Mettavolution reassures that for as long as they’re around, Rodrigo y Gabriela will be echoing their influences as only they can.

Her songs, stuffed with information and emotion, act as an extended reminder to appreciate the gentler things the world has to offer--proof that even in the tremors of everyday life at its most confusing, kindness, calm, and empathy still have ample room to grow.

CrasH Talk might not have the mean-mugging raps of Blank Face LP or the weed-infused smoker anthems of Habits & Contradictions, but it’s comforting, like diving into the fifth or sixth season of your favorite network sitcom.

It’s the vocals that provide the color. Nate chops them like confetti, stretches them like taffy, explores every crevice of their contours. ... It sounds complicated--from a technical standpoint, it is complicated--but the results are surprisingly easy on the ear.

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.

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

In League With Dragons is light on mythical beasts; only four songs here come from the original wizard musical Darnielle was writing. Instead, he fills the record with the subjects of his own escapist fantasies. ... The record occasionally delves into the arcane, as Mountain Goats records can.

The best moments all come courtesy of his guests. ... While Rich the Kid busily squanders goodwill, what a more engrossing rapper might have made of it.

That Marina--the lyricist who wasn’t afraid to detail the taste of toothpaste on a lover’s tongue, the vocalist who wasn’t afraid to punctuate a sentence with a feral shriek--has gone missing. The temptation of safe is undeniable, but mononyms are earned by embracing risk.

Foxygen have perpetually raised the question: Do they really mean it? On Seeing Other People, they drop the act and give it to you straight: If you are getting tired of Foxygen, well, they are, too.

Finn has already built a sturdy legacy, but his solo records yield their own durable pleasures: I Need A New War shines like a beacon of light in a dark time.

At its best, its songs are serviceable bangers to nod off in the club to; at its worst, it’s a collection of strange admissions that, thanks to Nav’s affinity for taking himself too seriously, come off cringe-worthy.

It’s a shame to see a band with such clear skill and experimental prowess release an album as doltish as Fishing for Fishies, especially considering that, not so long ago, they managed to release five good albums in a single year. There is very little joy involved in listening to these nine songs.

The spirit of Southern California, and Lu’s subtle experiments with its musical tropes, form the sly engine of Blood, her first full-length album; with an ear still to the elegantly eerie avant-classical compositions of her past, and the chamber-folk philosophizing that anointed Church, she goes more volubly, more unmistakably Los Angeles with the record.

The best moments on this record arrive when Harding’s playful approach to words syncs up with her playful approach to sound. The logic driving the end result may remain hidden, but its allure is undeniable.

Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost.

Some of these big numbers, however, rely on cheesy tropes that lack a degree of empathy. ... That’s not to say that Bird isn’t powerful in more vulnerable moments.

Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience.

When left to his own devices—as on the chopped-and-screwed “Roll” and the Jersey club-indebted “Pure Gold”--Girl Unit rests on formerly niche sounds that have been adopted by more mainstream-facing artists.

Hornsby plays with elegance, at ease with both his traces of hipness and essential squareness. It's a confidence that arrives with both comfort and age and it's what unifies all the disparate elements of Absolute Zero, shaping the album into a testament to the full range of Hornsby’s gifts.

SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.

He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows.

Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too.

Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping.

Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct.

As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia.

Homecoming is an important document of those [Coachella] performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity.

Despite the occasional nod to rock formalism, All Time Present achieves a scope only hinted at on Forsyth’s previous full-lengths.

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.

Fontaines D.C. are fueled by neither IDLES revolutionary fervor nor Shame’s festering disgust. They’re not raging against the current state of affairs as much as lamenting the local communities and culture in danger of being steamrolled by the march of modernity. As such, Fontaines D.C. are very much a post-punk band reclaiming a certain pre-punk innocence.

On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.

While Sulphur English is their least welcoming album, it is also their most rewarding. ... They’ve delivered a cohesive vision of internal destruction, all the more explosive for everything they’ve left behind.

The arrangements on PERSONA are busy and convoluted, and many lyrical highlights are buried in meta, self-referential schlock rock. ... PERSONA is not a failure, but it’s tough to call it a triumph.

Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years.

In other words, it’s strong and considered enough to mean big things to more people than just Pierce. Even the best Drums albums surround a few highlights with filler, though, and Brutalism falls even harder into this pattern.

The results are as reassuring as the memory of your favorite counselor picking up a weather-beaten acoustic guitar by the light of the campfire.

Thirty years in, the Chemical Brothers are still digging their own purely escapist sonic rabbit holes. At a time of great cultural and global insecurity, there's never been a more tempting time to get lost in their sensory overload.

This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds.

Many of the songs on The Quanta Series were released in previous years as singles. Sequenced into an LP, they carry more dramatic weight.

It’s neither bootstrapping origin stories nor rock’n’roll fantasies so much as the grim realities facing Moctar and millions of others around the world that give Ilana its considerable power.

Its mystery isn’t a gimmick, nor a playful riddle to be solved, but an abstraction awaiting interpretation.

Because she never fully commits to one mood or genre, it is difficult to feel fully immersed. Gika’s songwriting is sometimes too vague to resonate emotionally, and her delivery, though gorgeous, never feels fully unencumbered.

Free Spirit isn’t the coming of age album Khalid intended it to be, though in his nascent adulthood he has mastered something. Unfortunately, it’s the art of being innocuous.

It’s the rare occasion that Hermansen’s ambient interests align so neatly with his disco instincts--a small step, perhaps, toward a new era in his exploration.

If it seems unfair to judge Hyperion’s weaknesses against the work of Lévy’s supposed peers, it’s equally frustrating that he hasn’t yet given us a real idea of who he is as an artist.

Dog Whistle functions best when Show Me the Body are able to capture the vitality of their live sets, as well as the sheer noisiness of New York itself.

Rarely do the Mekons get quite as loose as they do on Deserted, alternating between arid, nocturnal atmosphere that seems to emanate from Susie Honeyman’s fiddle and moments of near hysteria, as though their sun-baked brains have gone haywire. These songs take their time to wander about, even getting lost in the vast expanse--sometimes a little too lost.

Already in possession of telekinetic players and a distinctive fusion of indie-rock hooks and jam-band dexterity, Garcia Peoples grow more intriguing as they step out of the shadows of their inspirations.

Too urgent to ignore, too pretentious to easily love, The Seduction of Kansas winds up feeling both high-concept and kind of hollow, whether inherently or in natural reflection of its subject matter.

Even for demos, they’re surprisingly rough, in a way that only sometimes breeds intimacy; most often, he bashes around on an acoustic guitar, both his verve and falsetto well into the red. Though Bowie’s folk period is ignored today by all but his diehards, it does offer some insight into the man’s mind, and Keyhole adds several moments to that discussion.

In the Shape of a Storm is an album’s worth of that feeling. In grief many cloak themselves in distractions, or hide away entirely: Jurado treats it as an invitation to look closer, feel deeper.

Morbid Stuff is 37 minutes inside a sweaty venue process your worst feelings when a half-assed meltdown just won’t cut it.

Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.

There is still something magnificent about what Gibbons, Penderecki, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra have accomplished here: They have managed to make the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” feel dark, even dangerous.

The most diverse and ambitious recording to appear under the Efdemin name, incorporating not just standard electronic kit but also dulcimer, sing-drum, hurdy-gurdy, and guitars.

Not only is the trop-house she's mocking low-hanging fruit, but throughout Ancestor Boy, it's never clear where precisely she's coming from, literally or artistically. Her perspective is blandly adrift, tethered to neither a point of origin nor a destination.

The new record feels less like a collection of proper songs than a series of evolutionary steps as the band unmoors itself from its taut rhythmic foundation to drift further out into the chop, and not always with a set destination in mind. It’s the sort of record where each successive track seems to embellish ideas introduced by its immediate predecessor.

The music has retained its urgent physicality. Still, it’s probably for the best that the Faint continue working at their recent leisurely pace of about an album every half decade, because this band burns through their ideas fast.

The Same but by Different Means is surprisingly seamless for a 22-track record. Like a Ouija board session, each track here feels part of a collective effort to access a realm outside our own. Sometimes, it leads to sustained moments of connection, like the radiant tropicalia sunshower of “Curtain of Rain.” At others, it yields sudden, surprising moments of rapture, like the beautiful melancholic chorus of “Hard to Say Bye.”

Her strongest, most distilled release. The playlistification of mainstream music has not hindered this refreshingly concise collection of pop, rap, and ’90s R&B resilience.

Within the course of a single album, Gaye could come off as conscious, pensive, concerned, driven, committed, topical, tough, sexy, urbane, hypnotic, tortured, troubled, hip, religious, defiant, disillusioned, high-flying, defiant, blunted, and compassionate.

A decade after making her solo debut, Stevenson has found her sweet spot as a singer-songwriter.

Toeing the line between artful restraint and playing it safe can be difficult, and despite the moments where Lion Babe gets it right, they have a long way to go to set the mood they’re so intent on finding.

At two hours long, The State Between Us ought to waver in focus or intensity, but Herbert has never sounded more at home. Safe in the knowledge that most British people, for better or worse, can’t help but engage with the subject, he taps into a small, honest hope that would be inexplicable as a thinkpiece.

There’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works.

Mise En Abyme hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia.

Floating Points keeps the mood consistent. Few selections move faster than a resting heartbeat, but they nevertheless feel dramatic.

Deforming Lobes’ closest antecedent would be The Who’s original, equally compact Live at Leeds, where the purpose is less about highlighting the set-list staples than showcasing the band in their most primal, exploratory state.

Somehow, they’ve retained all the messy spirit of the vintage classic rock they venerate. That It’s Real feels so exciting and alive only shows how thoroughly they’ve absorbed the lessons they’ve learned.

The best moments of When We All Fall Asleep play firmly into this formula. Inspired by Eilish’s frequent night terrors and lucid dreams, the album juggles dark compulsions with grim eulogies, balancing her feathery vocals with deep, grisly bass.

Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.

After the atmospheric first track, the second shifts toward modern classical, centering on an uncertain harp theme that develops as McCaughan gusts in low, faintly jazzy harmonies. The third movement descends into a tense, quiet dark-ambient realm: as synth tones curl up like scraped metal and animalistic noises whisper from the darkness, harp notes drop and ring like silver pins. And in the last movement, a psych-rock interlude inflates to epic proportions.

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

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.

Somehow this totem of influences works, stacked one atop another in a monument to the newly refocused Strand of Oaks.

It’s not all doom and gloom, however, and Guy expertly balances the record’s more somber offerings with a handful of four-on-the-floor, heat-seeking anthems.

Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest, and in its controlled weirdness lies real liberation.

Jenny Lewis has reached her troubadour phase. She’s telling tales like never before, singing live in the studio while charismatically leading a band that includes elder statesmen like Benmont Tench and Don Was, not to mention cameos from Ringo Starr, Beck, and Ryan Adams (recorded before the allegations against him emerged).

A pleasantly surprising return on My Finest Work Yet, his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time.

Putting aside musical intricacies, Inside the Rose just sounds amazing, conjuring a lustrous, lucid world shaken by distant explosions. The drones of strings, pianos, and electronics are offset by bright accents of tuned percussion, sustaining an atmosphere of anticipation and wonder.

Yanya’s songs reflect a woman who’s uncertain of how much of herself to reveal to the world. That is both the allure of Miss Universe and what augurs even brighter things to come.

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.

Let’s Try the After is a pleasant Andes Creme de Menthe following the feast that was Hug of Thunder, as Broken Social Scene tackle a few of their distinct modes—propulsive and tricky instrumental rock, explosive guitar-hero theatrics, slow-burning balladry—in capable, familiar fashion. That familiarity isn’t necessarily a bad thing, especially if you’re typically into what Broken Social Scene bring to the table.

Nearly every track on LP3 pushes out toward the five-minute mark, and where previous American Football songs were internal journeys, this album’s travel to new vistas in all directions.

ATAXIA has moments of all three, running the gamut across funk, feverish entertainment, and frustratingly dry-eyed experiments. Throughout, however, it remains startlingly original—a powerful piece of work from a sonic adventurer of rare intellectual clarity.

Panorama skillfully and subtly creeps towards resonance rather than catharsis, an approach that can make even their own colleagues sound like they’re trying to cheat towards the big release. Even when La Dispute rock, they do so like they’re trying to tiptoe on a frozen pond.

When asked to rank the group’s previous albums by Noisey last year, Kugel ranked them in reverse order. On The Devil You Know, their evolution continues.

There’s always a risk that an album like this one will be received as novelty music, but the compositional integrity is there, and the music is engaging purely on the level of sound.

It’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.

Lifeforce is an album in the truest sense, with each song blending into the next for continuous listening. Mostly low- to mid-tempo, the band skillfully integrates bleak and radiant tones, leading to an impressive nine-track suite of ambient, spoken-word and grime-infused compositions.

Groove Denied can’t help but feel like a minor effort. It’s essentially his answer to McCartney II—the sound of a veteran artist with two beloved bands under his belt reveling in the freedom to indulge a latent fascination with the latest gadgets.

Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine.

Certainly, some--even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work--will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.

The story of a young female songwriter pushing back against the sexist songwriters on her major label and modern pop’s oppressive beauty standards is an impressive one. The cautious Sucker Punch could do with more of that insurrectionist spirit.

A different kind of hero’s journey through the musical mind, Psychodrama feels less like a platform for clout than a starting point for self-help and paradigmatic change.

The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top.

On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.

Fifty percent of the lyrics are bad (“Back on my bullshit, devil emoji”) and the other 50 percent are also bad, but then they get stuck in your head and ultimately turn good (“Tell me your darkest secret shit you wouldn’t even tell Jesus”). ... Death Race For Love feels like the real Juice WRLD, wearing his influences and heart on his sleeve, putting his ups and downs into the music in real time.