It’s definitely a more expansive palette, and not entirely to my taste, but I’ll defend any artist who takes a chance like this.

Even at their most spacious, these songs are taut and well-crafted pieces of music. Previous Modern Nature outings showed that the band can be expressive and daring; with The Heat Warps, they’ve proved that realism can be just as intriguing.

Daylight Daylight flows easily, likeably, languidly — but at times rather forgettably.

A lot about One Hundredfold reflects its unsettling time and place, with its gleaming technological surfaces, its machine-like precision and its invocation of rot and threat and corruption. If we ever get through this period, we may not want to hear it again, but for now, it’s a mirror to what’s around us.

Touch is a surprisingly coherent album, demonstrating the band’s strengths of agile melodic sensibility, nuanced performances, and immersive production.

Despite the length—and maybe because of it—this one drew me in and kept me there. It’s warm and casual and unstudied, which is not to say that it’s not technically proficient. It’s a campfire where everyone sings and plays preternaturally well, and it’s easy to linger there right through to sunrise.

The album has a gleeful, headlong, nearly slapstick propulsion. .... There are some tranquil, romantic interludes, like the Julee Cruise-ish “Plastered” and the dream-pop, 4AD drift of “The Lady Vanishes,” and that’s all fine, but what this band does best is unpredictability, where you never know who will take the mic next, or where a song will take its latest sharp turn. This time, Bar Italia goes into some satisfyingly dark and noisy places, and cheers to that.

The Besnard Lakes Are the Ghost Nation is another solid addition to a consistently strong discography. It doesn’t quite hit the heights of my personal favorite, Until in Excess, Imperceptible UFO, but it certainly comes close.

These are gnarly, inward-focused songs, but if you listen carefully, you can hear how a different sort of delivery—big voice, big drums, slashing guitars—could turn them into a female-centric version of emo-rock. Even if you appreciate the way the music works here, you might still wonder what that larger scale version would sound like.

But whoever’s on board, the sound remains largely cohesive, the agile slither of bass, the slap and clatter of found percussion and the lilt of Latin melody, sung sweetly but with menace. It’s a potent brew, still challenging, but coalescing around songs.

None of Molina’s songs gets an extreme makeover here, and, indeed, one or two wild cards might make the whole collection more interesting. However, it’s telling that so many young, vibrant acts honor the material enough to deliver it straight.

Agriculture comes closer earlier on the record, when “Micah (5:15 am)” commences its final run through the song’s compelling set of tremolo chords and then the massive riff of “The Weight” crashes down. It’s the best part of a good record, excepting perhaps the middle portion of “The Weight,” when the band’s playing reaches an acutely feverish pitch.

Real Warmth, her seventh album and sixth for No Quarter, is an authentically emotive rejoinder to the all too prevalent practice of pretend empathy.

Only “Travel Fox” and “RocMarcable” in the second half come close to the usual Marci in his macking mode. But even they won’t warrant revisiting this EP in a couple of years.

Le Bon’s production approach has shifted her musical universe far from the brittle, guitar-driven sounds of earlier, post-punk indebted records like Crab Day (2016) towards a distinctive sound that seems to reach backwards and forwards simultaneously. This feeling of being held in suspension characterizes many of Michelangelo Dying’s most affecting moments.

Inland See is the kind of record that offers multiple layers of riches: the rich sound of the analog synthesizers, the mellifluous wind instruments, the subtle use of evolving rhythmic elements. It’s an addictive listen that rivals Totality for its elegance and depth.

At just five tracks, Orcutt Shelley Miller is lean but still intense. It’s a record that burns hot and fast and benefits from multiple listens.

He never makes an overt argument that these things belong together, or are parts of a whole (even a whole as nebulous and encompassing as the human experience), or should be taken as equally important, or that all the good and bad therein are equally a vital part of life. He simply does it, and for another 43 minutes the world feels like it makes a little more sense.

Some vibrate with a ghostly blues — lovely, haunted “This” and the bent note mirage of “June Bug”—while others swagger fancifully like barroom tall tales (“Monkey”). Older songs, like “Abominable Snowman,” first recorded for 1995’s Parsnip Snips, and “Indian Chiefs and Hula Girls” from 1988’s Water Tower, sidle casually into the present moment, sounding well-loved and unbothered by the passage of time. They sit right next to newer songs like “Fava,” with its transfixing twang of guitar.

The Beths are bigger, better and more complicated than they’ve ever been. This is the record to beat from now on.

For an album with such a grandiose title, Big Thief’s Double Infinity is bafflingly mediocre — especially since it arrives on the back of a string of good-to-great albums.

It’s such a blessed relief that I Wonder When They’re Going to Destroy Your Face is not just extremely good, but that it is so in the way that Prolapse has always been great. Steelyard and Derrick are in classic form.

The Welsh guitarist hammers at her instrument, unleashing a percussive rain of notes that fray and change as they linger. She plays fast and hard and with assurance, whether in the blue-grassy “Cattywomp” or the mystic drone of “Jack Parsons Blues.” And then, just for the beauty of it, she dips into languid lyricism for “Dreams of Rhiannon’s Birds,” letting the notes drip like warm honey, catching the light as they go.

At 16 songs over 74 minutes, Interior Live Oak is surprisingly low on filler for an artist who seems to take mischievous glee in tripping up listeners.

Despite a few good moments, this isn’t a record where you feel rewarded by sitting down and sitting through the whole thing. Let’s hope that next time they exercise a little more discipline in putting together a finished record.

DJ Haram is all jaded Brooklyn sophistication and all wide-eyed exotic transcendance, all at the same time, and it’s wonderful.

“Is it making you feel something?” the band asks, in the song of the same name, and yes, yes, yes, all kinds of things. That’s what’s so great about it.

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.