There are spoken words buried in these machine-like architectures, only the tone, not the sense of them coming through the music. It is a rather lovely space that Hopkins creates, lyrical but inhabited, precise and well-lighted and buoyant.

Dupuis’ reference may run more to punk and indie, rather than disco/R&B, but the effect is eerily similar: gender studies inquiries encased in the kind of music that once looked uncritically at female disempowerment. Yet while it’s serious stuff, it’s also fun, with big bashing choruses and somersaulting strings of words that surprise and entertain.

It’s the earnest balance Morris strikes between brokenness and openness--his willingness to savor the condition of being broken open--that makes the experience of this music so deeply sustaining.

You may not need to be a Fugazi fan to appreciate Messthetics, though anyone can draw lines from the fiery complexities of Instrument to these explosive compositions. The nervy aggression of post-punk joins with jazz-rock’s virtuosity here, and it’s good stuff all the way through.

On the Tylers’ third and best album, The Ox and the Ax, there is no obscuring the harsh world conjured by these songs with elaborate instrumentation, overwrought singing or dance tempos. Recorded in crystalline clarity, the instrumental accompaniments are usually little more than guitar or banjo, and while they’re skillfully played, it is the Tylers’ voices, unadorned and rich, that are the center of this record.

When drums and fiddle swagger, it feels like a Krautrock hoedown. Still, the harmonium exerts enough of a presence to give the music a devotional quality. In combination with the chanting, this music invites you to surrender to reverence without telling you what to believe.

And this one, too, is as sardonic and soulful, as hilariously outraged and superbly tuneful as any rock-pop record you’ll hear in 2018.

Now Only is a messy record, brimming with musical ideas that often drop out before resolving, and with lyrics so factual as to sometimes verge on dull. But in the name of progress, this messiness feels hard-won. You can learn from death, and Elverum proves again that you can make art from it.

Turns out, the news is that Roberts has made the most unabashedly gorgeous record of his career.

Andrews’ band is first rate, particularly organist Daniel Walker, whose weedy, wavering hum imbues these songs with a mournful depth of field. ... What’s new, here, however, is how damned strong she is, how fierce a belter, how indomitable a chronicler of the middle-class struggle.

Even as the album’s often joyful, always human stories unfold and crackle with inspiration, intoxication or love, the haunting sense of irreparable change lingers.

Where earlier tracks tended, endearingly, to drift and wander, these new ones move not faster but with more purpose, as if they have somewhere to get to.

This isn’t the flare and fade of passing fancy, but the kind of deep and considered work that comes from a long-term union that has had time to hone in on its strengths.

The pulsing, nodding, whisper-y grooves are a kind of accomplishment, too. Subdued, sure, enveloping and lucidly becalmed, you can float on them like warm salt water, no effort required at all.

Yet as disjointed as Nap Eyes’ free-associations can be, they capture a vivid part of life, the drifting area where you’ve acquired adult freedoms but adult focus still dangles out of reach.

Joachim Nordwall, Daniel Fagge Fagerström and Henrik Rylander are enough of a quorum and enough in sync with one another to make a defining closing statement.

You end up thinking, well, of course, a band this ruthlessly observant and unflinching is going to be mad a lot of the time, but how great that they bring the same intensity to love.

Black Times succeeds on its own terms and not as an artifact.

The record is energetic and often rollicking. Paternoster’s singing and intense guitar antics are center stage, but her longtime bandmates King Mike (bass) and Jarrett Dougherty (drums) are essential to the band’s potent combination of groove and snarl.

The proceedings would be a lot less palatable if they didn’t often achieve a forceful, unhinged immediacy; amid the heavy themes and brash posturing, there’s still room for the band to elbow in some loud, rousing real life.

Sunwatchers II is an enjoyable listen, and its energy and good intentions are admirable; it’s clear that Sunwatchers take the spiritual and political implications of musical ecstasy seriously.

A great deal of well-written, rigorously observed detail.

Freedom’s Goblin is remarkably coherent. Ty Segall may never have to make another album, so definitively does this one capture his art and possibilities, but you know he will.

Tizita, like Lala Belu as a whole, feels like both a victory lap and the beginning of something new. It will be exciting to see what, at 71 years young, Mergia does next.

She hasn’t lost anything, just slipped her message into an unusually sleek, attractive covering where we might not have been looking for it.

In 2018 few singers could convincingly build a career as the next great crooner and William’s gambit to do that sometimes sacrifices the effectiveness of the songs, especially on those that serve his voice over craft. But when songwriting matches the talent of his voice the songs coalesce, and the results are spectacular.

The result is a melding of energies that is both fragilely beautiful and extraordinarily resilient.

In Messes, I’m hearing plenty of scrappy, sardonic, guitar-slashing indie rock--“Spotted Gold” stands out--but also other things. Chura’s voice gains clarity and sophistication on the slower songs.