Radical Romantics is essentially a collection of notes on love. Love—whether sexy, overwhelming, or vengeful—links together the recurring motivations of the Fever Ray catalog: curiosity and exploration, family born and chosen, sexual freedom and pleasure.

Catharsis is Stickles' fuel, and The Monitor is a 65-minute endorsement of angst and opposition as the best way to present that combustible sorrow.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound.

Without a lead melody to hone in on, the album’s ever-shifting arrangements can sometimes feel uncertain, like carrying on with a scavenger hunt after forgetting the hiding places. But heard in full, Notes With Attachments’ restlessness sounds more like determination: an insistence on fitting as many ideas into as short a time as possible.

<COPINGMECHANISM> asks us to accept a grungier and more mature Willow, but this maturity feels formulaic and the intimacy feels manufactured, relying on universal tropes of angst instead of her own. Even if the album is generic at times, Willow’s limber vocals surely enchant as she trapezes across pop, punk, metal, and screamo never fully landing on a signature sound.

Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts.

God Said No stands apart from Apollo’s previous releases not only because of its genre experimentation and its stickier choruses, but for its willingness to get ugly.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

Who is William Onyeabor? doesn't provide any answers its own posited question, but the mystery and wonder of the man’s music remains intact.

Tomorrow Was the Golden Age, one of the finest left-field releases of the year, transcends geography, inviting you to close your eyes and build your own richly detailed world.

For longtime followers of the band, Anxiety's Kiss has the feel of a logical endpoint, the latest natural development in an impressive career of progressions.

With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality.

Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.

By some miracle, the 24-track behemoth works on its own. It’s frequently beautiful and shockingly consistent, given the range of artists involved, and almost every artist brings their best efforts.

Because Staples has lost little expressiveness with age, We Get By sounds surprisingly raucous and admirably rough around the edges, especially on the percolating “Anytime.” But these songs are more about the small, quiet spaces where Staples can catch her breath and steel her nerves.

They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled--and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.

Part vibraphone-laden, Chicago-style post-rock, part electronic minimalism, and part pure melodic exploration, Happiness occasionally manages to slip into an immensely blissful groove.

You Are Free is full of arresting, serene beauty, but as an album-- as that quantifiable object-- it has composite failings. Sans a handful of lesser inclusions and tributes, the imaginary, shorter version of You Are Free is flawless.

Burn, Piano Island, Burn balances so perfectly between commercial appeal and untainted creativity that it's as if the band have been digitally inserted atop a mountain no man could conceivably climb.

Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.

Aytche is, for the most part, an easygoing album, but an unsettling undercurrent runs through it as well. The muted thumps and ominous dissonance of “Chopping Wood” play like an ambient riposte to Bitches Brew.

Drug Church’s music has always felt like an extension of their wider community, and nods to peers and influences dot Hygiene’s landscape.

It’s a pleasantly shapeless record, an album of experiments and small upheavals that bring new, occasionally mismatched, textures into her world.

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

Just a few years into her adult life, and only one album into her recording career, Melina Duterte has swept past a milestone many musicians never even get in their sights.

The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.

It's hard to complain too much about such a brighter-day kind of record, and it feels like the perfect album at the perfect time-- released on Election Day, appropriately enough, as the ideal soundtrack for Barack Obama winning the presidency.

While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate.

He made an album as bleak—and funny—as anything he’s ever done, digging deep into his sense of self with the same sardonic wit that made his breakout LP Dark Comedy so impressive. It helps that he’s not entirely alone.

His vantage from Eagle is one of textured ambivalence; his images split and shimmer like double-exposures, immediately releasing an obvious meaning quickly followed by a subtler one that equivocates the first.

It's best to turn off those imaginary filters when you pump Limbo, and just let it be as entertaining as it clearly wants to be.

Throughout Antiphonals, Davachi smooths out recognizable elements until they blur into the sonic landscape. Compared to the orchestral ensemble recordings of earlier albums like 2018’s Gave in Rest, these eight songs sound subdued and solitary. However, there are moments when individual instruments receive a moment in the spotlight.

Her work is a testament to the power of even the quietest music to help us feel things deeply, an experience that lasts for a few minutes that we can return to for a lifetime.

For the more casual, less obsessive listener, it can be a bit of a snooze. The songs are well chosen and certainly revealing, but Dylan and his band play them all pretty much the same, sacrificing any sense of rhythm for stately ambience.

Broken Hearts Club doesn’t stray far from that warm atmosphere, but Syd still makes time for the occasional detour.

Steingarten is a nearly perfect album.

It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.

At 54 minutes, the 18-track record begins to feel a little baggy, its uncharismatic drums and textural familiarity giving Nao’s paragliding voice one job too many. Even when overlong, though, the songs can impress with their breadth.

The band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.

Stay Awake's neither a coda nor a collection of cast-offs or curios. In just over 10 minutes, the EP not only lays out five fresh TNV cuts worthy of any of their LPs, but throws a whole lot more of that "nuance" business all over the place.

Bands like this often aren't lucky enough to find singers this subtle, striking, and strong.

Out My Feelings doesn’t have the rawness of In My Feelings, but its production is impeccable where that one was spotty, and it soars when Boosie reminisces on his pre-rap days or makes statements in line with Black Lives Matter about the murders of unarmed black people by cops.

Midnight is a growth spurt without the usual growing pains. Toledo contributes subtle handiwork throughout, but no studio trickery could replicate Chura’s intensity.

Sirens’ unrelenting nervous abstraction can be difficult to take over 14 songs, but perhaps that’s the point.

Do You Like Rock Music? doesn't fail miserably--which at least might have been more interesting--but disappoints gently.

Small Turn's greatest strength is also its primary flaw; they do this particular sort of downtrodden as well as anybody, but given all they're capable of, it's a shame that they limit themselves to such a small sonic palette. Still, it's yet another curiously strong record from one of today's most interesting bands.

Raise the Roof, also produced by Burnett, is the dark and spacey counterpart to Plant and Krauss’ first release, with covers that span from modern indie-folk band Calexico to early Delta blues musician Geeshie Wiley.

On her confident and intoxicating first full-length, Good at Falling, she lets go of any lingering self-consciousness and makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star.

It can feel like Misty is in danger of spinning out, but for most of the album, what’s so impressive is the subtlety of his control. The band—including frequent collaborators Drew Erickson and Jonathan Wilson, plus a string quartet and eleven orchestra members—play with silvery poise and high drama. The characters may be odious and dissolute, but the way Misty sings about them is delightful.

75 Dollar Bill slyly nudges you beyond the familiar, so that—no matter your record-nerd knowledge—you’ll wind up someplace new.

How To Live uncovers an internal landscape just as wide open, much easier to get to, and even harder to escape from.

It’s not merely a return to their old ways, nor does their long-teased reunion feel like a cynical, nostalgia-fueled cash grab. Instead, the record is a series of reminders of what Mclusky are still capable of—whether that’s melting faces in under a minute with “juan party-system” or the razor’s-edge guitar hammering driving “the digger you deep.”

Given A Vintage Burden's relatively standard space-blues construction, there's sure to be those Charalambides fans who will miss the levitational scope of the group's more free-form transmissions.

What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force. ... Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above.

Even though the 3xLP/2xCD set jumps backward and forward in Stereolab’s timeline, the result is a fairly comprehensive portrait of their development from their initial motorik nihilist assault to the pop molecules of their later work.

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

While his lush harmonies are occasionally quite striking (as on the slow-motion Fleet Foxes pastiche “Butterflies From Monaco”), this tendency leaves lethargic material like “Somerville Demo” feeling especially listless. On an album as rich with the spirit of teenage discovery as Jules, these are forgivable sins.

In comparison to 2016’s Fetish Bones, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a refinement. ... Her lyrics seethe with revelatory clarity.

Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade.

Saint Etienne's best LP since 1994 masterpiece Tiger Bay.

It may not herald another big day coming, but Fade is a thoroughly immersive dusk-to-dawn soundtrack to a dark night's passing.

There’s plenty of low and high end, but none of the gray in-between. It makes for an album that sounds more like backing tracks missing the singer and the song to complete them. If anything, Too Many Voices sounds like it has too few.

The Dream My Bones Dream grapples with memories that aren’t one’s own and tries to find some kernel of wisdom within them. It’s a multilayered, foggy work and one of Ishibashi’s fullest collections to date, showing us how the past can propel us forward.

On Simian Angel, we get a glimpse of something new: something sensitive, probing, and even whimsical.

What makes Nomad instantly compelling is the way it both reflects and celebrates the feeling of a peaceful morning walk.

It’s in these songs—softer and sweeter than anything in Chat Pile’s catalog, gloomier and more foreboding than anything in Pedigo’s—that their mutual empathy radiates strongest.

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.

If there’s a drawback to this psychic dredging, it’s a slightly limited emotional range. Crutchfield frames scenes vividly, yet we rarely feel the weight of the mutual devastation, the perverse thrill of love discarded.

If this album is indeed the beginning of a long, arduous journey of rediscovery and rebirth and other fun ponderous stuff, here's hoping the rest of the trip is more enjoyable than this initial misstep.

Yes, Heavy Light is destructive music, streaked with shrieked lyrics about prey and death, age and tears. But it’s also an inspiring, instructive record, too, where two brutal bands find solidarity and something to celebrate in the darkness. Even if every thought here isn’t complete, Heavy Light is as exciting as either band has ever been.

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.

A strong finish to Tesfaye's first trilogy, providing just enough closure to satisfy, and just enough mystery left to entice us back for the next round.

The versatility on show gives a sheen of adventurousness that isn’t quite backed up by the beat selections—the majority of which feel like safe choices for an artist otherwise known for his accelerated ambitions.

Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs.

By stripping away everything extraneous, Piñeyro has further refined the sound of his invented genre. Deep reggaeton has never sounded deeper.

With regularity on The Car, Turner will begin an idea that he does not finish, or he’ll introduce something totally different just when you start following along. He has become a master of turns of phrases that don’t necessarily cohere but still feel right.

More than his previous records, Lay Low focuses on the clarity that arrives with age and time. You can hear the proof in Chacon’s songwriting, which has sharpened to an impressively minimalist degree.

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

He surveys ideas on wealth and success with a confidence that makes even his most clumsy boasts about not going ham on the ’Gram seem sophisticated. Rap’s biggest winner coolly sustains his biggest losses.

The result is a vision of a prospective future both strange and alluring, a journey through virtual spaces and experimental technologies that, at heart, feels human after all.

A few fatal flaws eclipse all of Rooty's abundant qualities. Basement Jaxx have taken kitsch a few steps too far.

Anyone looking for [an] unpretentious, laidback and solid full-length is hereby invited to check out what's made Kilgour one our most consistent performers for 25 years.

A return to textbook Mekons-- from gracefully shambling country to deep-beating tribal rhythms, by way of good, clean rock 'n roll.

The band have finally mastered the monstrous proportions of their diffuse talents and arranged them in ways that are wholly satisfying and distinctly unique.

Suffice to say, Menomena are a hugely creative band, and with I Am the Fun Blame Monster, they've managed to make an album that's extremely accessible yet entirely unconventional.

Confield promises elegant production, accessibility in moderation, and one of the most enveloping, thought-provoking listening experiences to come forth from leftfield this year.

The result is a collection of songs so taut and concisely resonant as to be psalms.

It's still a potentially alienating album: unnerving when you're not on its aggro wavelength, inviting when you are, and transfixing either way, thanks to the aggregate work of Death Grips' core.

The best songs here are all nearly seven minutes long, but their erratic structures make compelling stages to watch dueling tirades of emotion swarm around one another.

For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug.

Granduciel is a much different vocalist in the live setting than he is on record: more punctuated, less delicate, and even a little less melodic. His soloing, meanwhile, consistently sounds more articulated as he rips into these songs on a tailwind of spontaneous inspiration.

Digga’s self-belief and willingness to raise a middle finger were never in doubt. As he continues to test and flex his talents, his path forward will only become clearer—no matter who’s looking over his shoulder.

For now, Horsegirl aren’t so much carrying the torch as they are keeping the pilot light lit, low and steady.

Even as the music expands in length, it feels more immediately emotionally satisfying than any of Prekop’s previous electronic music.

While hooks abound, WeirdOs also plays as one big, roiling piece. Like the live jams from which it emerged, the album has peaks and valleys, passages of unrelenting intensity followed by space-out cooldowns that offer the slightest moment to breathe.

Bitchin Bajas remain flame-keepers of the sphere where Teutonic poise meets new-age fuzzies, but here they act as patient collaborators instead of scene-stealing spacemen. Still, this seven-headed hydra of head music remains a great ambassador of vibes.