Martin and Taylor don’t think in opuses, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy simply slows down time just long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to float away if they’re not captured immediately and cherished.

Some might wish this gift for fastidious arrangements would carry over to the lyrics, which feature a bevy of look-it-up references and descriptions that might stymie attempts at easy listening. It doesn't hurt to do a little research or, like, pay attention to lyrics worth a damn.

For the first time, Kozelek has put out an album whose meticulous sequencing yields more than just a random scattershot collection of great songs, but rather a complete cohesive musical statement.

It’s not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It’s rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but Rostam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past.

It's not Les Savy Fav's most immediate record, nor is it their best.

Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions; of visible seams and unhemmed edges.

Despite the looseness and the grab-bag approach, the best of the songs on Unmap feel right as rain, like these weird mash-ups were there all along, just waiting to be discovered.

A hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream.

It has less of the soul-searching of Ware’s previous album Glasshouse, yet zooms in on a lighter facet of her personality, and is threaded with a camp sense of humor that reflects disco’s frivolity as well as the cheekiness that is all over Ware’s Table Manners podcast but has been largely missing from her recorded music. ... It is a joy to hear Ware sounding so relaxed.

Well-played post-rock was always the bedrock of Windsor's sound, but they've added angst, a flayed post-punk edge, and new-wave organ loops to their ambition, creating a sound that should be familiar to Yo La Tengo fans, yet remains distinctly this band's own.

It's a sound as vital and inspirational as ever.

It's obsessive and choppy. It's playful. It's gleefully oblivious of when to shut up.

This is music that benefits from being heard loud and/or on headphones in the same way couches are best experienced by actually sitting down in them instead of just brushing your fingers against the upholstery as you leave the room.

Forgiveness Rock Record's thematic bent is mature, and that sense of gravity is embedded into the music, too.

The first disc contains some of the loveliest songs Phil Elverum has ever written. .... The second disc, meanwhile, demonstrates that touring with the great anti-fascist doom duo Ragana has done wonders for his work.

Showbiz! is the young artist’s greatest accomplishment thus far, the product of a passionate, creative journeyman fully making his home in music.

It picks up right where Thickfreakness left off-- outside the bar in the gravel parking lot, swinging aggressively with Dan Auerbach's ferocious six-string and Patrick Carney's cymbal-and-snare seizures-- and brings the noise one step further.

The trick is to cede the idea that Franz Ferdinand are meant to deliver the cohesive, moving, traditional Statement Albums their debut may have misled listeners to expect. Some people-- earnest people, like Bloc Party, Sufjan Stevens, and the Arcade Fire-- will go on trying to fill that niche. Franz Ferdinand, though, aren't going to do that, and good on them: We can only hope they'll go on offering us cheeky, energetic surprises.

What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it.

Infra works as an enveloping and moving work even absent any knowledge of its beginnings. Others may glean different feelings from it than I do, but that is part of the point.

The album boasts the most opaque lyrics in Subtle's catalog. But put the record and the website together, and the big themes become clear.

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH is an intensely beautiful, intensely difficult record.

Good Bad Not Evil is the record where naysayers, disinterested friends and acquaintances, and anyone else within earshot has to sit up, shut up, and listen.

Minekawa reveals herself as yet another artist helping to forge the path for interesting and exciting musical landscapes.

You get the feel of two of the world's greatest musicians in a room together, having a conversation and creating a document that will carry their legacy into the future. It is not challenging music. Anyone can approach it easily, and it is the perfect initiation to Touré's talents for listeners who haven't yet heard him.

Their sophomore LP Powerplant sounds a little more like everyone else, echoing second-wave emo sourness (“Your Heart”), Britpop jangle (“She Goes By”), and classic alt-rock loud-quiet-loudness throughout. But Tucker and Tividad are wise enough not to abandon what makes them distinct--that unsettling magic that exists between them when they sing, the harmonic equivalent of The Shining’s Grady twins.

Black Mountain are about as referential as they come. But despite the obvious touchstones-- which, incidentally, fucking rule-- the band are affable and idiosyncratic enough to win over those who passed on recent retrofits like Comets on Fire's Blue Cathedral or My Morning Jacket's It Still Moves, and make those records' admirers practically cream themselves.

All Hands on the Bad One finds the Northwest power-trio at their most melodious, playful, sarcastic, and punchy-- both musically and lyrically.

There's a range of hooks and ideas at play in Splazsh that few others have approached, much less made coherent.

Flying Lotus has the notion that death should be the only limiting factor, and when he's put out a work that wrings beauty out of that very thing, what's the point of fearing anything?

For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music.

The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static.

At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.

You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here.

Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die. That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them.

Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious.

Lilitri’s dedication to concision and coherence doesn’t come at the expense of subtle, sharp songwriting.

The Witching Hour is the most urgent and immediate of their career. The earlier records were sort of toylike and plastic; this not only has a pulse, it has chilled blood in its veins.

Dragonslayer is a lither, more athletic Sunset record--easier to like, easier to understand.

Through the Wall makes its case without grandstanding, proof that command can be quiet.

This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like.

On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

This is terminally catchy music played with punk's enthusiasm and velocity, and maybe it's the fact that there's only two dudes in this band that makes you feel like joining in to bash along.

The songs here are airy, and often provisional-feeling, while Thundercat's lyrics reliably invoke death, mourning, and vulnerability.

On Any Shape You Take, De Souza commits herself to being undone, to experiencing the terrible feelings and the beautiful ones. Even when she’s fucked-up, there is something ecstatic in her attempts at loving, her hunger to absorb all she can from life.

Waiting for the Moon is just what I needed from Tindersticks: an album that doesn't abandon their recent direction, but breathes new life into it by drawing breath from their noisier past.

Monomania is certainly a strong effort on its own merits, and more importantly, they’ve avoided making their deflating “diminishing returns” record.

Pairing the risk-taking instinct of her best music with the swaggering confidence she projects as a kind of cyborg diva, it is the best of all five albums in the set, and one of her strongest full-lengths to date.

No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude.

Working mostly chronologically, this set flows so that you feel you’re riding alongside him.

The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

Crush offers proof that Shepherd has quickly learned to harness its noise and power. In a live setting, this material might have the potential to blossom into something unruly, but on the LP it comes across as more mischievous than deranged.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.

F&M's coy pose comes off as somehow original.

The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.

Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening--details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.

Though actual percussion remains sparse, Night Reign grooves harder than its predecessor, which featured almost no drums. Even when the rhythm instruments sit back, there’s almost always a sense of an insistent pulse.

Many of the familiar sounds of ambient music are here, and Evans boldly breathes new life into them.

Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one.

These two releases [Gish and Siamese Dream] still resonate, as both a nostalgia fix underscoring how it was so easy to fall for Smashing Pumpkins in the first place, and as the best introductions to their music any newcomer could want.

You can feel their newfound focus and commitment here, racing through every new crest Hernandez hits or each burly refrain Hill bellows.

Skeleton's flaws are few and often obscured by the album's mixing: Vidal's vocal adds an additional rhythmic layer, but his lyrical work is interesting enough to be more pronounced and less muddied.

By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability.

This time out, Man Man's less sloppy but just as ramshackle, as if the snaps and crackles are the band's diversion from actually writing the record.

Colin Meloy's songwriting makes them one of the strongest bands working today.

There's more movement, more development, more variety; fitting for a trilogy's middle, it's where the sounds get thicker, where the possibilities simply become more intriguing.

Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies.

Here's to Taking It Easy is a great record, but I feel like Houck's best is still in him-- the one where the deep roots of tradition will finally be inextricably fused with his own weird, shambling soul.

It takes a colossal effort to back Molina's candor, and given what a departure this record is for the band, it's not surprising that some of the songs get bogged down here and there. It's also not much of a problem.

For the duo to finally meet in the middle for a full-length project after all these years—and for that project to be as warm, gutter, and satisfying as The Elephant Man’s Bones—is remarkable.

While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.

Against those odds, Gillis turns these perceived weaknesses into strengths; as his most fussed-over and carefully plotted album, All Day paradoxically sounds like his most effortless.

They've found a way to be ambitious while also elemental, a difficult trick that Sleep pulled off on Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker, and one that High on Fire have nailed here.

Impersonator gently twists your arm like this, song-by-song and note-by-note, and it is as discomfiting as it is transcendent.

It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts.

Locrian chose to slow down and create consecutive meticulous albums. They are isolated and involved worlds of sound.

The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored.

Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love.

The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet.

The slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics.

For the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.

The Satanist is a terrific coil of most everything Behemoth have ever done well, a strangely hopeful vision of hell wrested away from its very grip.

10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun.

This is an album whose every layer seems customized, whose every crease seems deliberate. That calculation doesn’t seem to have mitigated Indian’s power at all. Rather, this is the strongest they’ve ever sounded and the smartest they’ve ever sounded.

It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.

It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog.

Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile.

Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.

Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.

As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus.

An enveloping, mysterious record that marries the idealism of "the future of tomorrow today" to the stark reality of the post-millennial present and finds beauty and fascination in the tussle between melody and rhythm.

These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery.

Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional.

Luck in the Valley is so vibrant, engaging, and alive, it's hard to overestimate it.

Despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to.