On We Are Always Alone, Portrayal of Guilt find a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. After all, what you consider to be “mood music” depends on whether you’re seeking counterprogramming or a chance to lean into the negative energy outside.

Ultimately, the album’s heady diversity originates in Hval’s malleable voice, which alters style, approach, timber, and tone from one measure to the next.

Cruise Your Illusion holds its ground, but there are sociological elements to Milk Music's story that make the experience of the record even more fun.

The Gossip sound best when flowing through lo-fi constraints: when they don’t have a hi-hat, and the down-tuned guitar is missing string.

You Will Never Be One of Us will live up to the expectations of anyone who’s experienced a Nails album before.

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.

As both look back and a step forward, it serves as a possible gateway album, and more intriguingly, it hints at a new chapter in the band’s chameleonic career through which all their scattered points of reference might operate in beautiful, deadly unison.

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

Sinuous instead of rigid, bloody instead of embalmed, the album refuses to be frozen in time or place. Instead it moves, and moves others with it.

Distracted works so well because it resembles a pop blowout at first, only to pull the shag rug out from under our feet.

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.

Rad Times Xpress IV illuminates how well that music lends itself to more experimental renderings while the songs seemingly engineered to hold onto RTX's denim'n'leather constituency yield surprises.

She's never been as in control of her voice, an incredible instrument that is as strong as it is attractive. And on The Living and the Dead, it's found just the right setting.

Fuckin A is as stupidly (and gloriously) irreverent as its title, all adolescent three-chord slams and snotty, self-championing chants, a seamless extension of the urgency introduced on More Parts Per Million.

Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.

At its best, the album constitutes a ’70s synthesis 50 years in the making—Sabbath meets electric Miles meets, well, Perry himself, who is able here to simultaneously revisit his most fertile period while breaking heretofore unexplored musical ground.

AOI:Bionix takes a belt sander to hip-hop's rougher edges, resulting in refinement, sophistication and undeniable accessibility.

In the end, it's hard to decide if Descended Like Vultures is better or worse than Rogue Wave's debut.

Fun House embodies all Duffy’s gifts at once, bringing their virtuosic talent into their own wheelhouse, on their own terms.

If 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce was an unflinching examination of all that he’d lost, this album answers the question of what remains. ... By looking even further in the rear view, through all the years, all the bars, and all the trauma, he seems to have returned to his original sense of self. Even as he grows, he’s always been exactly who he is supposed to be.

Cast of Thousands rides the borders of sentimentality expertly-- Elbow's new-found hope in unity may seem like idealistic drivel on paper, but is carried off on record with refreshing determination.

But with only two weak tracks and some deletable skits outweighed by a dozen good-to-great cuts, Everywhere at Once is one of the best albums to come from a Solesides alumnus in a long time.

La Increíble Aventura doesn't quite equal the sheer power and range of the band's best albums (2001's Arde, in particular), but it's a powerful statement nonetheless, capturing one of Spain's greatest exports at their darkest and most ferocious.

Ultimately, The Equatorial Stars is direct, engaging and modestly unsettling.

Running With the Hurricane is at its strongest when Camp Cope harness the swirling turmoil and ride it towards self-awareness.

Even though such familiar record-collector reference points abound on Drop, the mischievous melodies and funhouse-mirrored guitar contortions render the results unmistakably Oh Sees.

Ten is half as long as the band's debut and much more focused; each performer shows improved range and sharper talents. And yet, it's still a mixed bag.

King Tuff feels like the couch surfer friend you invite to your house party, the one who's often charming and fun but will not leave until every last drop of beer is gone.

Each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.

Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound.

Charli uncovers a singer-songwriter unafraid to display the cracks in her facade, crafting a striking portrait of what happens when a robot glitches.

Love in Shadow is a testament to perseverance in the face of uncertainty from a bandleader who has lived, worked, and loved by that ideal.

By maintaining their singular aesthetic while venturing into more inviting pop sounds, the weirdest band from Brighton just might have become the smartest.

Now We Can See is bursting with clear-headed explorations of the ways that fear and neuroses hold us back from truly living, winkingly clinical examinations of the rote machinations that consume our lives, and tales of the savagery at the basis of modern existence.

It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers.

An exuberantly echoing starburst of lo-fi twee-pop gone grand.

Mirel Wagner possesses a curious physicality both in her lyrical conjurings and in the confident agility of her guitar playing, which together sound distinctive, specific, and personal even when considered against the decades of acoustic folk music that has come before.

Remembering the Rockets is everything one might expect from an ambitious, reverent band moving to the epicenter of American indie rock: It’s sharper and more purposeful, forged by the pressure of real expectations. The best album of their deep and underappreciated catalog, it also imagines a life after indie rock.

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

An album that confirms Superorganism as that rarest and most wonderful of all musical beasts: a guitar band that reflects the age we are living in by embracing the technological anarchy of the modern world, as well as their own glorious peculiarities.

To say that it is the least compelling of her Dead Oceans records is also to acknowledge the stratospheric standard she has set. Laurel Hell still has wrenching lines and artful melodies, proof that Mitski’s every move operates at a baseline level of virtuosity. The existence of the album in and of itself feels climactic.

Hell Bent, while elemental, sounds sincere and grounded but free--a self-assured debut of principled pop-punk that leaves room for growth.

Musical twists and spasms aside, Origin is the most approachable Liturgy album yet.

The initial, gut-level response to Systemic’s crust-punk take on doom metal is more than enough to hold it aloft. But in engaging with its themes, then contemplating them on repeat listens, Systemic gains a depth that’s rare for a largely instrumental record.

Whatever the Weather dazzles by pulling you towards them with the gentle confidence of an outstretched hand.

Something Worth Waiting For is the sound of a band not tripping into place but clawing its way to the heights of its potential.

Giant Palm is a holistic and distinctly contemporary work, always rooted in the landscape of the present, never coming across as postmodern pastiche. Bock is a deeply idiosyncratic songwriter, and Burton is thoroughly attuned to her peculiarities.

This is instrumental music that embraces its undying capacity for uplift, that shakes off distinctions between bathos and pathos, between mawkish and grave, as it blasts upward.

Their tendency to temper their noise with surprisingly sugary pop hooks and wormy choruses is what keeps these songs from becoming pretentious or tiresome.

The Young Liars EP was as fully realized as all the critics suggested, yet now, TV on the Radio sound like a work in progress. Still, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes shows more strengths than mistakes.

On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.

Big tracks aside, it's an awfully static record, which gives it the kind of high-art "difficulty" that we critics have been known to like.

Stuart Duncan’s fiddle reinforces the small-town details of “Matthew,” about simply trying to make ends meet while enjoying a little bit of joy in between the trials. That’s a theme common to country and folk music, yet on Country Squire Childers invests it with enough insight and immediacy to make those hardships sound perfectly present tense.

Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era--and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

It's fair to say the songs lack the epic sweep of the last couple of albums, but there's still little about Hey Venus! to fault beyond the faint whiff of musical conservatism.

All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

Secret Wars is the first step toward the combination of Oneida's monolithic psych-rock and the numbing riff iteration they've spent so long deriving.

The lust, greed, excess, and anxiety that they grappled with on PAPOTA are still there, but this time, the atmosphere doesn’t feel as friendly or accessible. Splayed out across Bulgarian folk music, trance beats, bruxaria atmospheres, samba, and even bits of nueva ola, Free Spirits feels dialed all the way up.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

Full of tactile details and poetic turns of phrase, the songs on Safe to Run have the feel of road-trip musings, as though she were recording stray thoughts from an all-day drive.

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.

The detail-oriented approach that delighted on the Weather Station’s early records reappears on Loyalty.

Felix da Housecat appears to have approached this record in the same manner as other pop craftsmen like Stephen Merritt or Elvis Costello might: as a tireless effort to mine sub-styles and hooks that populate his detail-oriented visions of the perfect song. While that might translate into a record that fails to sit totally comfortably in either the pop or dance section of the CD shop, it's hardly lacking in compositional substance or high-toned flash.

A Wonderful Beast shows again how Johnson’s voice adds layers of meaning to his music--and how he’s kept that skill fresh by finding new ways to deploy it, and new people to help.

The homespun warmth and tribal rhythms of its predecessor have given way to chilly digital perfection--though plenty of organic elements persist, in a way that's crucial--and the album as a whole is more thematically unified.

Planet Her is a kaleidoscope of pop versatility that benefits greatly from a market that currently values eclecticism. It feels both premeditated and casual, well-crafted yet trenchantly frivolous.

Speed is perhaps the point here; whereas 2017’s Strike a Match punctuated energetic pacing with more meandering tracks, Run Around the Sun barely stops for breath.

At its heart, this music might be all about structure, but it’s also about listening to patterns evolve, celebrating the journey that leads wherever the music wants to go.

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

Tthere’s a palpable narrative here, a sense of loss and stillness, and it reanimates Dalton, if only for a moment. It’s good to have her back.

Malone is an unmistakable presence on his songs, his otherworldly croon an essential element to his genre-hopping sound. Despite the considerable leaps in quality taken on Astroworld, it still doesn’t feel like Scott can muster that level of individuality.

It's not as revealing as Doom's other work, and Danger Mouse's big, Technicolor productions here are a little too trivial to be immortal. But for what it attempts-- which is basically a comedy record with no-joke skills-- it exceeds expectations.

They always sound nostalgic, but the immediacy of Dahlström's vocals yanks all the warm, communal feelings associated with that sound into a present where they're in short supply.

One of the most inspired folk records I have heard in a long time.

It’s hard to point to any weak points on black british music, but a few songs feel less distinct: the breezy Afropop of “S.O.S.” sounds a bit anonymous next to the rest of these songs (admittedly, it also sounds like a potential hit), while the submerged sound of “Tiger Driver ’91” veers uncomfortably close to Drake territory.

The Heart Is a Monster contains no less than six ambient interludes. A whole separate album in that style would've been nice, but even in truncated form the interludes cast Philip Glass-ian shades onto the other songs and suggest that Failure's creativity is far from exhausted.

Young, earnest, eerie, and overzealous, Von is a unique, almost belligerently unaffiliated piece of music that unsubtly blazons its idiosyncrasies.

A superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks.

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.

Show Me How You Disappear is bigger, brighter, cleaner, more ambitious than anything she’s done.

It's a thrilling look inside his brain, a microcosmic version of this peep under the hood that Battles have allowed with Dross Glop, showing off the constituent parts that now make their machine a smooth, assured, and always giddily exciting ride.

Chasny has distilled all of his impulses and obsessions-- slow drones and brisk picking, solemn mumbles and cheery riffs, ponderous lyrics, and ruminative instrumentals-- into 43 muted, marvelous minutes.

Takeshi, Atsuo, and Wata have reflected abstract magic on W. Like a port in a storm, the foundations may occasionally shake, but, for the duration of the record, it feels like the safest place to hide.

Rainsbury, Bailey, and Law showed long ago that they could draw a crowd with a bold gesture, but Seabed's appeal after multiple listens is in its details.

Carousel Waltz drives a pretty flat road, without the peaks and valleys of their previous work, but that suits the grounded emotions and realizations they're addressing, skirting the line between the unaffected and mundane.

Sure, there's no avoiding the fact that some of these songs are appearing for the third time. The nagging "what now?" question isn't going away. But it can be filed away for later.

If the listener isn't eventually caught in swoons, at the least he will respect the degree of Lerche's refined artifice.

Forget Yourself is no small resurrection, and though it owes a great deal to The Church's traditionalism, that's nothing to apologize for.

The Omnichord Real Book is no less assertive, yet feels energized by grace and understanding.

This time they’re turning abrasive guitar chords and the dim roar of shoegaze feedback into weighted blankets that salve. The cacophony is consistent, but Robber Robber prove they know how to navigate it with a controlled burn.

If there’s a way in which UZU falls short of the band’s debut, it’s in the recording itself, which is a bit hazier this time out and consequently robs the music of some of the direct, visceral power it had on Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. That said, the songs and performances are good enough that it nearly doesn’t matter.

Each of these tracks is indeed summery in its own way, as is most of There’s a Dream. But there’s one thing that neither this collection nor Hazlewood ever forgets: The brightest sun always casts the darkest shade.

Beside Myself is dramatic and daring, the agreeably messy sound of the kind of radical freedom that might not change our sinking world but can liberate the willing mind.

Another very good album from a band that consistently turns out good work while charting its own path.

The results make for an inspired evolution of his sound, with Blake occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror as he moves in a new direction.

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.

On No Shouts, No Calls, the Krautrock-esque sonics of the band's last album have been fused with The Power Out's flair for continental pop, but it's the guitars that sing loudest.