By making a boldly experimental leap in a career already full of them, Dyer and Sanchez have created a surprisingly accessible record that shows off some of their best work to date. Whatever they call themselves, their powerful alchemy shouldn’t be ignored.

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

When McCombs gets deep into his vision of the world, or maybe a liminal state between ours and his, he’s at his finest on Tip of the Sphere. He needs a lifeline, though, to keep him tethered enough to this one that neither he nor his audience wanders off. He hasn’t gone too far, but the steadiness works better than the spiraling as this disc goes ‘round.

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.

If some albums make you lean in, strain to hear, fill in the negative space with your own silent ponderings, this one flattens you like a road roller. Its nightmarish sonic textures reach up out of the disc much as the figures painted in Netflix art-horror disaster Velvet Buzzsaw did, but without the comic relief.

Michael Chapman’s songs are gorgeous, dark-tone places, full of the work of musical collaboration, but also haunted and spare. Lovely stuff.

Fullbrook is quite a good singer, a subtle lyricist and a skillful crafter of melodies, but in Olympic Girls, she pulls all three aptitudes together in an organic way that is more than the sum of its parts.

Presley is an oddball psychedelic pop artist of considerable appeal. He’s also an experimenter in digital minimalism. Larry’s Hawk eats all kinds of stuff, apparently, and you just have to keep feeding him.

Like Bellowing Sun,Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars uses contemporary human tools and voices that refuse to be confined to words to enact sonic ceremonies that celebrate the natural world.

A lighter listen, enjoyable, but without the depth and drama that marks Tyler’s better work.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway.

His strongest set of songs yet. The guitar work remains effortless and radiant, but it is no longer the dominant thing. Instead the songs, bolstered by strings and vocal harmonies, take precedence. There’s an easy, lovely coherence to this record.

There are really only a couple of tracks mid-album that strike me as too conventionally pop, and they’re the singles, so you have to assume that Van Etten likes them just fine. Plenty else is shadowy, moody and lit by sudden crystalline flights of melody, and a few of the tracks combine eerie beauty with the pulse of four-on-the-floor.

His two band mates this time, Erik Walters of Globe and Silver Torches plus NW session drummer Sean Lane (who has played with Bazan solo and Silver Torches and many other artists), have never been associated with Pedro the Lion before. However, with Bazan on bass, they make a sound that is deeply familiar, rough-hewn and rambunctious with big bright guitar chords that punctuate moody, sharply observed narratives.

Faithful Fairy Harmonies often sounds like a song hunter’s discovery, a forgotten cache of preindustrial songs left behind on wax cylinders in someone’s dusty attic. Yet there’s something very modern about the idea of Josephine Foster being able to create this work almost entirely on her own and driven solely by her own artistic preferences. An old-fashioned voice singing exactly what it wants is not old fashioned at all.

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.

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.

With Stranger Fruit he’s gone even further than that; he’s made something powerful, something that amid all the ritual and esoteric language and bloody events foregrounds the humanity of these imaginary, unnamed people and their real world brothers and sisters in a way that’s far more effective and unforgettable than most metal bands will manage to be on any subject.

Even more striking is the way she folds all this talent into her songs, keeping all the bits distinct while shaping them into a complicated, intricate whole that breathes like a living creature. Nicely done.

Another record by the Bevis Frond, and another long, acid-fried blues? That’s a gift.

Holtkamp finds a beatific atmosphere somewhere between the first BEAST recordings and his earlier work.

Wham! Bang! Pow!, with its extravagant punctuation, is as brilliantly self-absorbed, as needlessly clever, as tightly wound and tautly played as the mid-aughts debut.

The more faithfully you capture these songs, the worse they sound. The Lillywhite Sessions may be DMB’s darkest, most dangerous material, but it is still slick as hell. No question, though, that Walker approached these songs out of love, and for that, you have to give some credit.

10 unassuming but gem-like songs that live up to their past work.

The mix of instruments is fascinating, but the reason this music lingers is that it is just so beautiful. If you’ve enjoyed either artist in the past, prepare to love everything you loved before and add a little extra.

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.

It’s an interesting artifact. Better, though, it’s another strong album from the young singer. Wall’s voice alone would carry these songs, but they’re each well crafted for the coherence of the larger picture.

No posthumous album can be heard without a sense of loss and absence. No matter how much you enjoy these tracks, you must also acknowledge as you listen that the world will go on without this singular talent.