With Shaw’s vocals as the pivot, Dowse, Maynard and Buxton flex, weave and dance around her, resulting in a nuanced listen that extends the band way beyond their pigeonhole of “post-punk.” Hard to pinpoint where Dry Cleaning belong now, which can only be a good thing.

Hell-On is Case’s most idiosyncratic album, but it’s also her most generous and grounded. It is her strongest--as in it projects strength, the kind that comes with vulnerability.

Ys is one of those rare sophomore albums that shatters exceedingly high expectations.

The personal songs, about Choi’s dissatisfactory early education and immigrant family, have a whiff of mythic American meta-story, while the historical ones are deeply felt and eccentric.

“Tinde,” at the end, floats a woman’s ululating tones over bare, echoing percussion. But mostly, Amatssou sounds exactly like you expect Tinariwen to sound, like its drifting to you over acres of sand, like it’s moving your bare feet to dance, and that is a very good thing.

This is a memory album that is touched with love but almost entirely free of cheap nostalgia. It comes from a long way away, using everything Dacus has learned since to capture her experiences clearly, with art but without too much ornamentation.

The Comeback Kid, is full of shimmering, ultra fanciful castles of guitar-based sound, but it’s also kind of an experimental pop gem, like Deerhoof after a month of Guitar Hero or like OOIOO any time, really.

No matter how smoothly the songwriting flows, nothing’s easy on Interstate Gospel. Lambert, Monroe, and Presley know that, yet they take on an array of hard topics and reel off one-liners and hooks as if that’s enough to get us through, which it just might be.

Now, 17 years removed from the original stateside release of the band’s music, this expanded reissue (buttressed with an additional disc of decent live tracks and a few cool demos) gives an entirely new generation of pop fans an excuse to dive into the group’s music.

Clattering drum machines and gorgeous washes of tone are topped off by a standout vocal turn that carries the album off into the clouds, a searingly emotional purge and soothing balm all rolled in one.

The more Clark edits, the more she refines, the stronger St. Vincent becomes. At this point, it's just a matter of consistency.

One Beat joins the likes of Fugazi's In On the Killtaker and Bikini Kill's Reject All American for its impassioned new-world resistance, and could very well be the greatest triumph of punk independence since Black Flag.

Even if it fails to meet impossibly high expectations, The Harrow & The Harvest offers a handful of keepers while moving Welch and Rawlings (hopefully) past their writers' block.

Thoroughly satisfying in sum, Hart and crew still succeed in leaving the listener desirous of more.

It’s the wholeness of his style that is so arresting.

These songs make no concessions to your serenity. They are prickly and aggressive and a-melodic. In a world geared towards bland, uneventful spotify-core, Mating Surfaces grabs you by the short hairs and shakes you. It will not be entirely pleasant, but it is absolutely necessary.

Fireraiser Forever! is an often galvanizing collection. Feck and Evans cast an acerbic but humane look at contemporary life and the band is in fine form. Their indie garage sound is nothing new but fans of this kind of scrappy raw sound will find plenty to like.

Overall, High Violet feels more like a protecting-the-franchise record than a new phase in the National's sound. And yet, even so, a handful of its songs rank with the band's very best.

That Vashti Bunyan had the courage to step out of seclusion and follow up her classic debut is admirable. That she was able to do so with an excellent batch of songs is a joy to behold, pure and simple.

You’ll never hear the same thing twice in listening to Levon Vincent. Akin to the highlights of his past discography, something in the mixes of these songs jumps out to grab you by the throat, then gradually retreats as other elements subtly work their way to the fore of your consciousness.

Before Today accomplishes exactly the same thing all his other good records do, so I’m not sure it does much for me that, say, House Arrest didn’t. Nonetheless, it’s still one of his better records--there are some excellent pop songs here, and it’s a good place to start for listeners who are unfamiliar with Pink’s bizarre schtick.

This is wonderful stuff, both as pure entertainment and a document of a vanished era.

Occasionally, it feels like there’s a manipulation going on somewhere, a cloud of hype that obscures both the band’s actual virtues and its shortcomings.

The attraction that already existed between Xasthur’s music and Mount Eerie’s exerted a strong enough force on Elverum that it became incorporated into him.

Fantasy Empire’s production values keep some of this internal resistance in check, and the album’s relatively linear songwriting does the rest, with much of the record proceeding at a pretty steady gallop, without too many wrinkles or games of musical tug of war.

The trio skilfully carries the track ["Fyra"], and the record, towards a gentle dissolve into the clouds as the drums fade out entirely, leaving the dulcet bass and guitar tones to play off one another in the closing moments. Sublime.

Arab Strap chronicle all the joys we seek and the catastrophes we make on what could well be their finest and most complete record. As Days Get Dark is a sordid, mordant, tender triumph.

Each artist, individually, brings something impressive to the collaboration. The intersection of these gifts reveals something bigger, an art that embraces experience and vulnerability, but that also relies on studied craft. Whatever confessional comes through does so in an artful but not showy manner that makes this latest album more than just a likeable reunion.

Maybe people with better audio equipment or a more jaded approach to electronic music have been enjoying him this much all along, but the remaining 47 percent are in for a surprise.

Most of Light Up Gold's songs are either filled with clever insights or self-aware honesty.

Shaking Hand demonstrate a cleverness with the reins, balancing looseness and restraint. This is typically found in long-tenured outfits; it’s hard to believe this is their first record.

Having the backstory on Walker’s path to sobriety isn’t necessary to appreciate Course In Fable. There’s enough allure in Walker and guitarist Bill MacKay’s elaborate latticework of glazed melodies and modal chords that call to mind McEntire’s other band The Sea and Cake, and how drummer Ryan Jewell floats through it all with loose, jazzy flourishes.

This two-disc set capture the duo in full-psyched out freak mode, 18 tracks of spiraling, tightly harmonized, punchily played guitar pop that the two brothers have been holding onto since COVID bollixed up a post-Beyond the Door tour in 2020.

At the end, S-M is still a silly tribute band, years away from hoeing a unique row. But when musicians crank out such a joyously chaotic mess of someone else’s forced nostalgia, it’s hard to be mad at them.

Here on this fourth Cairo Gang album, Kelley works in full-blooded, freak-beated 1960s garage mode--and damn if the change-up doesn’t suit him.

There’s a good deal of spoken word on this album, the sort of poetry that’s meant to inspire but seems a little overblown. It’s part of the genre, obviously, and it gets swallowed, soon enough, by groove. But you have to stick with it through the flute-scented rites of “First Peoples,” the downtempo intro to “Re-Memory” to get to the music. I could do without it, personally. The music, though, is pretty great.

Even more than Luminol, No Depression in Heaven builds up such a heady and consistent ambience that you can relax into it like a warm bath.

The music offered here constitutes the expected fluid mixture of rhetoric and instrumentation.

The wild humor and slash-and-burn methodology of Comets on Fire have outlived any pretense to trend; Blue Cathedral makes a strong case for the permanent re-emergence of undiluted psychedelic rock.

Keeping Secrets feels like, itself, a bit of a hidden gem, murmured at you rather than shouted, a quiet one but a grower.

The recording’s sessions were done in a few days, and the final product retains a fetching immediacy and intimacy. A fundamental lightness of affect pervades the recording, even when it delves into heavy or sad topics.

The most disarming thing El-P's got going for him is his ability to sound like he's broadcasting from an impossible future even while he's standing right next to you in the present.

The orchestra’s nearly perfect. Cline’s selections are non-traditional but trustworthy and intelligent. The album keeps a persistent mood even as it reflects on the mood. But 80 minutes of it requires patient listening, and there aren’t enough moments to really grab here.

Elements jostle together with the pitch and roll of the walk home after last call, the songs themselves are beautifully put together, with striking images that fit the melody exactly, shine for instant and then are tossed away.

Razorwire-sharp and reflexive, Eton Alive sees Sleaford Mods knowingly take the existential dare once more, and mostly win.

With Forgotten Days, the band don’t so much extend the sprawling prog-laced epics of the previous album as blend them into tighter, more direct tunes that feel very appropriate for the moods of this long, fractious year: at times ornery, restless and deeply sorrowful.

The results are two fistfuls of noise-rock at least as potent lyrically as anything on God’s Country and arguably harder musically, for a few reasons.

It feels like Bejar's comfortable with himself – relaxed even – and that feeling saturates the entire album. It's a confidence that makes Kaputt the best Destroyer album in ages.

A schizophrenic palate of honeyed soul, downbeat electrix, timeless hip hop and bare-knuckle beats, these 31 tracks (spread over 44 minutes) are packed with triple the hooks – and suffer from attention deficit disorder (to the listener’s benefit).

The result is a strong collection of the sort of rock songs at which No Age excels: swiftly paced, inventively layered and riffy, simultaneously caustic and gauzy.

The album is lovely. The band as currently constituted has chops, and mixes highly polished songwriting and arrangements with select extemporizations.

Here his final collection of songs is both grand and ghostly, sweeping and solitary, and you do not have to know how the story ends to sense a profound melancholy.

The Imperial [is] a pleasure to hear. Sonically, the dark, rich timbres of The Imperial are as wallow-worthy and voluptuous as bar-light or certain kinds of sadness. Like the assuredly crappy hotel from which it takes its name, The Imperial is too run through with exhaustion to want to spend a lot of time with, but it’s perfect for retreating into when you can’t feel right about anything.

An instant classic. Few records contemplate such grandeur and fewer still achieve it.

5 is Town and Country's most beautiful, flawless actualization of the goals they’ve been working towards since 1998, and paradoxically, a near-complete rethinking of them, as well.

On Our Endless Numbered Days Beam feels some pressure to subtly expand his repertoire, but the swampy blues of tracks like “Teeth In The Grass” and particularly “Free Until They Cut Me Down” interrupt the aforementioned mood like unwelcome hiccups.

The narrator’s desire for transformation reveals a hopeful, but tenuous ending to an emotionally fraught and musically ironclad journey. One wishes more concept albums were so authentic.

Not entirely dissimilar to their previous efforts, but it features the duo tweaking their sound in subtle ways that make for an affecting, if not drastic, tangent.

Bottom line: if you like diva pop with a little edge, have at it. But if you got into Billy Nomates because she reminded you of the Sleaford Mods, maybe sit CACTI out.

Excavation is a dark, ominous and sinister album, but Bobby Krlic is too smart to focus solely on scaring the shit out of his listeners, instead using electronics and beats to explore the haunted past and uncertain present in ways that build on his previous output without rehashing tired “hauntology” clichés.

What’s surprising about ONoffON is how different it sounds from those previous two records, and yet how well it follows their lead.

Fall Be Kind really mines the depths of the b-bin: musical theater + jam band + Putumayo. Liking it feels goofy, even though it’s pretty good.

For the most part, Birgy’s excitability lends the album an infectious charm. Ultimately, Mega Bog deserves to be appreciated alongside similarly talented proponents of the absurd, such as Aldous Harding and Cate le Bon. Dolphine is a strange and affecting listen; the sound of a free-wheeling afternoon in the sun curdling into early-evening shadows.

A whole range of influences are apparent at essentially any point in the album, yet it never feels like a cumbersome effort made of separate parts pasted together. Room from the Moon is involved and fluid, it’s the work of an artist channeling parts larger than herself.

It’s about making art in a capitalistic society, where the artist must cannibalize every part of herself and offer it to a sometimes unwilling and unreceptive audience. It’s all a quest for immortality and staying power among icy cold synths, quiet samples and screaming. Sometimes, Jenny Hval is the vampire, and sometimes she’s the one bleeding.

So refined at times it borders on the insipid.

At little over the half hour it is a snapshot, but any recording of this Quartet contains multitudes to explore, marvel at and enjoy.

A colorful, evocative dream-pop record.

Bird Songs is unpretentious and as good a "mainstream" jazz record as you're likely to hear these days.

The old version violently rejected oppression, the new one quietly totes up the damages. Both are valid approaches, and both are musically satisfying.

Like a great short story, Body is well worth revisiting, even after you know the plot twist, to savor details and subtleties you missed the first (or second or third) time around.

There’s a solid, heartening release to be found in Countless Branches. It’s a shame that Fay and Dead Oceans didn’t take the opportunity to tease it out.

The good news is that Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga is Spoon's best record in a while - if you liked "Gimme Fiction," you'll probably like this too.

There is a sense of every note being where it should be, glowingly back-lit and carefully arranged. It’s far from the note-bending frenzy that Polizze often indulges in — and let’s not give up on more of that and soon — but it is very beautiful in its own way and captures this endless, featureless, daydreaming summer about as well as any music I’ve heard so far.

The breathy blur of Pratt’s vocals give these tracks a will of the wisp quality, as you chase after the lyrics only to find yourself becalmed and beatific amid iridescent fog.

It remains to be seen whether Nomad reveals Bombino to be an artist of limited means or one who is making the occasional misstep on the way to something great.

An ambitious, wrenching, majestic album.

Burn Your Fire is a minefield in the best possible way, studded even in its quietest moments with subterranean threat.

Skeleton Closet is like a good novel, full of implications and shadowy contradictions and complexities. It’s pop craftsmanship with a touch of vertigo, an uneasy sense that something dangerous resides underneath.

There are spoken words buried in these machine-like architectures, only the tone, not the sense of them coming through the music. It is a rather lovely space that Hopkins creates, lyrical but inhabited, precise and well-lighted and buoyant.

Halo distinguishes itself in its startling moments of suspension and sparseness.

The album, produced by Chris Funk of the Decemberists, manages to be both weird and relevant, experimental and comfortable. Malkmus’s grounded surrealism makes for a series of songs that offer connection within a skewed take on life. The music, in any track’s given mode, encourages persistent resistance of the way things are without being heavy-handed. It bridges worlds wonderfully and shows Malkmus to be as vital as ever.

The results are quietly remarkable.

Slater has found a way of collating a raft of familiar guitar tropes and injecting them with fresh energy. He seems to have ideas simply pouring out of him, plus enough of a quality-control filter to stack up an album’s worth of songs that fizz with inspiration.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

Guitar solos are fiery but brief and tethered to the main melodic ideas. Everything has been brightened, amplified and streamlined for immediate appreciation.

Camera Obscura’s comeback album is a thing of real beauty. Campbell writes movingly about memory and friendship. Looking at what was rather than regretting what might have been with an honesty that goes directly to the heart of things. Look to the East, Look to the West is one of the most poignant albums of the year so far.

The whole affair feels a little slighter, a little less important.

All Time Present is a guitar players album, but more than that, a songwriter’s work.

By turns languidly bluesy and as stark as an oak branch against a February sky, her music is a treasure, and this record fills in a story-line with far too many gaps.

Varmints is an expansive, surprising listen for which sonic left turns can be taken for granted.

Daylight Daylight flows easily, likeably, languidly — but at times rather forgettably.

It conveys the confusion and frustration of living in a 21st-century reality that conspires against the reassuring normalities of everyday life. Hen Ogledd meets this challenge with humor, defiance, and playfulness, resulting in music that’s colorful, chaotic, and occasionally deeply moving.

Given that it’s a collection of EPs and singles, These Were the Earlies is predictably all over the map, a problem exacerbated by the Earlies’ wide-ranging stylistic ambitions and long-distance collaborative methods.

The main problem with Tarot Sport is that it sometimes seems to be trying too hard, building drama into repetitive riffs by sheer force, urging greater and greater effort on listeners who are already a bit out of breath.

Entomology is full of music you desperately want to love, as it’s so clearly superior to the music that has subsequently genuflected in its direction. Thing is, I’d much rather hear a couple of minutes of Paul Haig’s droll yet strangely alluring post-Josef K solo records than the entirety of the host outfit’s material.

Overall, this new chapter in Liars’ fascinating story is perhaps their most easily digestible for years, synthesizing many laudable qualities of different chapters of the band’s career.

But whoever’s on board, the sound remains largely cohesive, the agile slither of bass, the slap and clatter of found percussion and the lilt of Latin melody, sung sweetly but with menace. It’s a potent brew, still challenging, but coalescing around songs.