Wild! Wild! Wild! was a spontaneous, live-off-the-floor recording, with some enthusiastic chatter left in after "It Came From the South" that points to the relaxed, fun vibe. But while it's tempting to say it's a rock'n'roll album about continuing to rebel as you get older, it's also a love letter to all the music Lewis grew up with.

Through For Their Love, Tabish and Other Lives as a whole re-engage with the outside world and analyze their sense of self worth. The inevitable vulnerability is morphed into a sense of strength and confidence, which adds another purposeful layer to the band's repertoire.

With the release of their 16th album, All That Reckoning, the Toronto group craft something simple, passionate and visceral.

Boniface is youth music, both in its vibrant shimmer and its wide-eyed, confessional storytelling, verging on embarrassing but typically landing somewhere raw and urgent.

While the songs of Something in the Room She Moves seem to exist in two modes — one buoyant, playful and adventurous, and the other weighty, contemplative and measured — a deeply somatic sense of sound design binds those halves together beautifully.

As the ninth addition to the Wilco canon, Star Wars is a vessel for a few impressive tunes, another respectable--if just a little uninspired--step for a band that continues to unapologetically evolve

His is an askew version of experimental electronic music that is as engaging a vision as it is singular.

Indistinct Conversations doesn't so much pare back as it does reveal depths: Powell's putting their inner life on display, and giving it the full range of space and volume it deserves.

The LP is both amusing and poignant, full of strange imagery and punch lines that are characteristic of Mountain Goats.

They have a warmth and earnestness that permeates their complex emotional movements. Their soundscapes seamlessly blend the organic and rustic infrastructures of urban life.

Through fragmentation, each track finds cohesion, making deconstruction — the silences, gaps, twisted repetitions, abrupt cuts, looped production, harried noise--the story itself.

Island represents a tender, more melancholic chapter in Pallett's repertoire, but one that offers a refined perspective.

The project hits a bit of a rut with "Rachel's Song" — an anachronistic cover of a Vangelis composition for Blade Runner — and the subsequent "Stardust," whose droning synth line and latent drum pattern ironically also give the impression of the film score for a sci-fi thriller, albeit an underbaked one. Fortunately, Tragic Magic rediscovers its rhythm on closing track "Melted Moon," a song written in response to the tragic wildfires that consumed much of Los Angeles last January.

With each piece of childhood minutiae recollected, the divide shrinks, and there's a triumphant sense of something starting anew. Sparks flying.

Do yourself a favour and cop this release. Rap is good nowadays, so indulge.

On V, the Budos Band give fans a new, granite dimension to their craft, while keeping things head-bobbingly and anthemically familiar.

If Soft Landing doesn't make you feel good inside, all the drugs in the world won't help you.

These tracks point toward a more compelling musical direction that would allow Parks to stand out as a singular pop artist, but the overwhelmingly simple bedroom pop stylings that decorate the majority of the album struggle to leave a mark. ... Nevertheless, Parks' wise words are indeed the album's saving grace.

Cheat Codes stands as Black Thought's most fully fleshed-out and accessible non-Roots project to date. Despite not veering too far outside his comfort zone or breaking any new ground, it holds the perfect blend of accessibility and complexity, supported by an energetic cast of guests.

Likewise checks all the boxes of a "good" album, but it's also a bit boring. It's too much a showcase of Quinlan's lyrical acumen, which is incisive, but the record doesn't strike a visceral chord.

Ensemble sections expand and contract into brilliant solos by his musicians, and while this will be a difficult listen for some, it contains some amazing moments.

On Hubris, Oren Ambarchi displays the confidence to allow a jumble of musicians and sounds to come off like a beautifully orchestrated, high-concept piece.

Heaven Is A Junkyard will make you feel its spiritual tone and tenor, a superpower that has laid dormant with Youth Lagoon, now awakened by Powers finally finding his voice."

Life Will See You Now tackles life's most drastic ups and downs with good-natured empathy, making it both complex and comforting.

Infinite Dissolution is full of haunted love songs between a fallen city and the ghosts that inhabit it; it fills a void that I never knew existed until this unsettling, aching sound poured in.

Although GUMBO'! does move with some inconsistency, Siifu nevertheless delivers a dynamic approach to his craft.

The Window finds Ratboys deservedly taking a confident step into a space they carved out for themselves.