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.

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.

It’s another high point in an increasingly strong discography, one that demands more than just mild praise.

It's as wild and heterogeneous as the rest of the band's work, and manages to bring all the elements at play in their music into the tightest, most carefully balanced equilibrium they've achieved yet.

This one is subtle, but very much worth exploring.

Playing any of these three records on home speakers while choring through the day, their subtle modulations will melt away, their wispy chimeras passing unnoticed. An immersion through headphones, or at pane-rattling volumes, provides the magnification that these cataclysmic environments call for.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

That Allen is able to continue to do this 45 years on from when he first introduced us to Sailor, Spanish Alice, Jabo, and Chick is as moving and mystifying as that big Texas sky.

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.

Throughout, Mirah picks her soft, knowing way through songs that soothe even as they challenge. Her melodies curl gently up into question marks, as she asks you to make sense of life and love and loss.

Final Summer is as sharp and exuberant and fierce as anything this band has ever done.

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.

A surrealist song cycle that is both oblique and engaging.

McCraven lays down a lush musical backdrop that allows Scott-Heron’s words to have emotional impact.

Each album isn’t simply a solitary entry into the Destroyer oeuvre, but rather some tile in the mosaic or thread in the pattern.

Lost Wisdom is not a long album--clocking in at just under 25 minutes--nor is it especially elaborate. Most of the songs rely on voice and guitar alone to make their case. And yet, how splendid they are, layered and looped in madrigals rounds and descants ('Voice in Headphones') or nakedly unadorned ('Flaming Home').

Couple Tracks seizes on these dichotomies and captures Fucked Up in all of its multi-faceted glory.

If you like jagged, body-moving beats and clever kids slinging dissatisfaction, try Silverbacks.

It’s hard to tell if these songs celebrate youth and beauty or mourn it from a remove; there’s a bit of both in every track. And indeed, that combination of surface and undercurrent, rave-up and desolation, dance beat and aria, is what makes Orchestra Hits so compelling.

Their 20th album, an absolute hoot of a disc that shows no signs of age or frailty.

FACS has been a monster band for a while. Wish Defense may be their best so far.

The result is an album that is as notable on its own as it is in the historical chillwave narrative.

Despite some rather simple melodies (and even simpler lyrics), or maybe even because of them, I’m Terry hits the mark.

Some of the most likable “weird hip-hop” around.

Moor Mother, Michael Stipe, Sharon van Etten, Bon Iver, Rokia Koné, and Jeff Parker lend their talents to Oh Me Oh My, affording its arrangements and production a mutability that supports, never dilutes, Holley’s aesthetic. ... Holley without guest stars is no less compelling.

Purling Hiss’s rough but accessible rock, made with craftsmanship and taste, does a difficult thing. It pleases old indie-heads just as easily as it can draw in the new kids.

It’s austere, minimal, and starkly beautiful, but incorporates some of Hidden’s pounding rhythmic heft on “A Season in Hell” and “Wild Fields.”

There’s a pleasing friction between the grainy or otherwise affected samples and the polished music around them. Whether they air the frustrations of pioneering artistic transgressors like Dilla and Bruce on “Poor Cops,” or propel the bombastic “Joyrider” with an echo chamber of exclamations right out of Ye’s Rick James sample on “Runaway,” they give the album an imminent sense of cacophony, of a messy world that can’t but intrude on McMahon’s thoughts. It’s a collective sound, and a haunting one.