This one, the first all-Segall live recording (he split a 2015 Live at Pickathon with King Tuff), manages to increase the intensity. It documents a monster tight, no-frills session from 2018 in obliterating, over-the-top style.

Fennesz has produced a maximalist experience with apparently minimal equipment but this is not about the machines rather the human producing the sounds. Agora is another deep exploration of the boundaries of experimental guitar ambience in which to lose oneself.

New Rain Duets teems with ideas that float and drift together. It works because McCaughan and Lattimore use their shared vocabulary to tease out the beauty in the murky haze.

The lightness of PUNK isn’t toothless escapism. Rather, it’s a challenge to find sweetness, joy and individuality in a world that trends toward cynical conformity.

High Anxiety is the record that some of us have been waiting for Oozing Wound to make.

It’s hard to overstate just how much fun this record is, how playful its complex rhythms are, how brightly colored its tonal variations. Plastic can be a lot of things, but here it is an utter joy.

All in all, the album is a genial bird’s eye view of life presented in aphorism, perspectives from a man well aware of his aging and embracing it. There’s something joyful even in the moments of tension, as if their eventual dissipation is a given.

On Time Out of Time is conceptually fascinating, playing as Basinski often does, with very large abstract ideas that seem to have no obvious analog in music. Yet the concept yields a calming ambient sonic output that sounds not so different from other kinds of music that have nothing to do with black holes.

Brickbat is a worthy addition to the growing canon of bands and performers addressing the powers that be.

They turn their wit into complex sentiments, making for an album that encompasses more than it delineates, even as the writing stays specific. Two voices don’t make for a proper community center, but they do make for something potent in a potentially bleak context.

The long view is serene, but it boils with nattering subtext. Robert Forster makes lean, minimal, elliptical songs about the struggle against time and self. He makes it look easy, but buried contradictions suggest that it’s not.

Without the contextual anchor that Vo’s art gave to “Deforms,” Girl often gets lost in its own tormented vision. The album plays out like a series of crises, some real, some imaginary, some personal, others global. ... The better angels of Xiu Xiu’s nature are on display in the slow, scraping cello elegy “Amargi ve Moo” and in album closer “Normal Love,” the closest Girl gets to a legitimate pop song.

Frawley has made lemonade, squeezing out the sour juices of life into a lovely, acid-tipped, unassuming but quite refreshing solo record, Undone at 31.

By making a boldly experimental leap in a career already full of them, Dyer and Sanchez have created a surprisingly accessible record that shows off some of their best work to date. Whatever they call themselves, their powerful alchemy shouldn’t be ignored.

Razorwire-sharp and reflexive, Eton Alive sees Sleaford Mods knowingly take the existential dare once more, and mostly win.

When McCombs gets deep into his vision of the world, or maybe a liminal state between ours and his, he’s at his finest on Tip of the Sphere. He needs a lifeline, though, to keep him tethered enough to this one that neither he nor his audience wanders off. He hasn’t gone too far, but the steadiness works better than the spiraling as this disc goes ‘round.

The breathy blur of Pratt’s vocals give these tracks a will of the wisp quality, as you chase after the lyrics only to find yourself becalmed and beatific amid iridescent fog.

If some albums make you lean in, strain to hear, fill in the negative space with your own silent ponderings, this one flattens you like a road roller. Its nightmarish sonic textures reach up out of the disc much as the figures painted in Netflix art-horror disaster Velvet Buzzsaw did, but without the comic relief.

Michael Chapman’s songs are gorgeous, dark-tone places, full of the work of musical collaboration, but also haunted and spare. Lovely stuff.

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.

Presley is an oddball psychedelic pop artist of considerable appeal. He’s also an experimenter in digital minimalism. Larry’s Hawk eats all kinds of stuff, apparently, and you just have to keep feeding him.

Like Bellowing Sun,Nighttime Birds and Morning Stars uses contemporary human tools and voices that refuse to be confined to words to enact sonic ceremonies that celebrate the natural world.

A lighter listen, enjoyable, but without the depth and drama that marks Tyler’s better work.

None of this is so very different from Swervedriver’s catalog, or indeed from the guitar-crashing dream pop of Adam Franklin’s Bolts of Melody, but it is very fine anyway.

His strongest set of songs yet. The guitar work remains effortless and radiant, but it is no longer the dominant thing. Instead the songs, bolstered by strings and vocal harmonies, take precedence. There’s an easy, lovely coherence to this record.

There are really only a couple of tracks mid-album that strike me as too conventionally pop, and they’re the singles, so you have to assume that Van Etten likes them just fine. Plenty else is shadowy, moody and lit by sudden crystalline flights of melody, and a few of the tracks combine eerie beauty with the pulse of four-on-the-floor.

His two band mates this time, Erik Walters of Globe and Silver Torches plus NW session drummer Sean Lane (who has played with Bazan solo and Silver Torches and many other artists), have never been associated with Pedro the Lion before. However, with Bazan on bass, they make a sound that is deeply familiar, rough-hewn and rambunctious with big bright guitar chords that punctuate moody, sharply observed narratives.

Faithful Fairy Harmonies often sounds like a song hunter’s discovery, a forgotten cache of preindustrial songs left behind on wax cylinders in someone’s dusty attic. Yet there’s something very modern about the idea of Josephine Foster being able to create this work almost entirely on her own and driven solely by her own artistic preferences. An old-fashioned voice singing exactly what it wants is not old fashioned at all.