Making the transition from Songs into Instrumentals is more of a listening challenge than one might imagine. While both albums are populated by the same radiant guitar tone, the playing on Instrumentals is much more exploratory and tentative, dotted with hesitations, pinging harmonics, string buzz and misarticulated notes.

To anyone enamored with the effortless elegance of Loma’s debut, some of Don’t Shy Away’s more adventurous and synth-heavy production may feel a little jarring. However, surrender to the album’s luscious sound design, emotive vocal performances and smart narrative arc and it can be just as intoxicating. As far as front-to-back album listening experiences go, it’s among the year’s best.

Though Good Sad Happy Bad do outstay their welcome across these 40 minutes, there’s plenty here to enjoy if you like sing-song sweetness that’s bent lysergic and girded with a sneering, switchblade edge.

Nightcap leans more towards the song-ish end of things in its first half, though bits of free-wheeling freakery are tucked in between verses and choruses. In the second half, it sprawls more open-endedly across cuts that lead one to another without pause for breath. ... The effect is more like a suite than a collection of tracks, a bravura show of musical prowess that winds through moods, time signatures and keys.

Jónsi plays with orchestral beauty and flirts with pop, and ends up somewhere in between, fascinating and inscrutable.

It’s a wonderfully rich sound palette, and one that plays to the strengths of both musicians.

There’s quite a lot of music here, some tracks abstract and open-end, others more conventionally song structured, all of it rather good.

While Long in the Tooth offers more or less what you expect, it does so at a very high level. The band has never sounded tighter, more collaborative or more sure of itself.

SUMAC’s evocative and powerful playing hits you in the gut, as a physical experience, even as it motivates an intensely meditative mode. This is terrific music, in all relevant senses of that term.

Shame’s standout songs combine the band’s ugly intensities with inspired bursts of melodic riffing.

If you like your Sufjan Stevens in neon electronic mode, armed to the teeth with abrasive drum sounds, dive right in — and keep swimming. For anyone more enamored with his folk and chamber-pop records, it may feel like a rude assault to the senses.

Anjimile has come a long way since the last album, but you sense a journey still in progress, an evolution still finding its own best shape.

The cool thing about Protean Threat is that he’s got the beast and the collar. He can let things run wild in complicated ways while also keeping it wholly and brilliantly under control. Let’s not mince words. This is one of the best rock albums of 2020.

Some of beats are a little perfunctory, but the interplay between the grieved and the griever, the subtlety of the writing and beauty of the arrangements on Fall To Pieces haunt long after the needle lifts.

Twelfth stands out even in their strong discography.

Like most bands, Girl Friday has never been crazy about genre labels, and if you asked them whether they were pop or punk or indie, they’d very likely just say yes. By sliding continually between categories, though, this band creates a very absorbing tension between what they are right now and what they might become in a measure or two. You have to pay attention. You can’t take these songs for granted.

Despite coming up against a couple of creative cul-de-sacs, Comma largely succeeds in blending the most appealing elements of ambient, kosmische and electro into a heady brew.

Gold Record is honest in its own fanciful way, proving that not everything has to be literal fact to be true, and not everything needs to have a physical presence to be real.

O’Rourke sails these turbulent seas deftly, making small gestures laden with significance. It’s agonising and hypnotic, the kind of art that demands commitment to spend time with. Yet, while you’re immersed in it, it feels inescapable.

With Eno Axis, McEntire again connects to her very particular world, without retreading where she’s been, flourishing in rootedness even as she expands her scope.

You may have all the Pentangle you need, and all the Fairport Convention you could ever want to listen to. The Making of You won’t replace any of these favorites, but it can definitely carve a space out on the shelf next to them. Make some room. This stuff is good.

A buzzing, humming distillation of time and melodic idea that drifts by in sighs and stares and one paragraph written all day and wondering if there’s anything in the refrigerator. It is very much like 2020 in the bunker, hard to see from the road but pulsing with shimmering life inside.

The album varies between affecting and emotionally resonant straightforward pieces, and at times moments that increase the level of abstraction and repetition into minimalism. ... Sun Piano is a meditative and elegiac set, yet points towards the possibilities of endless variation and reflection.

Pyramid is well worth scaling.

There is a sense of every note being where it should be, glowingly back-lit and carefully arranged. It’s far from the note-bending frenzy that Polizze often indulges in — and let’s not give up on more of that and soon — but it is very beautiful in its own way and captures this endless, featureless, daydreaming summer about as well as any music I’ve heard so far.

Though they’ve yet to release a subpar record, the sarcastically titled Ultimate Success Today laser-focuses both their song writing and sound into what may be their defining statement to date, especially apposite for these grim times.

While they sacrifice a little of the propulsive excitement of their debut, the tweaks to their sound deepen the emotional impact of this new set of songs.

It isn’t always as loud or as exultant as her band’s output, but it is rivetingly intense, whether at full rock strength, in dance-ish, trance-ish electronic mode or at a whisper backed by a small orchestra. ... The album is simply what it is, take it or leave it, but take it. It’s magnificent.