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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Street Safari defies the sophomore slump with another collection of sharply crafted tunes that play like singles. It's a slightly more refined and thoughtful set on average, one that plays like an undergrad to Never Enough's skipping out on summer school, but it still struts and shrugs and keeps cigarettes in its shirt sleeve.

Moaning is an undeniably powerful debut which sounds astonishingly mature and accomplished for a first effort.

It's clear that Superorganism know exactly what they are doing at all times, slicing and dicing like master chefs, then reassembling the bits and bobs of pop ephemera into a concoction that has a sugary kick sweeter and fizzier than an ice-cold cola.

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.