Torche’s strongest effort since 2008’s breakthrough Meanderthal.

They’ve found a way to wedge different sonic elements together, creating an assemblage of oft-quoted elements that feels fresh and vital even when its tone turns elegiac.

Bad News Boys works more as a collection of singles than a continuous listening experience. You’re constantly switching gears as you move through it.

Xe is a refreshing glimpse of a band captured in its most primordial state, and for all their clinical musical intellectualism, the album also offers snippets of Zs’ odd sense of humour, not to mention each player’s unique talents and virtuosity.

Every song on his debut album is sourced from an old record or field recording, but he and producer William Tyler have gone out of their way to ensure that they don’t sound particularly antique. In fact, while they’ll rest pretty easily upon Americana-tuned ears, they don’t slot too easily into any particular scene.

Bishop’s elaborate flights celebrate what his instrument can do, and express by example the notion that having an interesting time along the way matters more than where you’re going.

Volume is fine, fuzz is good, but it shouldn’t obliterate the songs.

As a portrait of a man in a city sharing his thoughts and feelings, it’s strikingly effective, all the more so for being so far-reaching.

A band that glides effortlessly when it might benefit from a bit of friction. A little ugliness might break up these pristine gate-reverbed vistas and make them seem not just stylish and cool but real.

Range Anxiety provides plenty of action and feeling, though not always in the ways you catch on a surface listen.

His complexity comes through more clearly than ever on Alasdair Roberts, his most stripped-down solo side in years.

Fantastic Planet is a world unto itself, just as carefully crafted but breathing its own breath, living its own life.

The best of the songs heard on LP3 are those where the more traditional rock elements compliment Restorations’ more relentless tendencies.

The power of Carpenter’s best soundtrack work, the title themes to Halloween and Assault on Precinct 13, comes from their relentless, single-minded drive. But when this approach is stretched to full, eight minute tracks as it is on Lost Themes, it can wear thin. This being said, there’s still some fun to be had on Lost Themes.

One thing that’s allowed Napalm Death to keep punching through mirrors is that as its sound has sharpened, the band’s ability to capture high-resolution chaos has sharpened, too.

On Your Own Love Again is something else again, at least a personal landmark and maybe a classic. Simple, straightforward, but more than it seems, this is one of the best albums of 2015 so far and marks the emergence of a very distinctive songwriting talent.

Sleater-Kinney is back in all its spiky, brainy, let-a-bunch-of-ideas-fight-it-out glory.

This is not a welcoming album, but it’s as gripping and immersive as a good film about dystopia.

The rehearsal takes are probably the real draw (aside from the customary production corrections and sonic scrub all reissues get) for those already tuned to the album’s contrary wavelength, and they do not disappoint.

Though much of the album is aggressive in its tempos, the mood continues to circle around to the pensive, moving from catharsis to solemnity and back again. Or, to put it another way, it’s a map of a mind that doesn’t feel self-indulgent.

It’s wonderful stuff, a model of restraint and subtlety that also has visceral pleasures.

It’s somewhere between 2011’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill and, say, Peter Jefferies’s Last Great Challenge For a Dull World; there are discernible melodies here, but above them is an overwhelming sense of loss, and the musical chops to channel it.

This latest recording is assured and full of intent, seamlessly integrating acoustic guitar blues with a rushing undercurrent of electronic noise, backdropping stark self-revelation with sleek synthesizer arrangements.

It certainly makes for a more expansive work, but loses some of the immediacy that defined Stott’s music as recently as on Drop the Vowels.

As the album advances, you get the sense that Clark is finally accomplishing what he claims to have been doing all along: making a techno record.

Despite the generalization that they “sound more like themselves” than ever, it’s worth noting that this isn’t a watered-down performance--all parties involved perform with the conviction necessary to sell an increasingly rarified brand of big-room rock.

The songs are more cohesive now and Walker’s focus has narrowed, honed to a sharper edge on shorter time and the steel of SunnO)))’s contributions, but some of the posts, beams and plumbing still show through its exterior. Those little gaps in the facade help Soused sound more approachable.

Not quite folk songs or noise experiments or vocal soundscapes or really anything you can pin down by category, they are nonetheless very beautiful and as quietly striking as any music you’ll hear this year.