With Doris, Odd Future’s Odysseus is finally back and chasing the ghosts out of his head.

Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.

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

Whether yelping or mumbling, Avey Tare occasionally gets stuck on autopilot, but here he sounds like he’s trying out new things and, crucially, having fun.

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.

While it’s a quieter record than its predecessors, and her ceaseless questions and lacerating self-doubt would seem like the opposite of asserting an artistic identity, Shelley’s absence of imposition only emphasizes her enviable patience and burgeoning tenderness.

Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments.

On 2020, the arrangements are proudly inorganic as they lurch and blast, sputter and break. The long-form structure of the record feels more like a short story collection, and taking it in front-to-back can have an overwhelming, exhausting effect. But unlike the sometimes hopeless characters in his songs, Dawson can wield this glut of information in his favor.

This is an album that sounds invigoratingly abrasive when you're moving and pins you to your seat when you're not, a study in pushing the limits of distortion that works as just plain good club music.

It doesn't matter if Gibbs and Madlib were once considered artists playing to different audiences--united in their uncompromising, independent-as-fuck visions, they put together something hardcore hip-hop heads on both sides should feel.

In its minimalist opacity and Vantablack depths, it’s the polar opposite of Goblin’s playfully neon-hued approach, and it’s in going to that extreme that Yorke has made Suspiria his own.

Bring any baggage you want to this record, and it still returns nothing but warm, airy, low-gimmick pop, peppy, clever, and yes, unpretentious--four guys who listened to some Afro-pop records, picked up a few nice ideas, and then set about making one of the most refreshing and replayable indie records in recent years.

There’s nothing on Dark Times that’s surprising and challenging for Staples but little that detracts from what already works.

He’s made great records before, even exciting and unexpected ones, but never one so comforting and compassionate.

Vagabon concludes as a work of not only personal self-discovery, but evolution in real time.

Yeah Yeah Yeahs spend some of Cool It Down’s sharpest moments citing and deconstructing their influences with refreshing candor. ... But every now and then, her reliable lyrical workhorse hits a brick wall.

The ebb and flow of the disc feels like it's advancing some unknowable plot, always the sign of a well sequenced disc but also the bridge between songs like the lovely 'Mirrorball' and the bluesy (in the get-the-Led-out sense) 'Grounds for Divorce.'

Never merely meager, this project delivers, both when you're waving your orgy-snorkel all blotto on-the-town, and for a soundtrack to serious rumination at your midday desk of harsh reality.

Listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music.

The result is a captivating, dizzying record by a band aware that they can do anything--so they’re doing it all.

Each track is its own study in loneliness, yet each is in communication with the others, like spirit mediums.

From King to a God would be considered a solid effort from most MCs, but it's clear Conway has his aim set higher.

Plastic Bouquet marries their remarkably timeworn voices, entwining threads from country-folk, 1960s British pop, and even rockabilly to stitch a retro flare into their modern lore.

In these songs, that ravenous, sinuous jumble of muscle and gristle swells within Tagaq’s body. It is a fearful presence, but a righteous one. It speaks with a strength that the young girl at that long-ago house party did not yet know how to wield. The violence this being threatens is the protective kind. But there is room, too, for tenderness.

Disrespectful sounds like the rap equivalent of a cartoon tornado, which is what makes it hard to dismiss them as a novelty act or an organically grown version of People Just Do Nothing’s hapless Kurupt FM crew.

Uplifting music can tend to grate rather than inspire, but Koffee hits a satisfying midpoint, free of didacticism and never forced; she’s simply inviting us into her world.

A record that's in the same league as Homework or Discovery.

Much of the album charms. What’s missing, despite a team that includes some of pop’s most sought-after collaborators, are memorable songs that stand up to the sky-high bar the Chicks set for themselves all those years ago. Without a clear target, their formerly devastating blows just don’t quite land the same way.

Persona lacked the natural fluidity and chicness of their best music. Those problems aren’t exactly mitigated here, since most of those songs appear on this album too, but within this new context, they feel like a flashback before the saga continues. Many of the new songs are better about balancing Easter eggs for day-ones with new entry points for more casual listeners.

Just as this album highlights Williams’ most existentially despondent musings to date, it is also the most fizzy record Paramore have ever recorded.

If you're down with the diversity and can sit still while the band tears through every idea it has left, Wild Mountain Nation is a revelation from beginning to end.

Blue Rider is short--eight songs, 35 minutes--but it slows everything down around it while's playing, coaxing half-formed feelings out of their corners and giving them space to exist.

There’s plenty to unpack here, as there is with all of Jaar’s work, but if you wanted to simplify things you could call 2012 - 2017 his house album, in that Jaar imposes upon himself the conventions and requirements of traditional house music.

On Odds Against Tomorrow he has found a way to settle down without settling into complacency. The album retains the core elements of his best work, and his restless, postmodern exploration of the American lexicon, while refining what makes those qualities potent. Refusing to repeat himself, he takes tradition as a living thing, blazing new trails to familiar vistas.

His raps land firmly within the established pockets of beats, but each song is so distinct and JPEG’s writing is so fluid and witty that no two moments within the album’s humid atmosphere sound the same.

Goodnight Summerland displays a fresh focus and intention. Here, Deland shifts toward a stripped-back, folksier sound, highlighting her gossamer voice and newfound observations about the ache of grief and the passage of time.

The songs on Who's the Clown fittingly sound like an extension of Abrams’ world: verbose, conversational, unfiltered. .... But the album falters in its second half, where Hobert uses specificity as a crutch, struggling to transcend the biographical details of her own, quite exceptional, life.

Parallax feels like a more complete work than any other Atlas Sound record, with the differences between the songs less distinct and everything flowing together more naturally.

With Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater achieve not only their grandest statement to date, but their most grounded as well.

It's this sense that nothing is (seemingly) too private for him to share in a song that makes Pale Green Ghosts so potent and, ultimately, accessible

That Lodestar exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it is so exquisitely done is a small blessing on top.

Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.

Japan had to go through the period of growth that resulted in Quiet Life, straining against the limits of their abilities as songwriters and musicians in order to move beyond them. As heard in the context of the group’s history, this album, however imperfect, feels rich with possibility and promise.

Against all odds, they’ve become one of the most interesting indie rock bands working, and the stately beauty of Familiars is the latest satisfying effort from a band that continues to reward those listeners who give them the attention their elegant, secretly weird music deserves.

Illegal Moves is just as powerful a statement about the urgency of the times and the reactions we should all be having, because being entertained doesn’t have to mean being disengaged. That Sunwatchers make their calls to arms sound so fun doesn’t diminish that power--in fact, it just might be the most important part.

A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.

What makes this record so refreshing is its unabashed ambition, the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory. And the gamble more than pays off.

Fans of big, stadium-swinging hooks might find Sister Cities a sparser, more introspective affair than they prefer, but the band seems okay with leaving South Philly basements behind and seeing more of the world.

Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before.

She’ll employ of-the-moment producers to add current touches to her tracks, but the way she uses them on Caution results in her fine-tuning her aesthetic, not bending to current playlist-friendly trends.

L.W. resembles K.G. after three additional months of lockdown: It’s more antsy, more angry, and less concerned about letting its gut hang out, allowing the motorik acid-folk of “Static Electricity” to gallop toward the six-minute mark in a blaze of microtonal shredding. But if the songs are looser, the targets are more precise.

It remains a fascinatingly ambivalent note to finish on for one of the most influential indie rock bands of their era, and this reissue, while not necessarily better than the original 1999 release, provides enough context to understand its odd bathos in a new way. It was the album that brought Pavement full circle: dressed for success, but never quite sure if they wanted the job.

Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here.

Mostly, Field Report sounds a lot like his old band.

Kempner grounds Duterte’s dreamy abstraction in gritty reality, creating a dissonance that works best when it mirrors the album’s treatment of the darker edges of relationships. At times, though, the collaboration limits these artists’ strengths.

I Know I’m Funny haha is full of this delicious texture. It might come off a little shallow, but it reveals its great depth at its own unconcerned pace. It’s probably one of the best records of the year.

Growing up to the world as Fela Kuti’s son will naturally always cast something of a shadow over Seun Kuti’s music, but Black Times comes across as both a respectful reminder of his legacy and a demonstration of Kuti’s own fresh talent.

The album’s sound is sleek and full of grand, sweeping climaxes that occasionally oversell the songwriting. But if Unfollow the Rules is sometimes in want of a unifying idea or theme, Wainwright’s dreamy voice provides a throughline.

The cartoonish brutality of the music is fun as hell, and since Korvette is most often mocking himself during Honeys, it doesn't come off as hectoring.

The Magic Place, her first album for Asthmatic Kitty, stands above her earlier work in virtually every way.

While previous albums gave a studio sheen to the noise, Dilate has a looser, more spontaneous feel to it.

Fruit Bats seem to be further embracing modernity and sounding great doing it.

The Coast is Never Clear sounds a lot like its predecessor, but it lacks the originality and heartfelt delivery that won When Your Heartstrings Break a constant presence in so many disc players a couple summers back.

Callahan's work seems of its time and makes you aware of the artist behind it. And Rough Travel, though ultimately only for established fans, turns out to be a very good snapshot of where that artist's music stood at the end of the last decade.

Where club culture mythologizes a circuit of endless nights and after-parties, Passed Me By suggests physical and spiritual exhaustion, Sisyphus collapsing beneath the dead-eyed twinkle of the disco ball.

Wilderness of Mirrors isn't groundbreaking in general, but it is new territory for the often-cerebral English, and he puts an engaging, commanding stamp on this style of ambient overdrive hymn.

Africa Express keeps it to a bite-sized 41 minutes, and every one of them includes something to savor.

Knowing that this is Dre's finale, there's a pleasant melancholy that frames Compton, and with the music in our ears, acknowledging that maybe that's for the best.

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.

Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.

Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever. Rotations is also richly emotional.

Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests--but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.

Big Bad... is yet another example of his continued career elevation, signaling what is possible if you stick to your guns while caring little for what others think.

The first dozen times through, I had trouble making sense of the overloaded midrange and upper register: the horns, guitars, call-and-response vocals, and insistent shakers and maracas. But eventually, it all settles into place, yielding both a rich diversity of complementary styles.

Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else.

They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet.

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

Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendor.

Her tracks might be improvised or labored upon. They feel both sui generis and tossed off. You can hear her hand, and it makes you wonder, and in that way her recordings are empathy machines. They warm and flatter as they fill the air around you, silk scarves just out of reach.

Where 925 was thrillingly inventive, but often kept the listener at a cautious remove, Anywhere But Here uses deeply felt storytelling and intimate vocals to usher us much closer.

The album burns brightest on a pair of songs in which Marea recognizes the limits of his grace in the face of emotionally unavailable lovers.

Though he’s preternaturally funny and frequently debonair, only a portion of these songs approach the vim and vigor of his generation-defining anthems.

Not only are the dimensions bigger than ever, but the songwriting’s more varied.

Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career.

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

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.

At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet.

He gives himself over to memory’s full sway, until the project feels a little like thumbing through a souvenir album, Chapman singing about the postcards that help remind him of places held dear.

Their most focused and fully realized effort yet-- an album that adds an imperial hugeness to the teen noir and garage-y psychedelia of their past efforts-- and one of the better pop records we've heard this year.

JT plays like an album of first takes. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son.

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.

King of Jeans successfully consolidates these two strengths, harnessing the earlier record's sometimes directionless fire-extinguisher splatter into shake-appealing rock action, and cohering Korvette's ramblings into a more complete picture of wage-slave misanthropy and alpha-male inadequacy.

On their self-titled third album, MUNA step fully into their role as pop stars and mentors, offering gentle instructions for falling in love, dusting yourself off, and joyfully living your truth.

Nighttime Stories plays like one seamless expression—its 50-minute runtime passes remarkably quickly—but it’s a statement heavy with meaning and memories.

With unexpected production and left-field samples, Rodriguez’s album is powered by a heady rawness that bucks the trend for theatrical concepts in today’s electronic pop nonconformists, producing epiphanies like hot stones spat from a fire. You could say it is as addictive as modern love.

As it stands, Good Things feels like hopping into a time machine, dialing it to 40 years ago, then forgetting to bring a stack of recent 12" singles with you to completely blow 1970's mind.

Time Off’s biggest asset is its ease. There’s a real sense, listening to these tracks, that everything could be a little simpler if we all stopped trying so hard.

My Days of 58 is a weird Bill Callahan album, and a good one.