All of it is minuscule and done in a minor setting, but it’s also meaningful. Tracks appear like brief sketches before dissipating into the air. It’s the low-key nature of this mixtape that makes Still Slipping Vol. 1 a compelling listen.

It’s a gallery walk through of her feelings with fans and listeners. The mind, like a bedroom, can be messy. While completely set up with decor and personalized trinkets, the chair in the corner with all your clothes and the trinkets poking out from under the bed are quite obvious. Grande proves again that she is not embarrassed to let it all be seen.

More than any time prior, it feels we’re getting the true human being that is Thao on Temple, offering her every thought, rather than letting another take her words from her. However, for the more casual listener, the musical barbs and purposeful roughly-hewn nature of the music might prove to be a bit of a barrier. With the inherent vulnerability of the words here, however, perhaps that’s just the blanket the band needed.

Different Rooms is more evidence of the duo’s quality, and its main downside is that it doesn’t reach the magical highs of their debut album. Still, in different places, different results will be yielded; Different Rooms may have familiar qualities, but it makes for a different excursion.

Yes, Mclusky are still here, but they’ve returned to the well balanced noise rock of their debut, My Pain and Sadness is more Sad and Painful than Yours, where things aren’t quite as thrilling as on Do Dallas and The Difference Between….

Embracism is a record that’ll grab you and bring you close, but also one that won’t hesitate to push you away with a gut punch and expect you to take it like a man.

With tighter editing – Different Kinds of Light can feel plodding in its ambitious length – on her third album, Bird should only continue to improve.

BANKS still surprises and delights with her unique lyricism, emotive vocals and direct assessments of those who have hurt her alongside herself as an individual. Still, many tracks are damned short and feel like they are lacking necessary bridges to reach their full potential that this album feels quickly consumed and fleeting when we want to stay inside these songs a bit longer.

Regardless of the energy used in the moment, Lindstrøm and Thomas create music that feels at home in many environments. This is particularly relevant as 2020 nears its end. Listeners can make of III what they will, whether that be slowly dancing along in their rooms, or laying back and taking the music in, waiting for the world to start up again.

Smother may lack the proper drive of Two Dancers, but it succeeds in whittling down what has become Wild Beasts' motif.

Okay, they may never reach the heady heights of Between 10th and 11th again, but we should just be grateful that they still exist and are still looking to move their sound forward in ways that many of their ‘peers’ seem incapable of. It doesn’t always hit, but when it works it’s a glorious thing.

Sanguivore might not be as precisely balanced and pop-pitched as Sex, but there’s craft and talent here, and the album is punctuated with sublime and sublimely entertaining moments.

Raging with a steady purr, Play With Fire might be an obvious follow-up to their 2017 debut—but that doesn’t mean it’s any less powerful or interesting. The LP sees L.A. Witch solidifying their status as the cursed love children of Black Sabbath and The Shangri-Las.

It promises even better material to come if he can blend the astounding songcraft from earlier efforts with the atmosphere of this album.

Beatopia lacks the edge and drive of its predecessor, yet several inspired moments are enough to maintain Kristi’s reputation as one of the nation’s most exciting young artists.

If you take one thing away from this debut, take away the fact that it's thoroughly deserved.

At times, take the cake feels like it’s at an ennui crossroads, trying to define listlessness while side-stepping its intentions. But how many artists have we seen hover around an emotional bullseye on their first album only to hit it on their next go-round? Even if take the cake doesn’t show PACKS’ full potential, it still gives us much to look forward to.

The record is about opposition: it haunts but soothes, it repels while drawing you in. As you listen, this unbridled exploration of sound will become part of your own dialectic subconscious rather than a soundtrack on your dancefloor. You have to listen.

Incessant repetition with infrequent and almost indiscernible alterations in cycles is the key to unlocking the joy inherent in dance music, and Snapped Ankles utilise this recipe with aplomb. Not everything on the album lands fully, though. .... These are, though, minor quibbles on a record that begins to at least start to translate the total enigmatic elation that a Snapped Ankles live show can manifest.

Secret Love may well capture the vapidity of the consumeristic life, but does it, in the process, dip into vapidity itself? Rather than critiquing or lampooning end-stage capitalism, Shaw in particular seems to have succumbed to its toxicities. Perhaps the album is best heard as a memento mori, a dying declaration – art, like everything else, drowning in the waters of mendacity.

12 Lines is enjoyable enough to be worth its existence without seeming rehashed and a solid improvement over his debut.

It’s a new Loaf album, with varied rock gems that will fit snugly into live setlists and even get those old fans to sing along. It’s one of those rare reunion albums that satisfies a need, even if it doesn’t land as hard as some may have hoped.

Observatory is ultimately not the Wrens record we all wanted, but it’s what we have and it’s better than it has any right to be given all the turmoil of its conception.

It lacks a genuine peak like “Spanish Sahara” or “Balloons,” but it achieves greater consistency elementally, if not tonally.

Weird Faith is an honest and well-written record by one of underground pop’s sharpest and most empathetic artists.

The Caretaker certainly remains a fascinating and worthwhile project.

The irony of Collapsed in Sunbeams is that Parks’ greatest strength also gives the album its most noticeable weaknesses. We are mainly here for her connecting songwriting, which means that the production – by Gianluca Buccellati – is restrained to allow her direct words to flow at their own behest.

Much like DeJ, this is an album that occupies its own space, music to get lost in your head to. It may rarely run and may struggle to fully break through for that very reason, but it does more than enough at its own, proud, steady pace.