Restraint, patience, trust: time and again they make GOLD sound like an incredibly wise record.

The album’s final stretch encapsulates its elaborate brilliance.

For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.

For the most part, Congleton doesn’t push Mogwai anywhere they weren’t already heading, but in its home stretch, The Bad Fire proves this band of steely veterans can still disarm you by opening up surprising new dimensions to their sound.

Shygirl’s ability to cook cutesy, juvenile references into grown and sexy club candy shines on “Wifey Riddim.” Its vintage lunchroom table production, evoking Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” or Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” gets a refreshing update with the addition of hip-rocking Jersey club breakdowns.

While not as pristine as the self-titled, their debut record for Epitaph is much denser, often overwhelming.

This dense, claustrophobic album is discomfitingly of the moment: Sudan’s characters sprint through these songs as though movement is a survival tactic, a way to push forward as the world presses down harder than ever.

Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck's best records. It's the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines.

Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.

Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus.

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.

While Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.

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.

The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.

In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives.

Some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize.

Despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs.

It’s more of a slow burn and a slight step backward from Liquid Spirit’s dynamic nature. The results are nice, but with too few standouts, Alley breezes by.

These songs rip and burst and go.

Getting forcibly pinned down in her personal cycle of attack and retreat is a dark, visceral, utterly compelling thrill.

What keeps many listeners coming back to Hauschildt’s records is precisely the promise that each album will sound practically interchangeable with the one that came before--just, perhaps, marginally better. On both of those counts, Strands succeeds, yet it also marks a shift in tone: At just eight tracks and 43 minutes long, it is noticeably more restrained.

Deep Politics, their latest, is among their richest, most expansive offerings to date.

At first listen, Public Strain is impenetrably cold. But deep down, beneath the blizzard of noise and hiss, something's burning.

For all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close.

A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream--darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled--is a fine monument to the nation’s despair.

In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn.

The move toward emotional exorcism on The Art of Forgetting is nearly as startling as Rose’s previous stylistic pivots. ... But individual songs, as carefully articulated as they are, tend to get swallowed up by the overarching psychological thrust of The Art of Forgetting: This is a mood piece capturing a specific frame of mind, even a particular era.

Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads.

Cold Spring is miles from epic or strained, and it's comfortable with its imbalance.

Holiday Destination is compellingly bleak, but Shah’s defiance and willingness connect the dots to make it hopeful.

Fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

It’s a raw performance and a gleaming example of the album’s ethos: There’s no element Shamir isn’t willing to try on. By collapsing genre boundaries and molding them into his own homespun image, he’s made an unconventional pop album entirely on his own terms.

Nursing wounds while simultaneously trying to put her problems to scale, Tudzin writes unpretentious songs that aim straight for the heart (“I Would Like, Still Love You,” “You Are Not Who You Were”) like the enduring hits of So Jealous.

As referential as Free To Eat can be on its own, there are times when a band notes an influence that completely changes your perception of it.

Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.

Fenced in by the demands of the film, Fussell and Elkington make modesty both a virtue and shortcoming.

n its refusal to adhere to a particular theme or sound, Paris in the Spring comes across as a little diffuse, but when everything locks in, the results are transcendent.

These songs are bright and bold, and although they essentially iterate on the misty dream pop of her previous album, 2023’s & the Charm, the difference feels stark when you return to that album; it sounds positively miniscule in comparison.

Even if you don’t track all the references, Sleaford Mods’ sense of fatigued resignation resonates. UK GRIM is their most varied album to date, but they don’t want to dull the shitstorm’s stench—they’re just here to blow off the steam.

There's power in pauses, silence, and empty space, these songs affirm, and small doesn't have to mean slight.

Screaming Females’ entire existence has been a rare testament to consistency and, despite being five years in the making and inspired by a devastating breakup, Desire Pathway can’t help but be their most consistent album yet.

They’re always the butt of their own jokes, which makes them good company for a late night but also makes these songs hit a little harder the next morning.

Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Liars and Prayers' success is owed as much to the band as its leader, but in the end, there's still no doubt about who's working on whose watch.

I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.

What LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit.

Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way.

None of the tracks are more noteworthy than anything on Sing "Other People", Angels' latest and straightest LP, and the foreshortened format disables development. But Gira's fatherly measuredness is a nice foil to Akron's hyperkinetic mini-opera.

Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career.

Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.

Amelia flits briskly from scene to scene, with just enough musical backing to flesh out the atmosphere: shimmering oceanic drones; subtly driving pulses; dissonant whorls abruptly smoothed into reassuring consonance.

Herbert has outdone himself when it comes to his usual conceptual three-ring circus. But, crucially, this time he's put all that theoretical effort into his most memorable songs.

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

Too many shards of ideas are shoved into the long songs, and Fickeisen’s flash sometimes borders on showmanship, a glaring incongruity for a spartan outfit like Trap Them.

If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful.

The hybridization that made Tool so popular on the radio in the late ’90s has rusted: They are part stoner metal, part prog rock, part mainstream metal, all working in ignorance and opposition to each other. Things do come together a few times. The 15-minute closer “7empest” brings the biggest fireworks from Carey and Jones, the two undoubted stars of the album, adding alluring melody and texture to these bloated epics. But the highlight far and away is “Invincible.”

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.

Cola haven’t reinvented the wheel, but these subtle experiments suggest they still have boundaries to push.

Though Salutations is one of Oberst’s most demanding albums, it’s also one of his least ambitious, even before taking these new arrangements into account.

The Antlers won't hold your hand through Burst Apart, which will inevitably make it more of a grower, but stick around -- it's all the more affecting for how it allows you to pick your own stumbling, lonely path.

Nuclear Daydream sounds placeless, as if striving for universality. At times the music sounds like it could actually achieve that lofty goal; at times it just sounds blanched, drifting into a kind of anonymity.

Just like last time around, Avatar is something for the plebes, the purists, the dabblers, and the old heads all at once-- a crossover in the best sense of the word.

While the palette of sounds Boy Harsher plays with on Careful can seem limited--brisk drum machine loops, oscillating synths, and Matthews’ haunting incantations--the group finds ways to make each song sound distinct.

The artist turns his lens inward on the back half of Guns, resulting in some of his ferocious music yet.

The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent.

Motion Graphics’ contradictions--simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant--make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt.

The music is spare, laser focused on those incandescent gospel melodies that feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on ways to minimally ornament them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and otherwise) audience. Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It shows her power in a different light.

Despite the wide scope of her project, Herndon’s ambitious efforts are appealingly multifaceted and personal, and Platform may turn out to be the most thought-provoking experimental electronic music release of the year.

Tyler, the Creator’s sixth album is impressionistic and emotionally charged, the result of an auteur refining his style and bearing more of his soul than ever before.

While there's rarely been a correlation between the accessibility of a given Fall album and the profile of the label releasing it, the lean, brute-force rockers on Your Future Our Clutter suggest that the Fall might actually be taking this upgrade to Domino seriously.

Swain seems eminently capable of empathy, but most of his time is spent chewing on deeply personal concerns, with the result being that the record can feel a bit hermetic at times. Lucky for him, then, that his personality is sufficiently engaging and his music sufficiently buoyant that we don't mind following him down his private rabbit holes.

While it’s exciting to hear a veteran band sharply change course on the fly, Tera Melos doesn’t always have a grasp on the mundane things like pacing or sequencing that make for a smoother LP experience.

Unquestionably, Gainsborough's sonic ingenuity continues to be his greatest asset; his growth as an artist hinges on accepting that others can't always enjoy his noise as much as he does.

Massive Attack were always equally as good producers as they were curators; it's promising that, as much of their old sound as they've retained, they've kept this as well.

On Ecce Homo, each tiny step reveals the will to run a marathon.

These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.

Goon isn’t an album of layers; what you hear is what you get, which in this case turns out to be something special.

R Plus Seven doesn’t have quite the disembodied weirdness of Replica, but it’s no less accomplished, another intriguing chapter from an artist whose work remains alive with possibility.

For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.

While Imperial Wax Solvent has all the buzzy, crunchy sonic hallmarks of great Fall, it also doesn't quite rank with their highest highs, an admittedly tall order when that includes albums recorded twenty-five years ago by a completely different set of musicians.

The soul of Shabazz Palaces is pairing next-gen sounds with classic brass-tacks show-and-prove emceeing, and Lese Majesty tugs those extremes as far as they've ever been pulled; that it never shows signs of wear speaks to the strength of the bond.

Introduction, Presence doesn’t offer any great reinventions. ... But their understanding of the genre they’re working in—its workings, tropes, and trappings—is so refined that they are able to boil it down to its barest essence, saving catharsis for just the right moment.

The Avalanche wallows, but the realization rather than the anticipation of karmic retribution lends it emotional urgency even as Kinsella works in his familiar modes of meandering melodies, exquisite acoustic arpeggios, and the occasional lapse into cringe-posting that threatens to break the whole spell.

The compositions on Luminol are precarious balancing acts, perched somewhere between the locating sensation of pain and the dislocation of trauma.

Gaze into Smalltown Stardust’s airy arrangements and you might see a reverse image of previous King Tuff records. That was music made for the cold dark of night, or at least a dimly curtained bedroom; this is music made to be heard in the reassuring glow of sunshine.

It’s dirty, smudged music, bitter with the terroir of suffering.

Fur & Gold sounds a little bit too comfortable for its own good. Khan is a great singer, and her band is undoubtedly competent and capable, but the record sounds like it wants to be more than it is.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

The result is oddly refreshing: an artsy, accomplished band turning their second album of the year into a pulpy slasher flick.

His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory.

She has prepared her whole life for the opportunity to challenge the coastal elites for a seat at rap’s table, and Fever is her folding chair.

Let It All In feels lived-in and newly cut from his core.

Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim.

When it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.

This album sounds best in the context of the Hiss Golden Messenger catalog--as a comment on and a celebration of the spiritual and creative toil on the previous albums.