Knew You When. Such imbalance makes I Knew You When a bit incoherent, yet in its quietest and angriest moments, it offers some of the best music Seger has made in the 21st century.

The songs are all about stressful experiences, conflicts, and struggles, and this uneasiness is felt throughout the record, but all of this cathartic energy is harnessed in a highly skillful manner. Messes almost seems too accomplished to be referred to as a debut album.

Here her vocals are resoundingly clear, and her lyrics are sharp and direct, sometimes to a startling degree.

Here Come the Runts doesn't shine or resonate like Awolnation's previous material, though it is quite clear that Aaron Bruno's songwriting abilities are understated. His penchant for effortlessly combining bright melody and harmony with gritty distortion and towering walls of sound never ceases to entertain.

There are no easy answers or happy endings here; as Vasquez grows more skilled at expressing his pain, he delivers his bleakest--and most cohesive--music yet.

She radiates genuine personality, and her second full-length demonstrates just how well she can bend pop structures to her will and sound fantastic in the process.

Bardo Pond seem to be on an eternal, destination-free odyssey, and Vol. 8 is another strong stop on their trek.

Throughout, the album's stories, turns of phrase, and underdog romanticism loom even larger than its melodies, but what leaves the biggest impression is that barely restrained revelry.

Resolve is easily Ackroyd's most confident and mature statement. She remains devoted to lyric melody, but her re-combinations of sounds and textures inside these compositions are almost compulsively listenable, even as they move toward the undefined--and untamed--musical border she seeks.

While that's brief by 21st century standards, it's plenty and proper on a collection of songs framed in kinetic, inspired performances by one of the greatest soul bands to emerge in decades.

Walk Between Worlds offers further proof that Simple Minds can flaunt what they are because they finally understand just who they are.

Their new way of constructing songs and the more open nature of the sound have done nothing to blunt their emotional impact, and Microshift ends up being just as powerful and cathartic as previous works while being richer and more musically satisfying.

It stands with their best work--some songs would no doubt end up on a greatest-hits collection--and in that regard is some of the best pop music anyone could hope to hear in 2018 or any time after.

They're working on keeping the flame burning, and Black Coffee may be their most effective testament in that effort to date.

Themes of nourishment, transformation, and compassion thread through meandering and often lengthy tracks like "Kukkuripa," "Aery Thin," and "Gull Rock," the latter referring to the distant rock hulking out of the Celtic Sea's golden horizon on the album's cover. For their part, the five other members of Red River Dialect add their own distinctive voices to the conversation, swelling and jangling together in loose formation to create a musical landscape that, if photographed, might look very much like that sea-encircled rock, dark in its own solidarity among the sun-crested waves.

Trinity Lane is honest, well-crafted, and hits an emotional bulls-eye: it's Lilly Hiatt's strongest and most moving work to date.

Love Jail isn't magnificent by any means, but it is stronger than its predecessor. Dommengang's much improved songwriting, relentless pursuit of more spacious atmospheres, and richly textured backdrops inside the hard rock cave provide ample evidence.

Rifles and Rosary Beads is unlike any other record. It edifies and empathizes with the experiences of its participants in delivering brutal yet tender truths; it confronts listeners to embrace without judgment the struggle of war survivors, while experientially relating the extended fact that over 7,400 veterans commit suicide each year. Gauthier and her collaborators look into the gaping maw of war, its trauma, isolation, rage, and loneliness, to reveal the human faces and hearts of its witnesses. Popular music can do no more than this.

Die-hard fans may appreciate the musical switcheroos on The Worm's Heart, but others may not understand the need for them.

With enough highlights to form a single digestible effort, Migos could have delivered another culture-defining classic with just a little trimming. Instead, they've taken what should have been a potent, big league statement and diluted it.

The album finds them delivering music that feels fresh and inspired; this is what Turin Brakes do, and Invisible Storm shows they continue to do it quite well.

By turns gentle and bold, traditional and boundary-pushing, The Thread That Keeps Us is another fine example of Calexico's ever-broadening horizons.

The Official Body is a frequently dazzling example of how resistance can be fortifying and even fun.

Whether they're sophisticated or visceral, Shame's energy and confidence makes Songs of Praise an exciting debut from one of the most vital-sounding British rock bands of the late 2010s.

Even with thirty-plus years behind them, Corrosion of Conformity can still reach the nosebleed seats without sacrificing any integrity. It may all feel a little familiar, but it still burns going down.

All in all, Between Two Shores is an effort that will please his fans while showing he's still learning new tricks in the art of record making, and he's putting them to good use.

A skillful debut by musicians with notable prior credits, they've settled into something intriguing and distinct out of the gate.

The Limiñanas sound like they're too cool and nonchalant to even have a phone, much less use one to make a less than great record.

While Cook's credentials are undeniably impeccable, they don't outshine her talent, and she just keeps getting better.

Could It Be Different? is an exhilarating album that hits hard on the emotional front while making sure to move feet at the same time. It's a small step up from their previous works, with stronger sounding and with sharper hooks that help make it even clearer that the Spook School are one of the most exciting and important bands of their era.

Kacirek and Müller are credited, but it's difficult to discern their contributions to the piece. The title All Melody seems to refer to the singularity of the sounds combining together. It also suggests that while empty space is often a major element to the album, what is present is entirely melodic, and purely based in emotions.

Dream Wife have seized a certain energy that is undeniable and--despite the myriad inspirations and easy comparisons--feels so fresh and alive, enough to make their trailblazing influences proud.

It's art with a beat, noise with hooks, and more proof that No Age are one of the great slept-on bands of their generation.

Much of the time, Freedom's Goblin plays like Ty Segall's version of the history of rock & roll as seen from his perspective, and it's as idiosyncratic and exciting as you would expect. It's also some of the very best music Segall has given us to date, essential for fans and strongly recommended to curious newcomers.

While this sounds like it could be an impossibly tall order, or something that requires an encyclopedic knowledge of music just to listen to, the band achieve a remarkably, almost effortlessly cohesive sound, and it goes down much more smoothly than one might expect.

More nuanced than previous releases but recognizably brand-related, Marble Skies is another win for Django Django.

Accessible and friendly yet highly profound, Vision Songs is a truly uncommon work, and easily one of Laraaji's best.

Exploring new directions with experimental confidence, an ever-playful BØRNS takes the necessary steps in artistic maturation on Blue Madonna, a worthy and satisfying follow-up for the mischievous Lothario.

This Is Glue ends up a clear improvement over the band's debut and something worth recommending to fans of classic jangle pop and anyone looking for some catchy indie rock to help them break free of all the bands that seem content to just cruise along in low gear.

The release is best summed up as stream-of-consciousness bubblegum pop, seldom committing to an idea for very long, but still maintaining a driving sense of excitement.

Earthtones is a refreshing, playful set that hits a sweet spot between classic smooth soul and Jurvanen's pensive soft rock.

Even when the Johns' sentiments are morbid, I Like Fun's music seizes the joy of the moment.

A vibrant album that explores the political and cultural tumult of the late 2010s with anthemic heft and individualistic perspectives.

The House reinforces Porches' standing as a distinctive voice in a crowded field of wistful D.I.Y. indie electronica.