Deer Creek Canyon is a deft fine-tuning of her meandering rustic tendencies, the tweaks so minor and carefully placed they're at first nearly imperceptible.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

Just as fuzzy and unpredictable as its namesake suggests, with high, hissing vocals, archaic-gone-futuristic blips, pedal steel, keyboards, glockenspiel, and a barrage of other noisemakers helping to build a thick, spacy stretch of soft 60s psychedelia.

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.

On Wahre Liebe Roedelius is able to conjure many different moods without deviating from the round, bell-like tones of the Farfisa, an instrument he returns to after years of primarily working with acoustic piano and digital processing.

With NINE, they add new layers—of mystery but also flippant humor—to their sound.

Interscope’s trust in TDE saves the album from the awkward test tube collaborations that bog down many of its peers, but Oxymoron’s doubling down on a reliable formula makes for a relatively risk-averse listen.

Rarely is electronic music so utterly human as on Still Slipping, its emotional draw as reassuringly complex as a grand family reunion.

It’s no slight to say nothing on Ultramarine matches its opening triad--not much does. The remainder of it is solid, though it shows a band still using established pop framework in lieu of a personality.

Listening to these songs still feels like you’re eavesdropping on Moffat’s intimate exchanges and innermost thoughts, but now, more than ever, his narratives are firmly plugged into our unsettled collective consciousness.

D.R.A.M. doesn’t really have new ideas to pitch into this ball pit, but on his full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M., he reminds us that new ideas aren’t the whole game.

Across 12 songs and 74 minutes, All Melody functions as a single, cohesive piece of music, with recurring themes interwoven throughout. It’s easy to get lost in the album and then, hearing a familiar motif, come up short, as if turning a corner in a long hallway and wondering if you hadn’t passed the same spot just a moment ago. It’s a pleasantly disorienting sensation.

The guitar work here is still ten times rangier and more inventive than you'd expect, but it takes a few very professional steps back, nailing down its snappy flourishes amid ecstatic "whoo!"s, new-wave poses, and occasional clouds of glitter and confetti.

All Yr Atal Genhedlaeth lacks is the unifying ambition of the great SFA records.

The ritual drama of falling and picking one’s self back up again (taking "responsibility," as Dawson prefers in interviews) plays out in every element of this music, and is key to its elusive power.

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.

Jump Leads has a few more slip-ups than its immediate predecessor, A Touch of Cloth, but I'd like to think they result from the addition of a vocalist (Steve Edwards of Presence) rather than being an indication of pending obsolescence.

Fidelity is more wistful and weightless than either Ten Fold or do it afraid. She raps less; she sings more. She leans into the breathier end of her fantastically versatile voice, pairing it with sun-soaked keyboard sounds reminiscent of mid-’90s R&B groups like SWV or Kut Klose.

Through written piecemeal between 2021 and 2025 (a period in which Presley focused primarily on his painting practice), Orange is by far the tightest, most cohesive record he’s made.

The result is an opulent, elegant, and occasionally exasperating farewell. This is the Weeknd’s most expansive-sounding album that’s also narrowly focused.

Feels Like doesn’t reference any specific dates or weather, but it feels like a summer coming-of-age album.

Once you stop trying to label what should be a hook and focus on what is, the ingenuity of each song’s design and the ear-turning nature of every maneuver speaks to Never Hungover Again's inexhaustible quality, the kind of album you can play three times in a row without any part wearing out its welcome.

Walker’s idiosyncratic take is his way of reconnecting the celebrated, cerebral art-folkie he’s become with a past spent dodging beanbags and sucking down Natty Lights in an East Troy parking lot. If you hear a little bit of your own journey in there, hey, all the better.

The ample generosity of Manipulator highlights the cruel paradox of showbiz: When you give the people everything they want, you can’t leave them wanting more.

Close attention reveals an album of highly varied moods and textures.

You don't get anything that great [as "1777"] on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic.

Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism.

Wintres Woma is an album that makes itself easy to like.

As long as McMahon is singing, Amen Dunes will never sound quite like anyone else--and on Love, he sings better and more ambitiously than ever.

Chua creates landscapes out of the hollow spaces within her. Each track becomes its own kind of home, or at least a safe harbor.

It’s not quite the departure that Point was from Fantasma, but it feels like a natural next step.

Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too.

The second Bangs & Works is a marked improvement over its predecessor.

Saya is more of a restoration: filling in the cracks of Gray’s music, redrawing her in bolder shades and more vivid hues—indigo, flesh tone, spring green.

The band's egalitarian and mutually supportive dynamic pays off on the harmonious Still Night, Still Light, their third and best album.

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.

Although their distorted punk pairs well with Midwestern bands they’ve opened for, like the Armed or Angry Blackmen, Prostitute are no imitators.

Forward motion makes So Full Upon Her Burning Lips more than just a return to a classic sound. There are enough surprises here that what could’ve been just a comfortable glance backward.

I’ll Tell You What! is a masterful album of precision and imagination, one where footwork resounds with the potential of a rewritten rule book. It is also astoundingly alive, its energy and originality a reminder that visionary ideas and emptied minds can outlast feeble human mortality.

He’s finding new aural and emotional textures within a familiar genre. Those fresh sounds are married to the sturdiest set of songs Strings has written, with defined melodies distinguished by flashes of empathy and wit.

The generational chasm between parents and children can feel deep and dark, but Anne, both the album and the person, builds a bridge with light and tremendous empathy.

Firmly bound to themes of renewal and rebirth, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is a winning experiment in economy and earthiness from an artist previously known for ornament and excess.

Tassili is a very different album from any Tinariwen have recorded before, and they're proving to be a band of considerable range as they build a catalog of varied and excellent albums.

Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard.

The key to Dagdrøm's daunting mystique: You're never really sure if what you're hearing is the calm before the storm or the storm before the calm.

On Spaces there's a power that Frahm hasn't always been able to capture in his recorded work. But the overriding feel is one of joy at listening to a performer demonstrating the infinite elasticity of sound.

Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums.

Nothing Fits is the band's first release to be recorded in an actual studio, and the result is a shorter, more focused record, but hardly a cleaner one.

Nothing is left to chance here and both listener and artist are now free to imagine a 90 minute shot of perfection, where every transition is smooth and every dance step is executed with ease. We could all use those moments to dream of a unsullied world, if only for small stretches before getting back to the otherwise messy reality we’re in.

This is guitar as salve, not weapon. Moments when feedback pokes into the mix feel tightly controlled, and you can almost picture him moving the guitar in imperceptible angles to keep the resonant frequencies in check.

Elaborate but rarely ostentatious, The Godless Void is a true revelation from a band 25 years into the game—the rare Trail of Dead record that lets Keely’s shell-shocked performances chart the necessary emotional peaks without needing the music to follow suit.

Arcology, like its predecessor, is a genre study first and foremost, rearranging familiar elements according to McRyhew's own idiosyncratic vision.

By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.

Like much of her work throughout her career, each of these tracks feels like a glimpse of something larger. You won’t get the full picture from any single track, but let the whole album sink in, and you begin hearing the implicit connections that link them all.

As on Days Are Gone, its sheen is current and its spirit out of step. Beat by beat, Haim are the classic sound of heartbreak alleviated, if only for a moment.

The track "Our Nearest Neighbors" best exhibits Red Stars Theory's unique strengths: to harness the emotion of emocore without indulging in the maudlin lyrics; and to exercise the artistic grandeur and complexity of post-rock, but without the cold detachment and pretension.

It’s a testament to the strength of Clarke’s compositional gifts and his command of mood that even 14 or 15 tracks in, in an album pitched at a consistent campfire glow and midtempo stroll, songs like “The Golden Sky” sound just as fresh as the record’s first notes.

What it reveals is someone of talent, ambition, and enough wit and self-awareness to keep that ambition grounded in reality. It’s an excellent debut from an artist on the cusp.

The synthesizers, the gang vocals, their approach to choruses--it's all reasonably similar across these 27 minutes. Even Hoffmann’s vocal style, thrillingly furious in its from-the-gut delivery, doesn’t vary too much. But the structures, stories, and overall tones differ enough from song to song that this never feels like a monotone slog. They've created a surefooted, aesthetic defining opening statement.

Little Red is not the best album it could have been--a few of the bonus tracks should have made the album proper--but Katy displays a vision for her career that suggests an exciting future.

Thankfully, Davidson doesn’t hide behind irony for the entirety of this record. She never over-relies on a single set of muscles, she flexes them all.

It's far from perfect, but it's never less than driven, and that drive gets you past the garbled syllables and any pesky feelings of deja vu.

Rising Down isn't always an easy listen, but it's an exciting one, and its abrasiveness never gets in the way of a good throw-your-hands-up beat or a well-crafted lyric.

Echoes is more of a grab bag: Enormous festival fillers and hard-nosed club bangers rub up against wondrously bizarre studio experiments and some of the best pure pop songs Rowlands and Simons have ever made.

This is an album packed with abrasive tones of unimaginable density and uncertain origin. Oval shares with Autechre the ability to craft sounds that defy explanation.

In the three years since Last Broadcast, Doves have cultivated a better understanding of their strengths and limitations, and Some Cities beams with a revivified looseness.

Though they haven't changed much in the span of three terrific albums, Camera Obscura no longer recall Belle & Sebastian; they only sound like themselves.

Even with this shared billing, Van Etten remains the album’s undeniable highlight, though she explores a range of vocal approaches outside her trademark wail.

Never pedantic or didactic, never extreme or aggressive, Poor Moon is a warm hand on a cold shoulder, a vintage piece of soul music for new times in need.

His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. ... Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone.

Are the Roaring Night sounds richer, and while it doesn't rewrite the formula, it contains many small refinements to the band's songwriting and production skills.

Louder, faster, fiercer than their 2019 LP Itekoma Hits, the 20-minute, 18-track Super Champon goes down like a tart smattering of face-scrunching, neon candy.

Saint Etienne's best LP since 1994 masterpiece Tiger Bay.

It’s also a disco-funk explosion, ecstatic from every direction. Even when the satire wanes, the potency of the music remains. Like the rest of the album, Remy shakes free her sorrows and stretches loose her limbs, sanguine as she moves across the dancefloor.

Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions.

For every track where Barbieri pushes her sound in new directions, there are others where she simply refines it.

Occasional goth clichés aside, Deeper is a thing of beauty.

Against the preceding volumes’ most attention-grabbing moments, they may risk getting lost in the shuffle, but perhaps that is part of their charm, too: The whole fifth volume feels like an Easter egg in a video game—a sparkly basket of jewels collected from the crevices of Arca’s more imposingly monumental works.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

At just 28 minutes, HEIS moves with ceaseless hustle.

It still might not--but fetch at least harmonizes more disharmoniously with the tenor of the times.

The album is beautifully and judiciously arranged, but a collection of bonus tracks on the expanded edition show how Countless Branches might have sounded with more instruments and more people.

The writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart.

Ultimate Care II is a daydream of domesticity, a chore ignored. Call it the revolutions of everyday life.

trip9love…??? is tender as a bruise, the kind of bruise you press down on now and again, just to confirm that it still hurts—and to take secret pleasure in the ache.

The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.

This tension between plain old songs and structures and an interest in omitting details and accessorizing sounds enlivens Over and Even from start to finish.

His restless style makes each piece sound three-dimensional, as shards of songs pass each other in a storm of string activity. It makes for exhilarating, sometimes exhausting listening. But it also makes for music that, though it hints at structure, never sounds predictable and rarely settles.

To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.

Vulnerability has powered Tomberlin’s music for years, and “Collect Caller” aside, these songs are sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before.

Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.

The album’s hypnotic quality grows ever more romantic and tense with repeat listens, a prescient-feeling experience that matches a zeitgeist: strung-out maintaining in the face of impending doom.

Fittingly, on Sin Miedo, Uchis dares to trust herself more. She pares down the guest list, opting for feature production by Puerto Rican hitmaker Tainy and a smattering of artists. Her voice, still thick and sultry, looms larger in the mix.

In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine.

There are great stand-alone songs here, like the 1960s-at-78-rpm sugar rush of "Eyes", but Apollo Sunshine is best listened to in a full dose and appreciated in all its messy glory.

The music carries within it the idea of form coming into being; it moves away from the freeform drift of her previous albums and glides toward a nascent kind of order.

Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him.