An intriguing and often lovely album.

It's rare that historically important recordings are also essential listening, but this is such a case.

A pure, dream-like quality hovers around these tunes. The subject matter is, perhaps, a touch more mature than it was. Friendships gone fallow, loved ones missing, roads not taken, the bittersweet recognition that life is what it is now and will likely continue that way—the songs consider midlife with clarity and a little sadness but not much turmoil.

Ultimately, whether The Smile spells the end of Radiohead feels beside the point when the music that Yorke and Greenwood are making at this stage in their career is this damned good.

From All Purity will never have the impact of Earth’s second album, Khanate’s self-titled debut, Take As Needed For Pain by Eyehategod or Sleep’s drone doom bible Dopesmoker, but it contains all the important ingredients that made those records so essential.

The buildup remains, but the payoff is fleeting and tentative when it's made at all – the songs do get big and loud, but there's always the hint of an ultimate impending boom which, in songs like "Six Days at the Bottom of the Ocean", never comes.

Jones remains emotive yet controlled, her artistry enhancing the warmth of her delivery, taking a sound from the past and making it still new and still vibrant. This one is a time machine of sorts, but it looks back to push forward, fulfilling the persistent vision of Soul of a Woman and Sharon Jones.

It takes a unique kind of ambition to produce something like I See the Sign, but the wonder isn't just that he does it, but that he does it so well.

Fish at first doesn’t come across as the sort of defining, revelatory work that The Resurrection and Revenge of The Clayton Peacock and, to a lesser extent, Pachyderm were, but its pleasures are more subtle, revealing themselves in increments.

The work is too much for casual listening, and it refuses to be background music. And so, perhaps live performance is the most appropriate setting. This double disc captures both the awkwardness of performing such inward-looking material and the communion this sort of sharing carves out. Elverum’s lyrics are searing in their specificity.

Parker gets plenty of cred for the production acumen he has exercised with Tortoise and the New Breed; his work with the ETA IVtet affirms his mastery of making music that feels and is felt in real time.

These songs come on strong, and if you’re not in the mood may seem to push a bit too hard. But when was too much ever a bad thing? The best way to interact with Wasteland is to let its music roll in like a tidal surge and sweep you under, coming up gasping when it’s done.

Their exploration of the genre's boundaries is so lithe and confident, and their studied aloofness here so convincing, that the familiarity comes across as authenticity and the restless impulse for expansion feels, at times, transcendent.

Forster produces some of the most direct and affecting songs of his singular career. ... Forster’s observational directness and simple language are always in service to the deep feeling in his songs and few better imbue the quotidian joys of domestic life and the power of memory with such poetry.

The album sounds a little warmer and less rustic than might be expected. The sound’s not inherently better or worse, but it suits Fussell’s movement toward more expansive orchestration and a more contemporary feel.

A chilly, deliberately off-putting, but deeply fascinating record.

His inventive and affective pairing of resonating melodies and noise is impossible to deconstruct--that is to say, narrow down to a specified meaning or reason behind each piece. We, the listener, get to apply each of Hecker's abstractions to whichever feeling we choose. That's definitely an ocean worth diving into.

At 16 songs over 74 minutes, Interior Live Oak is surprisingly low on filler for an artist who seems to take mischievous glee in tripping up listeners.

Perhaps the best thing about The Lemon of Pink is that it possesses a cohesion that its predecessor, even at its frequent best, still somehow lacked.

The lightness of PUNK isn’t toothless escapism. Rather, it’s a challenge to find sweetness, joy and individuality in a world that trends toward cynical conformity.

Both weird and wonderful, Pick a Day to Die manages to boil down the immensity of Sunburned’s oeuvre into a manageable morsel that is digestible by both neophytes and long haulers alike.

The balance of spoken word and music is well-conceived. .... Less than halfway through, the Coin Coin series is engaging and ever new.

David ain't the kind of thing you want to hear every day, but it's the kind of thing someone is going to play every day for a month. Or months. Whatever it takes to come back to life.

Lost in the Dream continues Slave Ambient’s trajectory, threading wispy, half-spoken melodies through emerald forests of tone, ducking conventions like riff and hook in favor of edgeless, shapeless sensuality. These are songs that drive off into dune-like landscapes, always in motion, never arriving.

Dry Cleaning gave us a taste in 2019; New Long Leg is a banquet upon which to feast.

The Underside of Power is even more powerful than Algiers’ debut, starker, more violent and yet leavened with an uplifting surge of gospel.

Gold Record is honest in its own fanciful way, proving that not everything has to be literal fact to be true, and not everything needs to have a physical presence to be real.

The breadth of imagination, experimentation and diversity on display across these four sides of vinyl is nearly unparalleled in modern non-compositional music... With this record, Dilloway secures his place as one of the great solo figures of modern noise.

The record is energetic and often rollicking. Paternoster’s singing and intense guitar antics are center stage, but her longtime bandmates King Mike (bass) and Jarrett Dougherty (drums) are essential to the band’s potent combination of groove and snarl.

Haw is, likewise, bristly, indelicate, often beautiful but never precious. It bursts with life.

This one of the best releases of 2024 and one of the best in Blackshaw’s uniformly excellent catalog. Truly, well worth the wait.

Sometimes it seems almost sleight-of-hand that any music could have so much going on and yet be so spacious.

It’s the kind of album you can listen to many times without wearing it out, without even getting much of a grip on why you like it.

Akinmusire easily trumps Truffaz in the area of technical skill. His agile delivery and rounded, even-tempered tone recall facets of Kenny Dorham and Dennis Gonzalez in terms of burnished beauty and melodic alacrity.

Shaking The Habitual is quite simply a triumph, a bold and experimental statement.

Bootleggers will tell you that there are better versions of almost anything Neil Young puts out, and maybe they’re right, but that doesn’t matter much when this record’s playing. Because nude, even if you see some flaws, you’re not going to care because they’re dressed just right for love. You might love them even more for imperfections like the disarmingly stoned giggle at the start of “Hawaii.”

Overall, its more up-tempo songs aside, Lucifer on the Sofa is a disappointment, offering regrettable evidence that Britt Daniel’s laudable song writing mojo may have gone off the boil.

Though short, The Window Is the Dream is a perfectly formed and bewitching album that offers both immediate gratification through its measured performances, plus plenty of depths to explore as its themes gradually reveal themselves. This one will be sure to feature highly come the end of the year.

Rather than back down from the precipice of decline and confusion, Protomartyr has reported the situation as they see it in The Agent Intellect, an uncomfortable, honest and ultimately excellent record.

If Rook is as ambitious as they feel they can be without adding excess, then that's a good tradeoff, but their sound right now fits them like a pair of shoes that are a size too small.

Some of the songs feel like echoes of one another, such as “Diver” revisiting the water imagery of the opener, and short instrumental interludes “Made of Mist” and “Resolve” create an uninterrupted sense of flow. There’s an expansion of perception in “Night Picture,” which feels akin to Phil Elverum’s work as Mount Eerie.

Life has a wholly predictable uniqueness.

The music has a bare-trees feel that dovetails with the wintry theme. There's plenty of orchestration, but it's all framing and backdrop for Bush's piano and voice.

With Eno Axis, McEntire again connects to her very particular world, without retreading where she’s been, flourishing in rootedness even as she expands her scope.

There's something lunky and crude that weighs down the chaos, even if it outwardly resembles arty contrariness. Motorik without motor skills, New Brigade actually sounds new.

It’s a wonderfully rich sound palette, and one that plays to the strengths of both musicians.

Throughout, Sylvian's songs retain their peculiar emotional coloration, of tension bubbling just under the surface.

Third is about the potential for being, not being itself. It’s the base chemistry of the Portishead sound, a compound awaiting reaction. Which is up to the listener to produce, like the lightning that brings the Monster to life.

Much of this record is quietly beautiful, and its laments gather weight with repeated listens.

Dreaming in the Non-Dream is different. To the best that mostly instrumental music can articulate non-musical experience, it sonically renders the business of hunkering down and figuring out who has your back.

The instrumental parts patiently map out their terrain, Harvey intones her vivid poetry, often backed by long-time collaborator John Parish’s affecting voice, then the song will stand aside. It’s only on repeat listens and by drawing threads between the individual songs that the beauty of the whole begins to take form.

The songs won’t grab you or pull your hair. They’re barely touching you. They won’t even acknowledge that you’re there. And yet, they can sink deep into your cortex over time, haunting you like the nightmares you can’t remember and the words you wanted to write down but that fade completely as you open your eyes.

The first two discs make a good introduction to the curious, and following the anthology format, it’s exciting to think that anyone who does come to the band this way, although they’ll have a fine overview of what makes Mogwai compelling, still has plenty of riches to discover.

Impossible Truth is a dense and compelling album, but also one that shows room for him to develop into an even more impressive musician.

Very few other bands are working at the level of aggression, precision, intensity and intelligence that Protomartyr musters. Relatives in Descent is yet another record from this outfit that you can’t afford to miss.

The songs on England Screaming sound very much in line with Wreckless Eric’s recent output, brash and tuneful, the words barked out in the artist’s clanging, faintly tremulous tenor, the choruses exploding in swaggering hooks. And they are very good songs, not a real dud in the bunch, and a couple that rank with the artist’s very best.

Though none of these eight songs are anything less than fun, dynamic, and intensely listenable, lead single “Housefly” is probably the pick of the bunch; it arrives early, hits hard, and is the most economically arranged of all the songs.

The Lost Tapes doesn't feel like a barrel bottom being scraped; it's a scoop into a pond still teaming with life.

Loyalty can slip into the background if you let it, receding into prettiness until you miss the uncompromising intelligence and honesty. Yet that in itself is a triumph, as the former child star steps back and steps back until all you can hear are the songs.

Everything glows with a wonderfully forgiving warmth and subtle fortitude, generating the kind of intimate, reassuring atmosphere that feels unique to well-executed folk music.

There are listeners that will be drawn to and make much of the brightest moments on The Enduring Spirit: the breezy string work at the beginning and in the middle section of “Will of Whispers”; the guitar tone and most theatrical moments in “Servants of Possibility,” which may put some in the mind of Steve Howe, c. 1971; the long slide through melodic atmospherics in the second half of “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity.” This reviewer prefers the tougher stuff.

Stirring stuff.

Real Warmth, her seventh album and sixth for No Quarter, is an authentically emotive rejoinder to the all too prevalent practice of pretend empathy.

From the vocal harmonies to the steel guitars, tympani, and winds, Fleet Foxes continue to give rich and varied textures to their consistently tight harmonic structures and memorable melodies.

The record is more about preserving hip-hop culture that about creating something fresh.

A surrealist song cycle that is both oblique and engaging.

While Sky Burial is a bit overlong, and meanders a bit in some of its textural climes, it’s a fascinating statement from a young band to watch.

This is for certain, no time is wasted listening, likely again and again, to Rosali’s compelling emotional journey on Bite Down.

The band sound more pleasingly unified than they ever have. By the same token, the album feels less adventurous, at least in terms of stylistic diversity, but the focus on Newman's exuberantly literate power-pop affords it more impact.

Even more than their last record, the fine A New White, For Hero: For Fool is a wonderfully sprawling mess.

The results, though rarely the caliber of the albums that bookended this era, are a consistent delight.

No easy listening feat by any stretch of the imagination, Scott Walker's The Drift will provide critics and general music fans with talking points for the next 10 years. It is, simply, a work of staggering emotional sentiment and complexity that few will be able to match.

Though this release is bloated and sometimes inconsistent, Horseback remains a distinctive, at times even bewitching band.

All of the tunes are pretty but none of them knock it out of the park.

The magic of I’ve Got Me comes in the way that brutal sentiment comes dancing in on skittery melody and how coruscating lines conform so neatly to classic song structure. Joanna Sternberg makes tales of betrayal and non-conformity sound like tunes from 1930s black and white musicals, and that’s an accomplishment.

Moving well beyond the claustrophobic and listless tendencies of earlier releases and doing away with their predictably two-dimensional dynamics, this is Mogwai's strongest album to date.

Engineer Bosco Mann's work here exemplifies the principal that it's better to capture the sound right than to try to fix it in the mix. Then you can spend the mix getting the balance right, making some sounds stand out and others blend just right. Such is the case here; this record simply sounds right.

As ever, he refuses to offer any easy answers, leaving the listener beguiled.

For completists and anyone else paying attention, it is the most expansive and rewarding route to the band's elaborate genius.

The resulting sound is clear and resonant, which does justice to the music Orcutt’s composed. And instead of feral yelps, ringing phones, and passing traffic, the guitarist accompanies himself with subliminally registered breaths.

A great deal of well-written, rigorously observed detail.

Try to label what Newsom does in a sentence or two, and you just tie yourself in knots. Have One On Me will do little to change all that, and so the only clear point of reference is her own previous work. Beyond that, though, it’s enough to say that it’s her, and if you loved "Ys" as much as this writer did, you’re probably going to love Have One On Me also.

There's a just-right roughness to the recording that has worked for bands as diverse as The Commandos and The Trashmen.

The whole is so relentlessly nasty and the riffs so good that a multitude of metal sins are forgiven.

Ka got something from an autodidact street preacher. For more resonating effect he puts together street common wisdoms and Biblical allegories.

Perhaps more than any other record the band has issued in the last 20 years, Sunn O))) best recalls the austere glories of The Grimmrobe Demos (1999).

Oceans Apart is the album that fans have been waiting for, the one that brings back the flawless production of their early releases and the cynical/idealistic tradeoff in Forster and McLennan’s songwriting.

On Veckatimest, by contrast, the experimentation can go over the top: the additional arrangements may not add much aside from being one more thing to admire. And, paradoxically, doing that moves some songs out of the avant-garde and squarely into the middle of the road.

It should be stressed as bluntly as possible, then, that Jenny Hollingworth and Rosa Walton haven’t “just” made a good album for a couple of teenagers; I’m All Ears is pretty damn good for Rambo.

The thing that really sucks about Bitte Orca is that the guy is probably onto something pretty good, but his allegiance to cleverness rather than consistency fucks it up.

The decision to work these songs out while camped out next to a mobile recording truck shifts the instrumental balance; the bass is less mobile, handclaps and choppy rhythm guitar set the cadence and overall things move a little slower. And Ibrahim Ag Alhabib, who sings over half the songs, has never sounded more world-weary. ... But deep blue sentiments touch deeply, and Tinariwen’s music still has that reach.

Positively stomps and bristles, with Smith and his band summoning up the type of chutzpah not normally found in middle age.

Classic Objects demonstrates Hval’s capacity for musical growth and lyrical introspection. It is her best work thus far.

Life Metal is music as event. It’s a terrific record.

Tense and uncertain, The Weather Station will keep you tuning in.

I Am Not Afraid Of You is a one-stop jukebox.

What’s more effective is that the band have become more skilled at writing for chord changes rather than just riffs. They don’t exactly back down from the effect of the latter when they go there, but the attention to harmony gives the whole much more heft than it otherwise might have. The heft is certainly in the physicality the music achieves in its peak moments. But it’s also in the fractured beauty of this music, its emotional catharsis, the beauty of something lost perhaps.

Clara demonstrates Morgan’s ability to make practically whatever he gets his hands on into loscil music. But when loscil music is this deeply immersive, richly textured, carefully calibrated, and ultimately viscerally satisfying (however one feels about the process), you just hope he keeps on doing it.