The works are raw and technically poor, but the bitterness and hatred they express is overwhelming, illustrating how base feeling, when expressed with such belief, can overcome any window dressing put up around it.

It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music.

He effortlessly squeezes so many ideas into its barely-there, four-minute frame, it's easy to wish he'd settle in and record an entire album of such quietly masterful pastoral mood-setting.

Over time, the album’s subtle ambition becomes impossible to miss.

On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

Not every intuition bears fruit, but more and more it is becoming clear that the iconoclastic rapper’s impulses are to be trusted.

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

At its best moments, the debut sounds like an A.V. club president's wet dream, unabashedly nerdy and technically proficient. Sadly though, the record is peppered with aesthetically dubious nu-rave moments, making LOTP sound less like sympathetic revenging nerds and more like party-crazed dude-bros who just happen to own synths.

It sounds quite good, another weird and sloppy record from a guy who released a lot of them. And hearing it again with all the fantastic music that surrounded it, music that further cements Dylan’s Bootleg Series as one of the most important archival projects in modern pop history, it remains a beguiling artifact.

Set Yourself on Fire is about breaking up and breaking down, and as such the album feels wontedly cathartic, like the moments right after you hit your emotional nadir and start getting your shit together. Stars handle the mood delicately with few slip-ups; my only complaint is that they never handle much of anything else.

While the execution has at times wavered over the years, Allas Sak finds the band fully re-engaged in the sound that it has staked out over the past decade--performing music that’s still as beautiful, optimistic, strange, and singular as ever.

Rumors buffs away some of the rougher edges that made her so much more compelling than so many of Nashville’s aspiring singer-songwriters. Those albums made the fight sound worthwhile, but there’s too little fight in these songs.

Damaged is lovely but dull in spots, lacking the fuck-all adventurousness of previous albums.

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

Evergreen is pristine and light, as indebted to Soccer Mommy’s early sound as it is to the restorative effects of nature.

For the sisters' part, their voices are steadier now, and richer.

Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record.

Post-War isn't perfect, but it's all the more listenable for that fact.

Ultimately, there are too many wonderful moments here to deem it anything less than a beautiful record, but armchair producers might find themselves similarly wishing for less fat.

Ruff Draft still feels like a limited-edition collectors-only curiosity.

Into the Light is the kind of record that requires rapt attention, best enjoyed in still solitude. But even as Anderson’s instrument simmers, it still reaches for the great beyond, and she makes you ache to reach along with it.

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.

Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.

Small Medium Large might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter. At the very least, it represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community that, for a decade now, has only moved from strength to strength.

This is road trip music for the new normal. Yet you might also hope the widespread devastation on the West Coast would inspire something more substantial than a strong offering by an artist coming up on 30 years of dauntless consistency. It’s hard to shake the feeling this porous music can soak up any context in which it’s presented.

Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics.

After an hour of getting your heartstrings tugged with such intense proficiency, You Are There starts to feel no less egregiously manipulative than hearing Celine belt out "My Heart Will Go On" for the thousandth time in a Vegas ballroom.

The Sparks catalog does not lack for unpleasant characters or situations, but existential anxiety rarely comes through this overtly.

Where Bloodroot bristled with bright, dissonant clusters, Ultraviolet is consonant and warm, with steady rhythms and reassuring harmonies. It is a spring rain rather than a freak hailstorm.

What Tall Tales lacks in razzle-dazzle it makes up for with risky maneuvers, particularly Yorke’s in the vocal booth.

This is joyful music with a spirit of self-preservation at its core.

Fortunately, Winehouse has been blessed by a brassy voice that can transform even mundane sentiments into powerful statements.

Why Make Sense? is probably the fourth-best Hot Chip album. But that’s not necessarily a knock, because their fourth-best album is still a very good album.

Although most tracks on Try Me are taut and concise, they’re built around churning, sprawling riffs that feel far larger than the songs that contain them.

Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.

Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.

Like McGregor, he set an impossible bar, and even if he doesn’t clear it, the fall leads to something arresting nonetheless.

Sons of Kemet are most effective when they transpose concept to instrument this way. But despite the group’s skill for conversing between genres and generations, words are Your Queen’s greatest weakness.

His self-produced beats do more talking than his words, filling in emotional blanks with a 4o-esque fogginess and R&B samples that add some longing to his nonstop raunchiness.

Röyksopp are, ultimately, too beautiful to hate and too harmless to really love.

Though the concept of "growth" can border on illusory, the shady, gnarled Black Forest comes on less strong than Pale Young Gentlemen, but is ultimately a lot harder to shake than its charming, if slightly hammy predecessor.

It's not perfect, but it's closer than you'd expect from someone who just a few years ago was a member of a C-list girl group.

Even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection.

The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.

There's a prevailing sense of definite vision, but not one of the product being excessively labored over. Sure, there's craft at work here, but whereas most albums recorded over long periods of time sound weary and defeated in the final analysis, The Noise Made by People is positively vibrant and alive.

They have a knack for hitting the melody where some more experimental outfits might opt for a diverse array of craziness.

Jay Stay Paid's biggest strengths don't lie in its guest roster, impressive as it is. It's the way these reconstructed, reassembled beats so vividly show off how left-field he was willing to get in the service of finding new ways to make a beat knock.

Logos feels familiar and assuring, another affecting dispatch from a corner of indie music that is increasingly starting to seem like one Cox pretty much owns.

Most of the songs on Mind Control are worth a few spins, but nothing on here quite matches “I'll Cut You Down” from Uncle Acid's 2011 album Bloodlust.

Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

Despite the glossy guestlist, The Lost Boy remains Cordae’s show. At 15 songs, it could have used an edit, another voice in the room telling him to tone it down. But still, it’s an assured debut.

It plays like the last record’s darker shadow. As with every DIIV album, it sounds timestamped from the year that punk broke, but the mood is heavier, louder, queasier. The guitars jangle less and brood more.

Staying mostly faithful to the spirit of the originals, Mesmerism aligns itself with Bill Evans’ piano trio albums or Duke Ellington’s collaboration with Max Roach and Charles Mingus on Money Jungle. The sound of the new trio is warm and intimate, putting melody and rhythm at the forefront.

Nothing else on Metamodern is quite so bold or quite so dense as “Turtles All the Way Down”, but Simpson comes across as a man deeply dissatisfied with the easy answers country music typically passes along as wisdom.

At its best, Blume is a testament to the rich aesthetic diversity of London’s jazz scene.

Ode to Joy’s beguiling folk songs are direct and generous, quiet sounds coming from a big room.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

Dilly Dally always sound like they're being crushed throughout Sore, in a good way: They inhabit the dank space beneath dead weight, the place where the good stuff festers.

There are a few moments when the concept's cooler than the result, but in general The Rose Has Teeth's experiments result in frenetic dance tracks doubling as reading lists.

Now a bandleader of a live ensemble rather than a solitary synth programmer, he has opened the door to an entirely different sort of career for himself, one where concerns for the dancefloor shrink away to nothing, and the possibilities of repetition are infinite.

White Roses, My God won’t be for all Low fans, and though—perhaps as with the strangely comparable posthumous SOPHIE album—its reception will certainly be softened by goodwill, it stands alone. Sparhawk releasing a record this immediate and inchoate feels like a gesture of faith, in both listeners’ patience and the musical futures it might yet bloom.

Throughout, the much-improved vocalist Neil McAdams leads plenty of shout-along choruses.

Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

Underworld’s never had trouble getting listeners to their feet. This gorgeously love-drunk finale makes Barbara a record that can bring them to their knees.

he point is that there are lots of people who haven't yet had the occasion to discover Elliott Smith, and ultimately this gives them a chance to scratch away at the bittersweet reality of his work, at how conflicted he sounded, at how bitterly unresolved his career remains, and how every single song still somehow feels like both a confection and a dagger.

Not all of Diamond's new songs go awry. Most just go away, their melodies dissipating, their lyrics flimsy even through those tremendous pipes.

Taken as a whole, Masculin Féminin is a scrapbook made of records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a portrait of a band more multi-dimensional than their Sonic Youth Jr. rep suggested.

Despite the collaboration behind its making, it’s rife with loneliness; Cross tends to sing as though she’s in an infinitely empty room, and Duszynski’s production amplifies the effect. But from that alienation arises a way forward.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.

The record is not always as engaging for the listener as it might like to be. Gengras emphasizes the experience of sound over the process of constructing it.

Rigorous but rarely hermetic, the album is a small testament to his sustained excellence.

Meticulous as the sound palette is throughout, favoring sustained organ chords, close-mic’d guitar strums, and the patter of hand drums, the effect starts to smudge everything together.

A Distant Call is an album with depth of production, more deliberate songwriting, and a commitment to style.

Blumberg asserts that even for the creator, a song can be whatever you need it to be in the moment, a vessel for self-exploration. On&On shows that he’s wholly enmeshed his songwriting and improvisation in a way that feels unique to him.

Too often, she jumps to John Hughes-isan climaxes without laying the foundation that would grant them the proper emotional heft. But Kristi shines as a guitarist and a composer; even the sternest skeptics might be forced to headbang once the power chords crash in on a particularly distorted chorus. Beabadoobee needs to punch up her script, but the set is perfectly lit.

With this album’s unpredictable forms, the trio moves confidently beyond its acuity for cultural synthesis, stepping into stranger, more scintillating territory where unexpected shifts and mercurial sounds are the standard. The beauty of Afternoon X lies in its unusual balance of chaos and calm.

It’s too frantic, too kinetic, and has too many places to be, which over the course of the album makes the essential beauty of Greep’s singing and the featherlight precision of his band feel like a front they’re tiring of holding up. It’s fitting, even artistically admirable, that such strain makes The New Sound’s music an appropriate wingman for characters who struggle to maintain basic human kindness. But it sure makes for an uncomfortable conversation.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

It doesn’t have the teeth that really gnaw into one’s consciousness, lacking the bleeding heart and pleading lyrical hooks of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris. Instead, Out of Range dishes out good feelings and Zen calm—more East than West. These days, we all need that sort of thing, regardless of your stance on sound baths.

The ultimate compliment for Life Under the Gun wasn’t “catchy,” but “punchy,” their songs direct and delivered with a stiff jaw and clenched fist. The exact opposite is true on God Save the Gun; half the time, if a song reaches two minutes, it might as well add a bridge that gets it to three.

On occasion the music feels market-tested, straddling a few too many demographics at once—chords and vibes still take precedence over ideas.

It is a record that is whimsical and sensual; weird and romantic.

This is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.

Bound Stems have the rarefied ability to make that mess sound gorgeous, as if all were in its right place even when it's held together by chewing gum in some spots.

Where Stetson’s solo albums use dread and paranoia to undercut his careful attention to post-rock’s sense of limitless possibility, Hereditary feeds off of his darkest impulses.

An unusual mixture of hard funk and soft pop, like Zapp and Burt Bacharach stuck in an elevator together, Cole's is a sly, jubilant sound; it makes good use of the way funk also thrives upon a sense of wrongness, a screw-faced delight at things gone awry.

Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.

The group could have delivered 10 variations on “Clearest Blue” and made (relative) bank. Instead, they let their influences sprawl widely. ... Better yet, they finally build on the darker parts of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe as they excavate their own career.

Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game.

The album exists so thoroughly in the moment that it winds up obliterating the group’s fetishization of the past and just delivers pure, uncut rock’n’roll fun.

The ceaseless lull of her voice accounts for the record’s ambient feel, but it also makes She Walks in Beauty seem like an actual poetry reading that drags on for a quarter hour too long.

If not all of Lullaby’s fusion experiments succeed, there’s enough inspired alchemy here to earn Plant the right to bring it on home.

The cumulative effect of Shut Up I Am Dreaming surpasses "I'll Believe in Anything"'s ostensible perfection. That's a brilliant song, yes, but this a brilliant album, ballooning with those sorts of moments on repeat.

Vol. 2 proves there’s more than enough country funk out there to fill a good Vol. 3.

There was already a disarming openness to epic, and the best covers find new horizons in these songs still.

For an album where most tracks don’t extend past three minutes, and from a band with such a breakneck spirit, Visitor feels a little too languid.