Even if it's not quite as varied as Beabadoobee's debut album, Our Extended Play is still a welcome follow-up to Fake It Flowers' success.

It's a new and fantastic chapter in an ongoing body of uncontainable work, one where Birgy has never hesitated to dive into her own psyche and wrestle what she finds there back up to the surface for all to see.

Hinds pull off their reboot with daring and style, in the process making a record easily good enough to stand proudly alongside their best work.

To Love Is to Live is an unabashedly, thrillingly wild ride, and as Beth throws everything she has at her audience, she fully reveals the multitudes she contains.

Some tracks don't fully conclude so much as abruptly end, adding to the dis-ease and resulting in an album that is as compelling to feel as it is to listen to.

His most refined batch of animated pop yet. He triangulates somewhere between Ben Folds and Charlie Puth, albeit with eccentricity to spare and a better feel for the funk than either musician.

With 2022's Misadventures of Doomscroller, Dawes have crafted one their shortest and tightest albums to date that also happens to be one of their most enjoyably experimental.

Among the many earnest earworms here (the cringier "KFM" notwithstanding) are songs like "God Person" ("I'm not a god person/But I'm never not searchin'") and "Don't Do Me Good," an early single featuring her friend Kacey Musgraves. Mournful but defiant, the latter song makes catchy country-rock of tough sentiments.

It's a richly orchestrated, superbly crafted effort that veers between several different emotional states before its time is up.

Not only is Screen Violence Chvrches’ finest work since The Bones of What You Believe, it’s also their most purposeful. It feels like they took stock of who they want to be and what they want to say, and these epic songs about letting go but holding onto the ability to feel make for a stunning creative rebirth.

Even when the tracks sound more sketch-like, not fully formed--2013 single "Airglow Fires" is a trifle by Cutler's standard--the sheer moods are appealing.

Amyl and the Sniffers is a promising opening salvo from a young band who match a rabid hunger with the chops to back it up.

She Walks in Beauty is a loving testimony to the power and lasting vigor of the Romantic poets, and also a reminder of how lucky we are to have an artist as gifted as Marianne Faithfull giving us this remarkable tutorial.

He's building upon the past, both his own and the larger traditions of his homeland, both spiritual and actual, and that gives lullaby and... The Ceaseless Roar a bewitching depth. It's an album to get lost in.

Shut Up I Am Dreaming is pure bedroom art-pop with a thin Britpop glaze that is as poignant and self-effacing as it is self conscious and pretentious.

Country funk, no matter how one defines it, might not be a real musical style per se, but as presented here, and in the first volume of this series, it emerges as a reminder that no musical style stands in isolation.

Offering a newly recorded version of Epic by a bunch of different artists turns out to not only be a clever idea, but it also shows how versatile and strong Van Etten's writing is.

The most exciting and best rock & roll record of 2004.

Be Still Please is another hidden treasure from one of the truly important bands, and persons, in pop music today.

The stylistic switch-ups are clever and effective without coming across as forcefully out of character.

The clearer, uninterrupted version of the album sounds absolutely gorgeous, and actually gets better as it progresses, as Voigt saves some of the most recognizable elements for the second half, while also adding new details such as the eerie choir which appears during the tenth track.

It's rough-around-the-edges fun, with the warmth of familiarity and kinship that Neil Young & Crazy Horse have built by playing together for more than half a century.

God's Son isn't quite the masterpiece is could be -- mostly because Nas is so self-involved, sometimes seemingly intoxicated by his kingliness -- but it's surely one of the most remarkable albums of the Queensbridge rapper's highlight-filled career, just a notch or so below Illmatic and Stillmatic.

While it goes further musically than their two previous outings, it contains enough of the past to exist in a new space that claims the terrain between Watershed and Heritage. Brilliant.

Unfortunately, although Snaith may sound novel expanding upon his indie forebears of ten years ago, when he begins conjuring the ghosts of Krautrock ("A Final Warning," "Bees") or trip-hop ("Lord Leopard"), as he does here, he's entering the company of talented producers who have ploughed the same ground.

There's little that moves one to sing along here, unfortunately. The tempos are all slow, dramatic, and melancholy.

A weird psychedelic mindset is woven through everything, and even though everything constantly seems on the verge of combustion, the songs on Fits always manage to hold together and work themselves out with exciting, engaging results.

There's a soft-spoken power to Metals, even if its songs are more liquid and atmospheric than the title suggests.