Though there’s less of Chasny’s questing idiosyncrasies at play, it’s hard to pick fault with music that taps into such a universal sound, like stepping out of the way of the self to see things anew. It’s beautiful yet strangely daunting; like waking up somewhere familiar and having to reacquaint yourself all over again.

Admonitions is a weighty work, long and heavy and inscrutable, but full of contradictions. It’s an impressive studio document of a band that has always seemed to be largely a live enterprise.

Though he’s not in any hurry, he’s also showing no signs of slowing down. There are 11 songs on The Time of the Foxgloves, some jokily lighthearted (“Blondes and Redheads”), others hauntingly spare and beautiful (“Se Fue En Noche,” “Jacob’s Ladder”).

In the end, Switched on Ra is the best kind of tribute, demonstrating a fundamental grasp of the original material but taking it in an entirely different direction.

Henki is an extremely entertaining tightrope walk between restraint and free rein, its well-earned moments of excess and exuberance genuinely joyful. It’s a ridiculous and brilliant record and makes an extravagant last-minute bid to sit among the best albums of the year.

She makes her latest album with a full rock band and a headlong sense of joy.

On the flip side, identifiable guitar sounds emerge, with tones sufficiently intact that a sharp-eared listener might be able to tell that Gordon and Nace played them.

It’s full of sharp edges and rough noises, but it’s also kind of like a pillow. How do they do both things at once? That’s a mystery, one that makes for one of the best rock records of 2021.

If you can get past the unintentionally risible title, this new collection of songs from the Austin-based dark hardcore band is quite good. The music is convincingly pissed.

There’s no question that Y is an essential, classic album, but it’s also a unique one in that it is both chaotic and robust enough to be very open to reinterpretation in the right hands. Bovell clearly qualifies, and the result is a companion album that can serve as a through-the-looking-glass partner to the original, easily able to stand on its own.

While there are no lyrical revelations to be found, the non-specific words suit the “What Has Happened” may be the perfect gateway into Petunia’s intoxicating sound world, but it’s far from the only magic trick the White brothers pull off.

There is a lot to like on Sympathy For Life despite its unevenness. Savage A and Brown are acute observers, Savage M and Yeaton a really excellent and versatile rhythm section, the band’s willingness to swing outweighs its misses and when they hit Parquet Courts drop into those dive-y, sweaty clubs we’ve all missed.

Though comprising only nine songs across just over half an hour of music, Actually, You Can is bursting at the seams with ideas.

If not for the wisdom, lend an ear to these marginal spaces for the sounds within are their own reward.

Whether you want to get lost in the detail, immerse yourself in the whole or a combination of the two, this album will reward, awe and occasionally terrify you.

Nothing on Fantasy Island is as sharp or cataclysmic as that ["Voodoo Wop"] (the title track comes closest), but the unease is palpable. ... It’s very hard to tell whether Clinic is enjoying the hedonism of their hand-clapping, synth-bopping, drum thumping songs, or just trying to forestall the apocalypse. Perhaps a little of both.

Decidedly not for the faint-hearted, -io couches existential terror within ritualistic performance and orchestral musicality, and is often a challenging listen. With that in mind, approach -io with a brave heart and you’re in for a thrilling ride.

If you’re seeking a dose of danceable, retro futurist fun, Vanishing Twin are a good bet. Though far from original, Ookii Gekkou offers plenty of upbeat, colorful and likeable tunes.

The difficult thing about Fun House, which by this point becomes apparent, is that musically it primes you for a very different experience than the one it delivers. The middle section’s prolonged, sedate atmosphere feels like a slog following the album’s energetic opening. Not that the material doesn’t reveal its own strengths over repeated listens when given the chance.

Moondust For My Diamond does end up feeling like it’s a few songs too long, especially compared to Diviner’s succinct, 10 song track list. Nevertheless, it’s a predominantly radiant synth-pop record that offers receptive souls some much-needed uplift.

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.

While he has first and foremost created a dance record, it is one that rewards the two left-footed listener with its intricate sleights, redirections and deconstructions. It is also a reminder of the joy of unfettered movement and the art behind craft of producers who provide music that encourages it.

Striking, tenderly bruising. ... The six songs here certainly constitute some kind of hybrid, an illuminating substance that sometimes seems to float in the air, sometimes leaving you gasping.

Yes, you’ll hear echoes of influence but McGreevy and Lewis have forged their own path based on really good songwriting and musical chops.

The songwriting [on 2019's Weeping Choir] found increasingly complex ways to channel the band’s inexhaustible energy and potent sonic outrage. Garden of Burning Apparitions forges further along that general trajectory, but this new record also bares the band’s turbulent, tumultuous teeth with renewed ferocity. It’s pretty great.

Damon and Naomi and Kurihara have made art out of what was in front of them, and it’s a gorgeous, emotionally resonant reminder of the times.

Perhaps the most obvious way that this album reflects the COVID lockdown, however, is in its weirder, more idiosyncratic second half, which is, incidentally, the best part of the record.

Every sound fits, without sounding in the least bit fussed over or premeditated. It’s more like a living organism than a band, bringing all systems together to sing its song, once again.

The players never lose touch with the paradox of these songs, which have long endured through their strength and frequent expressions of anger, but which also have much still to tell us about human weakness and vulnerability. By tuning into that paradox, the players have made a terrific, surprising and emotionally dramatic record.

There’s a lot to enjoy on Year of the Horse.

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.

While Antiphonals can’t help but seem like a comparatively minor release next to Cantus, Descant’s 80 minutes, it shares many qualities with previous Davachi highlight, 2018’s Let Night Come On Bells End The Day: refined, reflective, and uniquely moving.

Little Eden pulls off one of Saloman’s best tricks: the record is unerringly faithful to the Bevis Frond aesthetic, a stable sonic construct for some 35 years, and it’s also cleverly responsive to our collective cultural moment.

You get a very empowered, very confident album. Super fun, too.

The Witness is definitely a grower, an elusive listen whose understated charms define its mystique — and also its flaws.

It’s a nice rest, listening to Other You. It’s hard to remember what you heard, but very, very pleasant while it’s happening.

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.

With Harmonizer, Segall moves further out into his own personal weirdness, without compromising the red meat appeal of his rock aesthetic. It’s a neat trick, using different tools to make different sounds that, nonetheless, fit very squarely into his catalogue so far.

Their joint compositions are undeniably atmospheric, evoking south of the border drama on “Pray For Rain” and surging apprehension on “Something Will Come.” But they’re also as rigorously structured as any popular entry in a hymnal or hit parade. If you like for your tunes to tell you what they’re going to say, say it, and then tell you what they said, the soothing “Life And Casualty” and the white-knuckled “Hurricane Light” are equally at your service, and they’re not alone.

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.

Whether it’s the soaring psychedelia of “Paper Fog” and “Pigs,” the more straightforwardly folky “Bird of Paradise” and “Vegas Knights,” or even the delayed fuzz-guitar squall of “Another Story From the Center of the Earth,” the pedal steel is there, and so is a songwriting sensibility that does feel very personal and emotionally powerful even though there’s not a lot of comprehensible narrative.

Hayter’s voice admirably performs that complexity on Sinner Get Ready; it’s a beautiful instrument that will fill you with terrible woe, and then terrible wonder.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.

The momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.

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.

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.

One of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload.

Frustratingly uneven album: hang in there, ride out the bumpy passages, and something lovely is likely to happen; until those moments pop up, expect to have your patience tested.

At 44 minutes, Life, and Another is lengthy compared to many new albums, but its 16 diverse tracks all earn their inclusion, each piece of the tapestry finely crafted and lovingly stitched into place. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.

I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.

Like Endless Boogie, Birds of Maya knows how to wring every sweaty drop out of a heavy groove. The basic foundation, thunderous drums, a gut-checking oscillation of bass notes, picks up various other elements as it goes on — mumbled spoken word, eruptive guitar solos, flailing drum fills. It is always the same but always changing, and you can get lost in it.

Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

The album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif.

Layers of clever reference resolve into songs that resonate emotionally. They’re smarter than most songs and better played, but they also have that elusive way of landing, so that they seem to tell you more about life and persistence and suffering than what’s in the words.

The whole thing took shape with hardly any notice and minimal rehearsal, across language and cultural barriers and in front of an audience, but nonetheless catches a wave and holds onto it in a very intuitive way. Probably if the players thought too hard about what they were doing, they’d lose the thread, but they don’t. It’s a fast ride and a jam and well worth experiencing.

FACS knows how and when to apply the exact amount of pressure to engage pain points and pleasure centers.

There are moments here that feel like being carried aloft by a parade, and moments that feel like the jail doors shutting. There are pools of calm and surges of impossible triumph.

Though they are spare and though there are a lot of these songs (17), the album doesn’t sag. A restless energy courses through them. Spike-y, unsentimental observations keep them engaging.

Penelope Three spends its 35-minute runtime exploring this fertile intersection between haunting folk and anxious electronica, creating a deep, resonant space that’s beautiful, eerie and unsettling.

Scatterbrain is a record of stocktaking but also of hope, at 32 minutes perhaps a lesser entry in The Chills’ canon, it is reminder that one of the great shapers and survivors of the antipodean sound still has much to offer.

Jurado’s records are always slow burners, but this minimalist one takes an especially long time to catch fire. It sounds like less than it is for half a dozen spins and then suddenly rears up, fully-formed and out of hiding. It may not be as mesmerizing as the Richard Swift triad, but The Monster That Hated Pennsylvania is its own odd, quiet, disconcerting triumph.

There are two distinct types of songs on The Power of Rocks: the herky-jerky, dada-ist contraptions described in the first two paragraphs and a sort of luminous dream pop that might remind you of the Green Child.

The band is very good, good enough to pull off this edge-of-your-seat flirtation with breakdown.

This isn’t a case of trying to reinvent the wheel so much as it is reveling in just how very good you’ve gotten a making wheels in the first place.

The Danish four-piece tapped Spaceman 3’s Sonic Boom for production on this uncharacteristically uplifting endeavor, and you can see the uneasy alliance of the bright colors of Peter Kember’s recent work mixing into the half melted, slushy desolation of Iceage’s aesthetic.

The recording shows little evidence of how acoustically challenging the glass-walled structure can be; every element registers clearly so that the music yields where it needs to and slams where it must. And slam it does, with big beats and massed choruses that bring the messages down hard and certain.

Hayashi’s eclecticism gives the album the feel of an anthology and although his beat making is terrific and provides a thematic backbone, the real interest here is what’s going on around, beneath and between. If his wish were to destabilize and upend expectations, then full marks, but too often he seems to retire behind his tools and allow his technical skill to overshadow his considerable artistry.

Endless Arcade will do nothing for the people who wish they would let it rip again one more time—but it’s fine, well-crafted, intricately plotted mid-tempo rock. The edges, if they were ever there to begin with, have been sanded off, and it’s all rather noddingly pleasant.

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.

Their attempt to weld the cerebral and physical is not always smooth but part of the attraction is to sit in on a work in progress, to hear the musicians grasping at handholds and swinging for the next ledge, fearless in the vulnerability of thought and action.

Keys isn’t a flashy album. Its songs tend towards the quiet end of things, and they make their impact in an unassuming way that never shakes you by the shoulder. It’s just two people playing two instruments, alike but different, listening to the way they align and contrast with one another and taking the tune to another place.

The second disc, the one with the covers, is a revelation of sorts. ... Not all of the covers add as much to the material, but there’s lots to admire in Courtney Barnett and Vagabond’s raw-boned “Don’t Do It,” and Big Red Machine’s rushing, blues-twanging, falsetto’d version of “A Crime.” One of the best, though, for its sheer audacity and difference from the source, is IDLES’ take on “Peace Signs.”

They’ve never interacted quite like this, and the results are correspondingly different from anything else they’ve done. ... Clocking in at just half an hour, Made Out Of Sound makes its points and moves on.

Whereas [Michael] Hurley tends toward the absurd, often pushing the limits of song structure in the process, Rose always has one foot planted in tradition. Although not always the same one.

Magnificently noisy in some places, forebodingly quiet in others and at all times distended from full cognizance, Dream Weapon is a balanced, well executed step firmly away from Genghis Tron’s former selves. Call it their Year Zero.

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

For Those I Love is a wonderfully open-hearted portrayal of young Ireland akin to contemporaries Fontaines D.C. or the Murder Capital.

A juicy amalgam of West African rhythms and soothing electronic sounds.

An album of subtle yet emotionally resonant songs.

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.

There are plenty of moments among these 15 songs that are devastating in a way that’s unique to Xiu Xiu, but also moments that leave me frustrated and baffled. Essentially it’s business as usual for this brilliant yet confounding band. They challenge you to turn away, yet reward the brave and patient listener with flashes of startling beauty.

The album certainly leaves you with a sense of dislocation and déjà vu, as if hearing musical avenues open, meander deliciously, then abruptly slam shut. It’s disorientating, surprising, at times deeply funky, and often very beautiful.

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.

It’s a lot of Gang of Four, and if you’re interested at all, you probably already have a good portion of it. Still, it’s a nicely packaged set from the best years of the career of one of post-punk’s best ever bands.

The players worked remotely, sent in files and Johnson and Kaufman fit them together. All of which makes it even more remarkable how effortless and streamlined this album sounds, how its sounds swirl around the listener like warm currents, and how carefully Johnson kept the balance between letting the songs speak for themselves and enveloping them in luminous arrangements.

Future Times takes a few plays to sink in. Its balance of the monumental and the delicate, the personal and the epic, shift as you listen and only draw you in gradually over time. Stay with it, though. It’s worth it.

Dream logic rules this world, with periods of calm beauty, eruptions of noise and the sense that for every step forward there are delays, disruptions and detours that must be dealt with in order to proceed to a distant destination. If abstraction is the rule, the emotional resonance is real and deeply felt.

If you like Woods you’ll enjoy this record. If you’re team Skygreen Leopards, however, you might want to wait for that Red Pink and Purples record, which is very good and all Donaldson.

Her soundscapes are transportive and evocative, but they also contain detail and texture that plays with a sense of natural versus unnatural soundscapes, the real versus the imagined. Left in the between space, this is fascinating stuff.

Feelings does no damage, it exists to target pleasure centers and does so. The influences are the point and yes there’s the Gilberto voice, the Mendes smoothness, the Getz sophisticate sheen but also a lack of Stereolab’s knottiness and the kind of knowingness and look-at-me cleverness of some of the practitioners and fans of whatever round of lounge revivalism is going on now. There is nothing here to take offence at unless you want to split the hairs between anodyne and placebo.

While the bossa nova drum machine on “All the Things You Do” and the scratchy funk guitars on “Pyramid Schemes” introduce a bit of welcome variety, both songs wear out their welcome over the course of their combined 10-minute runtime. Thankfully, “Solarised” takes the album out on a high with its swooshing synth pads underpinned by a hard-grooving bassline and soaring vocal melody. It’s a fitting close to a vibrant collection of tunes.

Each piece is seemingly quite simple in terms of overall construction, with sustained atmospheric tones juxtaposed with spare melodies traced out in the foreground. However, pop on your best headphones, focus on the interplay between the layers of these richly detailed mixes, and you’ll find plenty of instrumental texture that’ll raise the hairs on the back of your neck.

These songs are like aloe vera and St. John’s wort, all natural and healing. Though none of them are exactly happy, you find yourself relaxing into them, letting things go, breathing deeper and feeling measurably more able to go on with whatever’s next. ... It’s going to be one of the best records of 2021.

Virginia Wing pack a lot into their pop songs. Glowing hooks and nagging phrases continually draw you in.

They have earned, through the force of their creativity and sweat, access to new places and social spaces. But even as some of their songs explore what’s newly possible in those spaces, the Mods remain deeply interested in the places from which they came.

As the music comes full circle, Vertigo Days forms a satisfying whole. On subsequent spins, more and more subtle threads and parallels become apparent, highlighting the craftsmanship The Notwist have invested in what may prove to be their finest album to date.

Even after several weeks of listening to this thing, I still don’t feel like I’ve truly got a handle on it. Prepare to immerse yourself in order to tap into its mysteries. Thankfully there are abundant rewards to be found amid the surges of widescreen sound.

Once The Blue of Distance recedes into silence, there’s a distinct sense of time having been gently bent to Saxl’s will. The album feels simultaneously long and short, fast and slow — it’s all of these things at once, forming elegant waves that wash over you.