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.

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.

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.

Much of his past work was uncontrolled in great ways, but it’s equally fascinating to hear him lead a group through carefully written, meticulously executed songs.

Each of these tracks finds a new texture or wrinkle in retro sounds, tapping into emotions that are evocative but hard to pin down, and showing off colors that hint at a once bright past beneath their faded exteriors.

This is the anti-colonial, anti-complacency guitar album of the very young year so far.

Orcutt and Fratti understand each other, and their collaboration might be the most relaxed, generous music either has made.

At times, it can feel like the album is revving off into too great a number of sonic paths. “CAME HERE FOR THE LOOT,” for example, combines trap and hardcore under bold bars that unexpectedly play out like an Opium label track. But elsewhere, her stylistic combinations add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.

The occult themes and enigmatic samples would be irrelevant if the experience of listening to Inferno weren’t so scintillating. But the elevated subject matter seems to have animated Eoin and Sandison, too; everywhere you listen, strange and thrilling things are afoot.

Beauty Land sounds just a bit sharper than Mendez’s usual. The toy piano plinks on “I Wanna Feel Pretty” and “No Evil” ring out with a steeliness that gives Beauty Land a starker profile than his previous records, as if there were late afternoon shadows framing every rough-handed strum and blot of keyboards. The difference is subtle, but it’s unmistakable.

Blue Morpho’s transportive ambitions are ultimately a vessel for O’Brien’s innerspace explorations.

Most of the noisier and more heavily manipulated tracks appear on the album’s less accessible A-side. For heady listeners, this will be a field day; for others, a test of faith. Stay the course. The luminescent B-side, a release valve for the intensity of Heavy Water’s first half, contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard in recent memory.

She may have strained in her studies, but her playing belies none of it, which is relaxed and supple and careful and patient.

the color of rain proves that music isn’t just in aja monet’s words; it is the words. She’s become an instrument, in turn tapping deeper veins of selfhood.

I’m People is his best effort in nearly a decade precisely because the music sounds emphatic, insistent, unselfconscious in its celebrations. Taylor doesn’t try to force the miracle; he just lets it be.

The album has an ASMR sense of stereo space, full of louvered shapes you can almost touch. Counting Sunsets is very pretty, but there’s always something tense to give the beauty character, like the wowing frequency stuck at the spine of “Sunset VII.”

Leaning into anonymity over intimacy, Li captures the anxieties of feeling outpaced and misplaced while the rest of the room keeps dancing on.

Its 11 tracks are crawling with morose R&B melodies that feel beamed from Take Care’s deleted scenes, almost capturing the fun multi-regional slant of 2020’s Dark Lane Demo Tapes. But Drake’s writing still feels smoothed over and starved of evocative detail. His ideas oscillate between half-baked and colorful, saved by a few spurts of inspiration.

The key difference to Knats’ self-titled debut, which was released in 2025 and dealt in similar jazz fusion trappings, is A Great Day in Newcastle’s scope and ambition. Here, the group marries jazz-kid experimentalism with taut punk, sprawling worldbuilding, and social commentary.

It’s a delight to hear Mollestad rein herself in—she’s never sounded more assured.

Sweetness is part of what makes Long Wave Home so consistently dazzling.

While REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE may not embrace an explicit narrative framework like Owusu’s first two records, it charts a linear journey from dystopian despair to cautious optimism.

It’s a maximalist riot where he doesn’t just leech off musical trends but absorbs them into the kind of insecure, heartfelt, drained, and charmingly corny Drake party songs that are in short supply these days.

Justin Vernon sings on three songs, “Flood,” “Keep Away,” and “Glow,” and his voice pairs well with Saleh’s falsetto while transporting him into Saleh’s world. .... Of Earth & Wires’ emotional journey takes shape through these intentional collaborations and musical references.

On both sidelong tracks, they take their time to establish a vibe, each member finding the right time to add another layer.

There are no sour notes here; it’s a lovely listen from beginning to end. But you may sometimes get a sense of déjà vu, either because so many of the songs draw from a similar set of sounds, or because you’ve actually heard them before—six of the album’s 14 tracks came out on other records in the past few years.

Probably Rostam’s most compact and thematically cohesive project, with almost all of the nine tracks on the 30-minute album leaning toward folk and Americana. After the explosive energy of the first two tracks, things calm way down.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

MR COBRA solidifies her as an avant-garde curator—not only of sound, but of broader pop culture and camp touchstones that shape the public imagination of what a woman can be.

Lavender Networks is a step up on the “approachable” scale—even if it still has enough ideas for a dozen albums by a less adventurous artist. It’s a (relatively) digestible, catchy release that seems destined to invite more people into Marcloid’s digital dayglo world.

This is still quintessential Broken Social Scene—brokenhearted love songs, striking images set in dream logic, longing for connection while admitting the faults that prevent it—even if it necessitates a new level of patient listening.

It’s not easy to breathe warmth into such notoriously cold music, but Detached From the Rest of You manages to be intimate, human, and emotive.

Self-consciousness hovers over MAITREYA CORSO like a cloud. She’s comfortable when she can hide—fit neatly inside a shadow, as on the twinkling, toy-piano-poppy “Great Minds”—but recognizes it’s time to outgrow that.

This time they’re turning abrasive guitar chords and the dim roar of shoegaze feedback into weighted blankets that salve. The cacophony is consistent, but Robber Robber prove they know how to navigate it with a controlled burn.

It’s two lifelong friends tossing ideas back and forth, spiking gorgeous guitar patterns with unexpected effects and samples.

Their record is more interested in the truth of their own pleasures and failures, and in the ways both of those can, on the best of days, connect us more closely with each other.

It’s startling to hear Cola so energized, and the band carries that momentum through the whole album. There’s a newfound confidence to sprawl out in unexpected, noisy ways.

These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. .... arish knows the seance-like arrangement of microphones that will allow the transformation to occur.

The vibey, occasionally anesthetized sound can begin to feel flat and mushy at times, but Rashad’s nimble flows and sharp songwriting keep the album in focus, even when the thematic and sonic heaviness feels like walking through the desert in a weighted vest.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, it feels more satisfying than the last two records. That might have something to do with its tonal sensibility: While the melodic sounds are as wispy as ever, they’re slightly more harmonious.

A revelation. .... If six years is what Roxanne needs to produce a leap in scale as bracing as Poem 1, then so be it: This will cast shadows deep and long enough to sit underneath for a long time.

Here they are weird and jagged and noisy, occasionally abstruse and often disarmingly melodic. It seems they’re only out to impress themselves, and that’s the sort of stuff that doesn’t burn up with time.

This is the best way to approach the album—as an impressionistic work that rewards the questions and ideas it stirs, rather than a puzzle demanding a solution. Its knotted discussions of agency and morality take a backseat to how alive its characters feel in this illicitly exciting world.

So even if the songwriting guides the band toward the most impressive, experimental reaches of their sound, it also becomes their record most tethered to the lyric sheet and Kinsella’s role as a frontman. It’s a dizzying effect, as the polish of his surroundings never distracts from the rawness at its core.

Haines’ dynamic vocals often bail out the more inelegant lyrics. But it doesn’t help when her bandmates seem to be on autopilot, working with a distracting series of references to the band’s influences.

Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song.

It is a decent entry in her catalog, but by no means essential.

The trio sharpens its focus, marrying clever production with the soul-eating intensity that propelled its rise.

The songs give the intriguing impression of having been fully arranged, then severely pared away, leaving behind starkly outlined space. It’s a somnolent register from which the music seems to keep waking up.

Through written piecemeal between 2021 and 2025 (a period in which Presley focused primarily on his painting practice), Orange is by far the tightest, most cohesive record he’s made.

We toggle across this record between the same core sounds—crisp acoustic guitar, modular synths, analog drum machines, and Margaret’s alto. In some instances, these ingredients render a feast, and in others, barely a 7/11 haul.

Knowing that Kahan is capable of a song like “August” just makes the more pro forma arrangements on the rest of the album more frustrating.

The While We Wait mixtape remains their best-written release, but Kehlani, with “Folded” leading the way, proves she wants to compete in the marketplace.

On an album that otherwise counts as the Foos’ leanest and meanest since their 1995 debut, the closing “Asking for a Friend” is a lumbering, melodramatic power ballad better suited to a latter-day Metallica album. However, Your Favorite Toy strikes a harmonious balance between the Foos’ punk-muckraker and arena-crowd-pleaser sides on “Unconditional.”

Though its songs are simple and occasionally repetitive, the incisive lyrics cut through the clear country air, enough to turn heads a few times.

Something Worth Waiting For is the sound of a band not tripping into place but clawing its way to the heights of its potential.

Fidelity is more wistful and weightless than either Ten Fold or do it afraid. She raps less; she sings more. She leans into the breathier end of her fantastically versatile voice, pairing it with sun-soaked keyboard sounds reminiscent of mid-’90s R&B groups like SWV or Kut Klose.

Like the band’s classic LPs, Sanctions locates a strange beauty in plaintive sadness and offers no easy answers, just the feeling of being let into a secret world you don’t entirely understand.

Songs like “Automatic” and “Mon Amour,” meant to feel airy and perfumed, wind up coughing on their own musk. Ware’s adherence to such rigid disco blueprints also has the knock-on effect of making her voice sound less remarkable than it actually is.

Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics.

WU LYF’s ambitions have not abated in the slightest since Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, an album that eased its path towards the rafters with cathedral reverb sourced from an actual abandoned church. They’ve just become more clarified, stripping away the booming echo that once obscured that group’s limber musicianship, while Roberts has sheared the most jagged nodes from his trachea and, with them, a language of completely unprecedented vowel sounds.

Despite the outward sameness of the music, there’s a wealth of detail to be discovered.

Evaporator satisfies in a low-stakes way, providing an oasis of chill in a world on fire; it’s an episode of Friends with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, a familiar joy that won’t trouble the palate.

The two reunite on Dying Is the Internet, striking an even more idiosyncratic fusion of their respective talents while their music remains as heavy as ever.

At times, it sounds like either the most tenderhearted prog album you’ve ever heard or the most fearless, cold-blooded mutation of folk music. Sometimes, it’s just plain stunning.

His corralling results in several glimpses at individual members in their element, but you’ve heard just about everyone here do better on their own. Fun moments aside, sheer force of will isn’t enough to help The Scythe fully cohere as a unit.

On her latest LP, No Need to Be Lonely, she reconnects with the punchy hooks and confidence of her previous work while taking bigger creative risks.

The three best songs here—“Another Lifetime Floats Away,” “It’s Here,” and “Will You Dare”—are the most unguarded statements Eisenberg has ever made. Each one, at its core, is a paean, a devotional—a love song.

The drums are the most overt scaling-up device throughout the album. Carey often slowly brings songs to a crescendo and then proceeds to play around or against them with all his strength. As captured in Whitesel’s immaculate recordings, unburied in the studio haze that cloaks most of Bon Iver’s records, this approach is arresting: something like Glenn Kotche drumming for Def Leppard. Vernon’s voice, too, comes into sharper focus. .... The greatest foil to Vernon’s voice, though, is Wasner’s electric guitar.

It’s ELO and ELP and the Cars on lithium. Roxy Music is another ingredient in the strange, gauzy casserole. It’s stylish in an uncomfortable way, like a Stereolab record by way of a hostage crisis.

Distracted works so well because it resembles a pop blowout at first, only to pull the shag rug out from under our feet.

Sunn O))) is a behemoth, a leviathan, a statement of purpose worthy of the late-career self-titling gamble. Despite that, maybe because of it, I can’t imagine wanting to listen to it more than once every few years.

That this isn’t a more ornate, Watch the Throne-type album is a bit deflating; the two collab tracks between the duo–“Leadbelly” and “Kirkland”–display how much of their synergy is left untapped across the 31 other tracks. It took some living with this record for it not to feel like a homogeneous, just-decent meld of MIKE and Earl throwing shots up in an empty gym.

All but one of the mesmerizing puzzles on Vol. II strut across the six-minute mark, and the songs never lose steam because they contain so many variations and plot twists.

While the record delivers on joyful bass drops and club life vignettes, it occasionally leaves you longing for just a bit more unchoreographed chaos.