An exceptionally fierce indie pop record.

Smother is an exercise in moderation, trying to find the precise balance between audacious beauty and emotional intelligence. The depraved encounters it presents are brash, risky, and just like its characters, always on the verge of imploding.

Freak Puke is at its very core a Melvins album: strange and abrasive, muck-borne and jagged.

Matching thoughtful lyricism with heightened arrangements, they're building on what they've learned, and all their efforts are clicking at the right time.

It’s definitely going to be divisive, this album – there are some who simply won’t welcome this definitive stride away from the electronic psychedelia that’s been the Boards’ purlieu for so long.

Though The Golden Casket shows Modest Mouse at their most accessible and tuneful, a creative shift that started with 2004's Good News For People Who Love Bad News, they return to some of the experimental aspects that defined so much of their early work.

Alex G’s ninth full-length album, is easily one of his most cohesive works to date.

It’s all meticulously crafted, but thanks to an easygoing dynamic, each track sounds somehow breezy and nonchalant.

Like those early EPs, Gloss Drop relies more heavily on complex rhythms and wonky melodies to get its point across.

There is real sorrow and feeling amongst all the fun and the record will hopefully see Hunx gain some of the attention that is way over due.

It’s a buoyantly hopeful album where Hyde gives a final wave goodbye to his darkest days before moving on to greener pastures.

Centres has the ability to both mollify and unnerve, and to think that most of it was assembled through sensitive means speaks volumes of Craig’s greater ambitions.

The talent, confident and imagination on display throughout this album makes it a must-listen, a chance to let your mind wander and to lose yourself in an incredible plangency of strings.

The strongest songs come at the very end, where Harvey most effectively puts us in the setting she's describing and has the melodies to keep us there.

At its worst, Go-Go Boots comes off sounding like Lynyrd Skynyrd. At its best, it stands as a testament to the unparalleled songwriting of Cooley and Hood and as a reminder of just how special this band can be.

Sun Airway conducts Soft Fall with a unique command, never straying from its drifting atmosphere even as it continually delivers a batch of catchy, highly replayable songs.

One could say that her impeccable use of space is what reveals a special intensity to her work, a musical style artists don't often explore as they near the end of their third decade release music. Orton hinted at it through all this time, even if you weren't paying close attention.

The songwriting is versatile but cohesive; every song clearly has its own place on Shrines, and each one has a strong hook, at least one beat or lyric you'll find yourself thinking over for a little bit.

Pretty Years doesn’t sugarcoat things just for the sake of it: the band is just as apprehensive about life’s everyday troubles, and it’s by holding on to a healthy sense of proportion that Cymbals Eat Guitars retain their quietly visceral power.

Leave Me Alone is giddy with joy, cackling with sun-drenched vibes and that captivating youthful energy, and it’s impossible to listen to tracks like Easy, Chili Town and San Diego without leeching off it.

As you listen, you can easily picture a campfire in a forest, stars in the sky and Laura Gibson, guitar cradled in her arms, mumbling her way through an upbeat breezy folk song that implies some inner sadness while at the same time being entirely optimistic and happy.

There’s a melancholic elegance in Amidon’s pieces that express nuanced forms of sadness, and as demonstrated in songs like Short Life and Pharaoh, sublime chamber arrangements spruce up those feelings of sorrow.

Music for Listening to Music to isn’t just a background pleasantry; instead, it may very well be the one that could move Goodman into the foreground of her career.

Visions is beautifully conceived and executed, musically, lyrically and thematically.

Maybe it’s not the showiest of returns, but instead, she proves that the toughest battles are the ones that happen inside us.

Tumor hangs everything together with dark and inventive layers of pain that never relent. After Tumor ends things with a glimmer of hope on Ebony Eye, we're enthralled with their journey, eager to see where they will take us next.

Battle Born, doesn't quite reach those heights [of their debut, Hot Fuss], but it comes close.

There’s no use putting The Twilight Sad out of their misery if they continue to deliver such a delightfully morose tapestry of color and vitality.