The pulse and stomp of opener “City of Angels” or the sparkling twilight balladry of “Misery Remember Me” are classic examples of what Ladytron has always done well and why it’s good to have them back. Especially on the back half of Time’s Arrow, though, there are some new wrinkles.

The title of nature morte might reference death, but this music is frightfully, joyfully and overwhelmingly alive.

On Shook, Franklin James Fisher, Lee Tesche, Ryan Mahan and Matt Tong sound refreshed, energized by collaboration and completely confident in their identity.

The Hypnogogue is anything but minimalist. It starts with a big concept, adds dramatic, room-filling rock arrangements and extends for over an hour. And yet, there are very few intervals where you wonder if things might have been better if they were shorter or more pared back. The Church is going out with a bang, not a whimper, and we’re lucky to be here to hear it.

Given how inspired they sound here, it’s clear their musical chemistry is as instinctive as ever.

Clattering drum machines and gorgeous washes of tone are topped off by a standout vocal turn that carries the album off into the clouds, a searingly emotional purge and soothing balm all rolled in one.

Two fistfuls of songs that are at once as tight and as expansive as the band has ever been. The trio isn’t unrecognizable in their compositions, but it’s the way they use space that appears to have shifted. The result is formidable for fans and an easy entry point for those just joining the journey.

Forster produces some of the most direct and affecting songs of his singular career. ... Forster’s observational directness and simple language are always in service to the deep feeling in his songs and few better imbue the quotidian joys of domestic life and the power of memory with such poetry.

They nail the curves and changeups so well that you only notice the complexity in retrospect. While it’s happening, it seems mostly like good rock music

Right from the start, it’s the attention to detail in the arrangements — what Frank Zappa used to describe as “eyebrows” — that brings Norm to vivid, radiant life. ... Regardless of how gorgeous it all sounds, sometimes the songwriting does feel a little wanting, as if Shauf has penned a decent verse and chorus, then run out of ideas about how to add another section to take the song to the next level. ... By keeping all the songs to a succinct few minutes, Shauf stymies their potential to evolve into longer, more complex pieces.

So yes, the combination of energies works as well as it ever did, a remarkable 30 years after it started. The pandemic, far from crushing the joy out, coaxes an unexpected giddiness from two lifers playing as hard as they can for the love of it.

If his last album 2019’s Occulting Disk seemed designed to alienate, Compositions for all its formality and repetition has a far more human aspect. Lugubrious yes, sometimes harsh but its granular beauty has a mesmeric effect that lingers.

We Cater to Cowards is a satisfying and sometimes thrilling record. Particularly in its final third, it finds a snarling, crunching groove that slots alongside the general feeling of our current socio-political conjuncture.

And in the Darkness Hearts Aglow is already a formidable amalgam. It will be interesting to see where the third volume of the trilogy takes Weyes Blood.

It’s not that these songs are bad, just that they sound a lot alike: elegant, chilled, full of foreboding.

Though Furling is a fitting title in this regard, in the sense of closing around something, of creating a feeling of being safe and loved, there’s also a sensation of unfurling, of opening out, of expansiveness, of fearless abandon. That’s a rare balance to strike, and one that proves intoxicatingly addictive.

Even if the record had been inevitable, it didn’t have to be so engaging; fortunately, it is.

Bottom line: if you like diva pop with a little edge, have at it. But if you got into Billy Nomates because she reminded you of the Sleaford Mods, maybe sit CACTI out.

Landwerk No. 3 is, like its predecessors, a work of craggy beauty that does homage to a world—that of pre-war European Jews—destroyed in the same wave of technology and social change that made possible the preservation of its traces in the archival recordings and, in turn, rendered the recordings obsolete.

Though this is far from an easy listen, and can be frustratingly wordy and repetitive at times, it’s a rich, admirable and thorny work of art. Invest the necessary attention in this record and it’ll reward in spades.

As fine as the instrumental playing is here, Crutchfield and Williamson singing together creates magic.

Overall, Almanac Behind is perhaps the most successful of Bachman’s “noise records”.

The album is full of the small noises and cosmic visions that encapsulate life, death, microbe and universe, a tick of time, like a chord, both stark and larger than itself, establishing and destroying its boundaries. This all-in-all unity gives the album astonishing power and a uniquely familiar beauty.

This is a feral, dangerous variety of punk rock, and if your favorite thing is Dry Cleaning mouthing witty asides in a BBC accent, you will probably not like it. But if you have any sympathy for the idea of burning it all down, here’s your jam.

Comradely Objects, is the band flexing at the peak of their powers.

The album is warmly, insistently, alive. Its music makes no grand gestures but offers generosity and compassion in its connective tissue.

Two Ribbons is neither the sound of Hollingworth and Watson paralyzed by these varying levels of grief, anger, loneliness and guilt nor them pretending like everything was or is okay. It’s almost incidental that this is also their best album and one of the best synth pop records of the year. ... Two Ribbons is the kind of great record that you kind of wish the artists never had to make.

While Feorm Falorx may have some of the duo’s more simplistic songwriting, it’s well worth a spin for its textural delights alone.