This is, in other words, still serious music, yet it is not necessarily somber. Probably not coincidentally, When the Roses Come Again provides the perfect soundtrack for a drive through a land of woods, farms, and small towns dotted with Dollar General stores and cell towers.

The Block Brochure, ponderous though it may be, is curated carefully and put together in a way that will actually hold up over time.

With Trampled by Turtles is indeed closer in the sense that these are verse/chorus/verse songs largely performed by acoustic instruments. Anyone familiar with the sometimes-bluegrass, wide-reaching folk band Trampled by Turtles might guess, though, it still doesn’t sound much like Low. And the record is better for that.

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.

Zomby's achievement with Dedication is in plausibly connecting these austere sounds to underground bass music. The best DJs can do this, but few producers even try.

If G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END! frequently felt like the massive, sweeping motions of some sort of gestalt entity, it’s fitting that things here feel fractured at times, if no less cohesive.

It’s confident, focused, and consistently strong enough that it feels like the right place for newcomers to start paying attention.

When it comes down to it, though, I can look at the track list and sing you back the most important lyric in any song. If pop music is meant to create a shared experience, consider this album a success on a whole bunch of levels.

True with its fey, reverb-soaked vocals, its synths and the jangle that recall the late 1980s/early 1990s when college rock started to segue into indie rock, is fun and catchy and worthy of an audience.

Kill the Lights, his second full-length, follows 2016’s largely acoustic Confront the Truth and 2014’s moderately more abrasive Dissed and Dismissed and amps up the voltage somewhat, especially in the anthemic “Jasper’s Theme,” site of this disc’s best electric guitar licks.

Pretty much everything else in Meluch’s body of work can fit somewhere between this LP and Sonnet, but surprisingly these two disparate poles are unified as the best work of his career.

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.

As much as the songs with the band click, “Earthsong,” which features just voice and acoustic guitar, is moving. While I hope that she continues to make vibrant music with others, Jennifer Castle can reveal vulnerability, eloquence and imagination all by herself.

The now-well-established ensemble pulls off a notable twofer with Give the People What They Want. It’s made a full-length album that hangs together as a distinct whole, and it’s also written a collection of unique songs that stands tall as an example of what still makes the genre vital.

Everything about Snow feels worn-in, the loose but precise way that guitars and drums and basses coalesce around melodies, the seen-it-all cadences in which these songs are sung, the bemused sense that here we all are again, still mired in a dissatisfactory world, still shrugging away things that hurt and perplex.

With this album, NOTS continues to reinvent itself in interesting ways that make sense for them. An experiment, an extension, a logical next step that you didn’t see coming, 3 is a significant move ahead for a band that is always worth watching.

The duo are clever producers. The album doesn't have the lopsided minimalism that's typical with the collage approach. Percussion is only as crisp as the leads and fills the spectrum evenly.

For all its formal and conceptual experimentation, there is a visceral, emotionally unsettling core at the heart of Lack 惊蛰.

Havasu is raw with current and remembered emotion, but there’s love at the center of it – for the girls at school, for the places he went and even for the family that misunderstood him— and that warm forgiveness makes it all the more powerful.

In Of Tomorrow, Lawrie sacrifices some of the pummeling noise and subterranean murk of previous albums without losing his ability to draw listeners into his twilit world. With his voice to the fore and some shafts of melodic light, he once more tweaks The Telescopes’ sound in ways that remain compelling.

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.

Living with the Living is Leo's most diverse album yet, a sort of musical "This is your life," where the artist revisits styles and forms that he's loved in the past.

If nothing else, it leaves you receptive for the bruised and ravaged beauty of “meet me under the ruins,” as radiant as a Jack Rose raga, and a fitting elegy for all that precedes it.

Lonely harmonicas, keening fiddles, plinking kalimbas, and vaguely dubby drums twist in and out of the interwoven vocals, their melodies like ivy vines climbing a fence; the lyrics grow on you just as slowly, requiring several close listens before they start giving up their secrets.

Seed of a Seed is a pretty record, and you can get lost in that but not for long. Heynderickx is always pulling you up short, interposing a clever line or a surprising sonic texture that upends expectations. A lot of folky, singer-songwriter records provide a bit of respite, but Seed of a Seed is too prickly and interesting for that.

Cosy Moments moves slightly toward pop-and-hook than the last Kinski album did, but more than maintains its integrity as an outsized purveyor of aggressive guitar rock.

This is a powerful piece of work, as serious about the trippy silliness as about the pitch and heave of amp overload. Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, like its title, is several things at once. It rocks like a hurricane, dreams like a lotus eater.

These two groups disappear into each other as naturally as vapor disappears into the air, and the general atmosphere favors an industrial interpretation rather than a drone or doom-metal one.