Here and throughout Is the Is Are, DIIV reveal themselves as a more thoughtful, more rewarding band than could have been expected from their debut.

Hold On! provides the best evidence yet that he and his band can find more rhythmic, harmonic, and dynamic paths to explore inside the well of musical history.

If Turin Brakes' world-view has changed little over the years, their embrace of the craft of record-making has only improved, and Lost Property is an impressive document of their skills in the recording studio.

Written and recorded almost entirely in Maine's Manhattan apartment, the album was mixed by Chris Coady (Beach House, !!!) and should play equally well in bedroom headphones and basement nightclubs, and leave many anticipating album three.

Much like Jepsen's Emotion or Swift's 1989, Foxes' All I Need is vibrant, intelligently crafted pop pleasure.

With this sophomore record, Nap Eyes offer a subtle gem that ultimately improves on their debut.

Scheherazade isn't exactly the Feel Good Album of 2016, but being lost and forsaken with Freakwater is a more satisfying experience than feeling perky with most other acts, and Scheherazade is a brilliant reminder of what Catherine Irwin and Janet Beveridge Bean do so strikingly well.

They're able to execute ideas they were only able to hint at when they were a young band. Some songs do have hooks that sink in quickly.

After releasing one of the best and boldest albums of her career with Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, Williams goes from strength to strength with The Ghosts of Highway 20.

Human Ceremony is an impressive debut from a band who seem positioned to make many more excellent albums if they can continue to do such a good job of mining the past for gold and revamping it in their own fashion like they do so well here.

The addition of simple pop elements to Commontime and the fact that the Brewis brothers manage to keep cranking out music this intelligent and flat-out fun to listen to without ever having the slightest dip in quality, makes it one of their more interesting and rewarding efforts to date.

Often, the tunes appear to be handsome constructions--grand, stately, and well appointed--but their foundations are shaky, constructed from threadbare melodies and words that dissipate not long after they land.

By the end of Anti, Rihanna may not arrive at any definitive conclusions about her art but she's allowed herself to be unguarded and anti-commercial, resulting in her most compelling record to date.

Compulsive in more than one sense, Big Black Coat contends with Last Exit as Junior Boys' deepest, most vibrant work.

With their dark fidelity and overly spacious arrangements, these new meditations feel almost as if they were unearthed from some distant vault of preserved wax cylinders rather than re-recorded.

Not for background listening, the album rewards repeat plays and gets the new project off to an impressively cathartic start.

If the individual components occasionally drift or sit still, the overall construction of the soundtrack has momentum, warmly wandering from a 14-year-old tentatively plucking away on his acoustic guitar to a singer/songwriter who never quite seems as confident in his art as perhaps he should.

"Tough Towns," which salutes cities like Pittsburgh and Cleveland, similarly lapses into ambient space for an extended time period, and closing track "Fame II: The Wreckoning" is nearly still for five minutes before its splashing, hopeful finale. Other than these more reflective moments, the album is generally pretty exhilarating, particularly on vicious avant-rap tracks like "At Your Service."

Songs for Our Mothers indicates Fat White Family still want to annoy you, but they're only going to put real effort into it for so long.

Ultimately, with Promise Everything, Basement return from the brink of oblivion and deliver an album that more than lives up to its title.

Never has TTB sounded so organic, relaxed, and free. Let Me Get By is the album this group has been striving for since their formation. You need this.

The overall result is a spirited collaboration that digs through the past for inspiration, but seems to prefer to keep memories a bit hazy.

Dominated by unrelenting synthesized bellowing battling slashing guitar figures and femur-snapping drumming, Pop. 1280 summon a hellish wall of sonic abuse that manages to also be curiously compelling, a neo-industrial attack that starts in high gear and never stops pouring fire and brimstone on the listener.

If Perfect is a tighter and better-focused album than one would have expected from Half Japanese in the '80s or '90s, miraculously it still sound like them, wild but fully engaged, and you'd be hard-pressed to name a band that not only sounds fresh but is still finding new creative paths close to 40 years after it began.

The overwhelming stillness of Promise demands attention but ultimately rewards it: it's an album that comforts the unease that arrives in moments of solitude, whether they arrive in the dead of night or in the chill of the morning.

Cayamo Sessions at Sea works best as a commercial for the ocean-going festival, but it also offers glimpses of some very talented artists crossing paths and sounding like fans, as well as musicians, as they make their way through some songs they clearly love.

Much like Deftones, NIN, and Tool successfully coexist alongside their respective sibling projects, Puciato, Eustis, and Alexander have created a refreshing entity to foster an alternative outlet for their emotions and creativity with satisfying results.

As an entry in Wilson's catalog, 4½ comes off as a fully considered EP, although leaving off "Year of the Plague" would have made it stronger. His obsessive attention to detail is everywhere in the production, but more than that, most of this provides fans with another fantastic showcase for his amazing band, excellent writing, and fine arranging.