It’s like the first album’s songs went on a quest and came back both brolic and anemic—even more expressive, stricken, and achingly contradictory.

Their new album, in grief or in hope, might be the warmest and brightest pool of cold, dark sounds they’ve yet made.

The songs on bitknot are heavier, uglier, and far more glitched out than those on their predecessor. They’re also lovelier, more full of life, and more empathetic.

Hum of Hurt is the darker and more brooding sibling [to Love Is Not Enough]. The bewildering time signatures that worked to scramble records like Jane Doe are still present, but they’re deployed to different ends, consumed by massive grooves.

Like an AI chatbot, Until the Sun Explodes has all the data but little of the soul that made Sublime transcendent.

Coin-O-Matic follows a similar script as older Deer Tick albums: a beer-swilling song paired with a somber one, neither fully inhabiting the space they claim.

While the lyrical concerns remain sadly relevant, Terrestrials can’t help but feel stuck in time.

There’s plenty of gorgeous sound design to get lost in, like rubberbanding delays in “Skylight” that give the effect of factory machinery imploding, or the timbres that open “Telescoping,” which mirror a Mellotron, a flute, and a choir all happening at once. But let your mind wander, and Carlile and Doran’s digital wrangling blurs into a colorful, reverberant hum.

Building on their work as individuals, where their training sits comfortably in the background of tactile experiments with synths and tape machines, the trio returns to Oliveros’ central insight. Together, they remind us how nourishing collaboration can be.

While the new album took shape at a proper studio and is a fabulous headphone listen, filled with washes and vibrations and rich stereo swells, it still feels like music for the open air, mixing with the local environment and stretching to its own horizon like water seeking its own level.

Demand to Be Taken to Heaven Alive! makes one or two schematic tweaks to the chassis they’ve built, resulting in a smoother, more welcoming ride than usual.

Magazine, though, is to me a tremendous next step, as YHWH Nailgun find how much structure and sophistication they can fit into very tiny spaces. If you thought the rototoms were a gimmick, even a good one, they’re gone; if you thought Borzone’s words were inscrutable, they have new relevance and urgency, motivational slogans for the dispossessed.

Filled with lyrics that figure the world as place both vast and small, the album is the kind of monument to deeply felt emotion that fans of Ana Roxanne, Solange, Weyes Blood, and Fiona Apple will hold close to their chest.

Rodrigo has never sounded more adventurous—some fans might miss the bratty sarcasm of a “good 4 u” or a “get him back!”, but Rodrigo is now a twentysomething eager to take a few big steps out of her comfort zone.

On Roses, we get something sweet and almost entirely satisfying.

Eyes Full feels like a missed opportunity. The album works on its own modest terms, but it doesn’t exist in a vacuum: To anyone who doesn’t know Amba’s track record, their reinvention may read as just another shoegaze-leaning alt-country record.

Unfortunately, Barnes’ drab palate—sandy acoustic guitars, squeals of distortion, drums so familiar that they might as well be wallpaper—leave these tales of heartbreak in the lurch.

Throughout I Built You a Tower, Death Cab for Cutie revive the yearning that propelled their original indie rock, alongside an insatiable focus and hunger for more.

Even if they do sound tighter and more controlled as a unit than they have before, The Bug Club still sounds disheveled and spontaneous enough to be mining the human anatomy for one-liners.

It’s faster, louder, and brasher than anything he’s done since Big Fish Theory and even Big Fish Theory itself, with all its SOPHIE-produced clamour. He’s still a pointed rapper, though, relying less on personal anecdotes than concise socioeconomic analyses.

It goes down as easy as a lot of records that sell millions of copies in ballad-loving Britain, but there’s a riot of invention going on within these eight songs.

The sincere, universalist ambitions of NATURE IS HEALING might disarm listeners most familiar with horsegiirL’s cheeky humor. But that’s what makes the music click.

While Little Barrie may belong to a long lineage of bluesy power trios, Gravity Freeze presents Cadogan as a basement indie-pop eccentric as much as an axe-slinger. He possesses a disarmingly delicate, vaporous voice.

More often than not, An Eraser and a Maze makes you wish Modest Mouse had been more deliberate in sharpening these no-filter moments, especially as the nondescript instrumentals regularly blur into the background.

What seems so straightforward on the surface eventually reveals deeper meanings and truths. Lines that seem artlessly off-the-cuff on first pass accrue an unexpected weight and purpose the fourth time through; the countrified guitar lick that sounds so chipper at the start of a song is dripping with melancholy by the end.

It’s certainly the best, tightest music she’s ever made, but it lacks the curatorial precision and creative vulnerability of the kind of classic album that’s well within her reach. Essentially, she could have said much more in less time.

If For Love of Grace were a Cave album, I think it would be Henry’s Dream, the one where Cave wrote songs that were as suited to a Brazilian street festival as a Berlin goth club.

The Boys of Dungeon Lane is a perfectly professional album, a beautifully realized drip feed of nostalgia with no sharp edges or harmful aftereffects.