Polizze has escaped the weight of history, the whole of the Hiss persona reaching the higher plain that the guitar has occupied from day one.

N-Space was at best ignorable, but Departed Glories makes a mark. Play it quietly and it shades the atmosphere; play it loudly and you can get lost in its sculpted tones and distilled emotions.

Instead of burning before an audience, here you have them working with other musicians and outboard effects to accomplish a vertical array of sounds that reward deep listening as much as full-body engagement.

“13.6” is where the album takes a noticeable turn and Supersilent finally finds its way.

Overall, Battle of Ages is a genuinely impressive release. More than your standard bro doom, it’s got reach, smarts and heart.

It’s about making art in a capitalistic society, where the artist must cannibalize every part of herself and offer it to a sometimes unwilling and unreceptive audience. It’s all a quest for immortality and staying power among icy cold synths, quiet samples and screaming. Sometimes, Jenny Hval is the vampire, and sometimes she’s the one bleeding.

That contradiction between the wistful and the prickly was one of the really fascinating elements of Green Lanes, and it’s gone now, but weirdly Dusk is none the less for lacking it. In fact, this third outing outdoes the second in an unambiguously soft indie rock embrace.

The songs, then, have a warmth and immediacy, even when they turn to otherworldly topics.

It’s as if the drug and crime infested landscapes of Sicaro were Jóhansson’s underworld, but, unlike Orpheus, he did not look back on his return, absorbing and assimilating his discoveries into his increasingly unified compositional aesthetic.

Any way you look at it, though, it commands and keeps your attention, and that’s something to appreciate in any age.

On Sunergy, Ciani and Smith have created worthwhile, intelligent work, guiding each other, delving into free composition to capture their environment and their influences.

Trouble is a grand survey of deconstructed rock which achieves its greatest highs via the winding routes it travels. Not all those who wander are lost, indeed.

This album sounds vast and intimate at the same time, like keenly recorded sketches.

Hoffman used to be in Ex-Cult. They have the same driving, droning, chanting, intoning attack, and though it’s pitched way up high in a womanly register, it concedes nothing else at all to conventional femininity. Great stuff.

Here is a pretty, pleasant record; and maybe that would be enough if Teenage Fanclub had never done more, wedding angst and bliss in a way that few other bands ever did. ... Teenage Fanclub seems to have swallowed the Serenity Prayer whole, accepting a lot and changing little, and it’s hard to say whether that’s wisdom or stasis.

Bullish and forceful, The Disco’s of Imhotep is also a work of considerable intricacy and mystery. Jamal Moss aims high and rarely overreaches, making the album not only ambitious, but a welcome blast of modern house that would live up any club night.

Even though this is Blackburn and Hartley’s first record as Higher Authorities, they’ve had this psychedelic, dubby feel nailed down for years now. Making it more prominent is just a nice touch.

If Craig can manage to maintain his unique delicacy of sound, while pushing his melodic capabilities, he could achieve something special. Yet, if he allows pop elements to take over, instead of remaining as hints and references, he risks becoming simply another producer penning groovy, soulless hits for electro-pop scenesters. In order to remain distinctive, Craig will need to keep the balance he’s struck here firmly in mind.

This crew has figured out how to make it work as a quartet.

The whole album feels like catharsis, as slow dirge-y openings give way to extended instrumental crescendo, as Zedek views from a position of calm, weathered experience, distance, the roil and mess and hurt of human existence.

At nearly two hours, these two discs are an embarrassment of riches for the 65daysofstatic devotee and most likely sufficient for anyone casually interested in the band behind No Man’s Sky.

The orchestra’s nearly perfect. Cline’s selections are non-traditional but trustworthy and intelligent. The album keeps a persistent mood even as it reflects on the mood. But 80 minutes of it requires patient listening, and there aren’t enough moments to really grab here.

The energy, from the opening whistles and stomps that kick off “Driving School” to the final crazed, surf-guitar-on-two-wheels of the “Batman” cover, is anything but studio; it is immediate, volatile and contagious.

Future albums will reveal whether this is as much of an offshoot as Mogwai’s other soundtracks, but this understated, solid effort reveals a lot more imagination and prowess than most bands that have been around over 20 years.

Rhyton is never quite that simple. Here it becomes a vehicle for pretty much all of Shuford’s obsessions, sometimes two or three on top of each other at once, and honestly, it works pretty well.

Tooth, with its sharp title, minimalist drum attacks and hauntological synth textures, represents the antithesis of such plurality, reducing dance to its most antagonistic and unflinchingly bare-boned aesthetic and coming up with a new language from familiar idioms, sometimes from other genres.

When there are fewer tracks, Anderson contrasts foreground sharpness with distant background. “House of the Setting Sun” and “Chimes” present fatigued leads pushed along by hazy, distant clouds of tone. What the new climate hasn’t changed is Anderson’s persistent restlessness, wandering off the road to find unusual details. Into the Light heads into the desert, knowing it’s hardly a deserted place.

If the consistently lovely Piano is radical at all, it’s in a subtle and contextual way, serving partly as a space for Taylor to investigate several of his own previously released compositions and a few covers with a quiet kind of focus, and partly as a sustained exercise in mood.