It may have taken a while, but the rewards of this belated collaboration are exquisite.

There are times when Lenker approaches Marissa Nadler’s eerie otherworldliness, though not for long. ... Couple that with a really good, dense, aggressive musical attack, led by Meek, but supported by bassist Max Oleartchik and drummer James Krivchenia, and you’ve got something special, especially in the more rock-oriented tunes like “Masterpiece,” “Humans” and, especially “Paul.”

While albums and concerts get to end, the knowledge that real lives carry on scarred by real-life tragedies like the one related make The Glowing Man a fraught record to hear.

It’s all attitude, baby, and on their second album Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic, it’s out in spades, for everyone who remembers when rock music rocked, politics and punk could live together without cancelling one another out (or making one more about the other), and bands could dig into a specific influence without being too obvious about it.

Eyes on the Lines is summer’s quintessential pleasure, the unmapped excursion through sunlit spaces, the unhurried but never static interval for reflection, the road trip that goes everywhere and ends up exactly where it started. It’s an album to get lost in, every time you listen to it.

Unlike your average grime productions, these tracks are rarely propulsive or tailored for the dancefloor, but rather shift and shake convulsively under the weight of stark, metronomic beats, swathes of sub-bass and icy synth swirls. Listen carefully, and there is a certain melodicism nestled in the heart of this album, but its tone is despairing and subdued, glimmers of light in a dark and uncaring world.

Nadler can’t be pinned down, and all of Strangers is an indication of that new challenge she both creates and meets.

Allen writes like a painter, renewing familiar material--in this case, poorly behaved men and resourceful hookers with Spanish names--via quirks of perspective and peculiar taste in details.

Hopelessness has occasional flaws. Not all the songs conclude satisfyingly, and some of the lyrics are vaguely trite. But despite them, it is a missive from an artist who has never ceased to evolve and now asserts herself with gusto and unflinching purpose.

Toledo’s first full band record, his first record with a producer, with a sound that is ragged but clean, emotionally raw but cleverly structured. It’s a record that engages heart and mind and viscera all at once, and if some of the songs go on longer than pop usually does, it’s because they have more to say.

Over its brief 26 minutes the songs crest and fall within a fairly narrow band, and when one feels like it’s about to peak and explode, the group instead will pull back a bit. There are shifts and changes aplenty, and there’s certainly no risk of tedium, but this is a reserved set of songs nonetheless.

Kowton’s clarity of vision after eight songs and 41 minutes leaves no doubt at the intent of its creator. You’d be a fool to argue with the results.

If that all sounds a bit lofty and conceptual, well, BBF is just that, but it’s also fun. Some tracks plod a little, and will sound pretentious to some ears, but each one contains a wealth of detail, and its best moments are miniature triumphs.

The album gains strength as it goes on, getting harder and more abrasive in its second half. And yet even as it rages, it has an elegiac tone.

The songs on Crab Day are more vivid in memory than when they’re playing. There’s distress at the edges that’s hard to source, but as they spin apart in performance, they lodge in the brain.

It blunts and softens its influences, whether heavy rock or soul or krautrock, and delivers them in a medium-temperature hippie haze.

It’s another landmark release for this deceptively versatile and forward-thinking artist, and perhaps, just perhaps, his most effective album to date.

With The Follower we have the first truly top-tier Field album that seems to draw its energy more from refinement than innovation, from the spin of the wheel rather than the speed of the car.

Even now, with this seventh album, the old thumping insouciance remains, while the subject matter becomes increasingly morose. These are the kind of songs that could easily, in the live setting, lead to sweaty euphoria; you realize almost as an afterthought that they are all about death.

The Body’s use of nearly-subsonic bass and samples puts these now commonplace building blocks of electronic dance music to their most infernal purposes. If there is something unsettling about an extended, windshield-rattling electronic kick drum, The Body has found it and perfected it.

Like the last two Damien Jurado albums, this one takes a while to sink in, and it’s backloaded, so you have to get all the way through for the payoff. And yet, if you’ve taken the other two Maraqopa journeys, it is remarkable how this third installment augments and complements them.

Rock that soothes and sears at once is a rare thing, and Heron Oblivion has made a whole album that makes the contradictions feel like an ancient tradition.

Varmints is an expansive, surprising listen for which sonic left turns can be taken for granted.

[The final track is] less antic and virtuoso than the earlier tracks, but a good deal more touching. Elsewhere Neufeld jets off for the stratosphere, technical dexterity gleaming in a rarified, surgically clean space. Here she sinks into a rich, loamy here and now, luxuriating in slow exploration of certainties.

This is an album that pulls you up out of gloom and into exultation, and if it’s manipulative that way, so be it. As Watts says, we would like to be like that, and Full Circle makes it feel, at least for a little while, like we are.

The music’s depth, and it is deeper than any other Q/C/Kluster album, encompasses myth and poetry while eschewing assumption and pretense. It walks a fine line between accessibility and the intrigue of novelty while never allowing timbre self-satisfying supremacy.

Freaks of Nurture needs a bit more abrasion to leave a mark. Sunny and pleasant all through, it blurs together like vacation days, each enjoyable, but hard to remember afterwards which was which.

Fleeting is therefore more intimate even than your average American primitive album, with the sounds of nature adding to the authenticity and naturalism of the music as opposed to intruding upon it.