In a humbler, warmer, more openhearted way, Reigning Sound have risen above themselves--as well as the garage-rock idiom that spawned them--while spiritually hewing true.

The four suites of music here sound incredible, capturing the grandeur, aggression, and power of their symphonic punk with perfect clarity. And it feels incredible, too, as it endures passages of oppressive darkness to step at least toward a new dawn.

There's a surface graininess that amplifies the corrosive qualities of the band's sound and the strep-throat rawness of Edkins' voice, but also serves to accentuate some of the more surprising elements in the mix.

Disturbing, complicated, and enthrallingly strange, The Mess We Made requires patience, and, ideally, an already established taste for Elliott's previous ambient output.

An epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.

Volume II is like an unnecessary b-sides compilation.... Nonetheless, the album has its high points.

Just as Elliott Smith's "Needle in the Hay" was perfect for the suicide-attempt scene in The Royal Tenenbaums, any song on this album would complement a still-photo montage of a prolonged labor ending in a miscarriage.

It's a satisfying and often moving final chapter to Cash's life and career, one that rejects self-pity and remorse in favor of hopefulness and even celebration.

Watershed has friction, and friction brings heat. Those left cold by metal's po-faced tendencies might well warm up to it.

The Church are still producing at a high level, and Untitled #23 is a must for anyone who's followed them this far.

Some of it will be a little too out-there for some people, and some of it will be a little too harmless for others. But overall, it's an interesting assemblage of artists, and the music is good, covering just enough ground that you can feel the variety but no one's likely to be overwhelmed.

Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

It's not unlike the effect of the Grateful Dead or even drone music, where subtle changes within a much bigger system provide thrills beyond the surface. That said, Atra Mors isn't an easy or amicable listen.

There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding.

The Body has always been obsessed with feelings of consuming futility, and in kicking free of conventional structures and following Wolpert's lead, they've come closer than ever to their truest selves on record.

He’s almost literally stopping to smell the roses, and the result is an album about growth and development, about the virtues of taking your time rather than the crutch of constantly sprinting forward. In the process, it advances Bachman’s oeuvre significantly.

A focused beam of hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment.

This is the culmination of an eight-year second-wind. It’s also the most complete 2 Chainz album to date, and places him where he belongs: in the upper echelon of rappers from this era.

It exists in a cloud of gloom that consumes the album. And yet, there’s something endearing about Boogie’s honesty, his commitment to the established mood, and his charming vocals to go along with his rap abilities.

The most diverse and ambitious recording to appear under the Efdemin name, incorporating not just standard electronic kit but also dulcimer, sing-drum, hurdy-gurdy, and guitars.

At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her.

Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.

All That Glue’s unearthed tracks easily punch as hard as their better-known counterparts, and each showcases Williamson’s bottomless reservoir of ways to vent spleen.

An album so profusely inventive, so alive to the possibilities of sound itself.

Burning projects newfound poise and even joy through a sophisticated collage. Rashad’s collection of references and phrases plays like the inside of a jumbled but vibrant brain.

For all these experimental impulses, Crawler ultimately proves to be more a transitional album than a wholesale reinvention, and it’s not entirely clear if Idles have it in them to go full Kid A.

Functions less like a singles collection and more like an overstuffed double album: discursive, playful, and full of imagination.

Barbieri’s dualities—holy and profane, ancient and newfangled, ecstatic and doomed—give Spirit Exit its potency.

The final track, “Mukazi,” arrives. It promises the grail, the holy truth behind the fanatical farce, and the reward for this brutal journey into the hellish depths of Mutinta’s psyche. ... It’s left ambiguous whether she can truly bring herself to say these affirmations, whether this is the triumph she has earned. It could be.

O Monolith raises bigger, more eternal questions about humanity’s relationship to nature, and Squid’s music becomes more open-ended while wrestling with them. This weaving quality means the music is unpredictable and often exhilarating, but the message is blurrier.

Steeped in the careening energy of surf-rock and mid-’60s Jazzmaster tones but open to any stylistic fancy that crosses Falcon Bitch and Gumball’s radar, When Horses Would Run is an unusually raucous and idea-stuffed debut.

It’s a dense piece of work and a dizzying journey, but at its best, you get the sense Marsalis knows exactly where his spaceship is going.

Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it.

The cloudier nature of Ishibashi’s score leaves it feeling less like a standalone piece than the soft, jazzy pop of her Drive My Car soundtrack. But as a mirror to Hamaguchi’s tale of creeping environmental anxiety, Ishibashi’s ghostly music makes a rich companion.

The illusion of continuous chatter and conversation is compelling enough even if you don’t understand any of the languages spoken therein.

Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns.

Stripping it all back, she leaves nowhere to hide, relinquishing her self-protective grip on control on a gentle-sounding record that is anything but.

Charli is one of the definitive pop artists of our time, but in soundtracking a classic story, she never fully transcends our moment.

The best moments of When We All Fall Asleep play firmly into this formula. Inspired by Eilish’s frequent night terrors and lucid dreams, the album juggles dark compulsions with grim eulogies, balancing her feathery vocals with deep, grisly bass.

At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.

It’s the first Wilco album in years to activate, in fits and starts, the band’s long-dormant experimental gene; the first one in years where the songwriting feels as guided by the production as vice versa.

As Epic progresses, her vocals couple with an array of sonics and styles (see: the pedal-steel country saunter of "Save Yourself", the electric punch of "Peace Sign"), though it's the slower, more atmospheric numbers that remain the album's most arresting.

Once you stop trying to label what should be a hook and focus on what is, the ingenuity of each song’s design and the ear-turning nature of every maneuver speaks to Never Hungover Again's inexhaustible quality, the kind of album you can play three times in a row without any part wearing out its welcome.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work.

Breaking the Balls of History has a blurry quality: a jumble of all-too-familiar thoughts that never add up to a breakthrough.

This doesn't eclipse their non-soundtrack work by any stretch of the imagination, and it occasionally lapses into texture that longs for its visual component, but by and large it's an involving listen that telegraphs a sense of emotional and geographic space. It's good to have it all in one place.

In a way, Mastodon operates something like prime-era Metallica, unleashing these huge, blistering tracks that journey over peaks and valleys and ditches and oceans before leaving you spinning.

Saves the World approaches adulthood with unabashed honesty, so you’ll be ready to smash the system a little more gently. And while MUNA’s pop is preoccupied with that greater sense of purpose, it carries its heavy heart to the dancefloor.

She occupies the space between the bouncing, full-bodied bassline and plaintive keyboards with a plainly stated want that would be unthinkable on her introverted early releases. Having come so fully into her own, PinkPantheress still aspires to reach out to you.

The wider canvas and broadened palette reveal the complex human emotions within War’s music, resulting in a breakup record that’s emotionally resonant and curiously hopeful.

Feels like music I've been subconsciously craving without even knowing it exists.

It doesn’t always work—it’s hard to ignore the shortcomings of his singing voice, and the otherwise relatable lyrics on “Cigarettes & Cush” are mired by a trite composition. But from the themes to the production choices to the sequencing, it’s a remarkably well thought out debut from the ascendant 23-year-old MC.

Taken as a whole, The Electric Lady is a convincing argument for the virtues of micromanagement, but some of the most powerful, tender moments come from acknowledging limits.

Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.

Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism.

Resonant Body celebrates 1990s rave anthems with a bittersweet sense of vanished time—the party ended long ago, the dancers shut their eyes against daylight, but balloons still float around the room on inherited breath.

It’s a playful, fantastical response to some serious life changes.

The intimate nature of Has God Seen My Shadow? thus illuminates those qualities that often get overlooked in Lanegan’s high-profile pairings: his grace, tenderness, and self-deprecating sense of humour.

At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person.

Roving at will across other genres, Cross is able to wholly remake the horn in his own image.

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

Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring.

The smartly paced set switchbacks between minimalist drum tracks and deeper, more atmospheric house, and it climaxes with two previously unreleased Audion cuts and an interlude.

If you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance.

More than just an autobiographical document or a manifestation of Charli’s impressive work ethic, How I’m Feeling Now is her answer to questions about the viability of music in a crisis. It works better than anyone could have anticipated.

Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic.

Fittingly for a band that’s spent the past few years retooling itself, it takes some time for Queens to shake off the cobwebs and get back to full strength.

New York duo Sepalcure nimbly incorporate current trends but arrive at a sound-- politely mysterious rhythms put to life by haunted vocal samples-- that's familiar and rich.

With Stonechild, Jesca Hoop complicates centuries of feminized folk music by singing about the ugly, violent aspects of motherhood. Stillbirth, spousal abuse, sexism inherited from mother to daughter—all claim vignettes on this record of electro-folk, seeking, much like Love did, to render motherhood in fucking intense terms.

McKenna has a remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships; that may not be an easy sell for the conservative playlists of country radio, but it makes for one of the most accomplished and devastating singer-songwriter albums of the year.

It’s GoldLink’s ability to seem at home in any space that makes Diaspora so coherent, and so specific to him, despite pulling music from all over. He is the anchor.

At heart these are songs about living with the weight of sadness, about the accumulation of severed relationships and missed connections and regrets both big and small. Change all the names and the album can still hit you like a speeding car.

Landwerk No. 3 never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to his records. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room. Listening to Landwerk is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s séance, but luckily, these spirits have a lot to tell us.

In Conflict might not be an autobiography the way you or I would write it, but make no mistake: the deeper you look into it, the deeper Pallett himself stares back at you.

Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression.

This is not an album of passages or movements or suites. It’s best understood and appreciated as a collection of songs, of which there are clear highlights.

Singles is risky, but the strength of the songwriting carries it over.

Never mind the retro-gazing moniker-- The Week That Was is a band you need to hear now.

Wire is continuing to make greatness look easy.

The album's not a step forward so much as a squirm in quicksand.

Blacklisted's accompaniment is roundly excellent and evocative, but Case's voice is what really sells the record.

The true beauty of Clinic is that they have, using a relatively standard rock vocabulary, constructed a truly distinctive, energetic, and magnetically appealing sound.

Whether you treat it as background music, incidental listening, or a two-hour magnum opus, Themes for an Imaginary Film is a well-rounded portrait of a key figure in the American electronic music landscape.

For all its lavish instrumentation and weighty subtext, however, Babelsberg never overwhelms Rhys’ preternatural gift for writing swoon-worthy melodies.

Even at her most damaged, Hauff’s take on noise is nothing short of opulent, and it’s that alternatingly grating and sparkling attention to detail that makes Qualm so exciting. What might at first sound retro turns out to be simply timeless.

One of Oldham’s most complicated albums. ... If you’re left confused or disoriented, that’s exactly Oldham’s point. Welcome, he seems to say, we’ve been waiting for you.

Camp Cope’s windswept punk feels both retro and right now, like Courtney Barnett covering Tigers Jaw covering Ani DiFranco. Their sound is jangly but unpolished, folky but not crunchy. Maq’s voice, decorated with Australian diphthongs, ably meanders from shouty to soft, conjuring an inexplicable mashup of Joe Strummer and Joni Mitchell

Here, as on previous albums, Arthur demonstrates his gift for emotionally direct songwriting, but the specifics often escape his attention.

t's a strangely affecting synthesis of sounds and marks Holy Other's short debut out as a darkly oppressive but ultimately rewarding piece of work.

For the most part, they remain a powerful trio with perfect chemistry, capable of embedding great hooks and marvels of rhythm section athleticism within riff-worshipping hits.

It's remarkably cohesive both in mood and style: energetic but never wanton, bittersweet but never wallowing.

There have been times in James’ career when his knowing smirk threatened to eclipse the music. But here he’s obviously having a genuine blast, and his joy is infectious.

For all the complexity of Stadium, its true genius lies in understatement and how a thousand small sounds build into a larger vision.

The original Superwolf was the product of two loners delighting in how easily those solitudes intertwined. Superwolves’ success, then, is unimaginable without the 16-year hiatus between albums. Both artists needed to wander, to lose themselves, to become strangers again—even if only in their artistic partnership—so they could come back together and find that the rearranged pieces somehow still fit.

The album is more a warm remembrance than a full-blown celebration.

It might not meet the extremely high bar set by his best work, but it’s almost certainly him at his most emotionally vulnerable.