Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning.

You could take issue with Spiritualized for sticking so closely to the blueprint they inaugurated more than 30 years ago. But the band always felt built for repetition and refinement, a cosmic home for Jason Pierce to grow comfortably old, away from an ever-changing musical world.

Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy.

Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors.

Greenspan's singing is the best it's ever been on It's All True, proving the band's mixing desk skills aren't the only thing that's matured over the past eight years.

Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.

How Do You Burn? boasts a mixtape-like eclecticism, communal bonhomie, and psychedelic texture that feel untethered to the Whigs’ past playbooks.

This new album is in line with what fans of the band’s more recent (as in, post-2006) material have come to expect, but with a new twist—namely, the outsized impact that traditional doom bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus seem to have had on the songwriting. Darkthrone still stand firmly in the heavy metal (with a dash of punk) camp, but they’ve definitely got a soft spot for old-school gloom.

Resonant Body celebrates 1990s rave anthems with a bittersweet sense of vanished time—the party ended long ago, the dancers shut their eyes against daylight, but balloons still float around the room on inherited breath.

Anna Calvi has found her voice with her third album would be reductive; both literally and figuratively, her voice has always been crystal clear.

This isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos.

In its brief onslaught of sneery fun, Vicki Leekx only occasionally reaches the dizzy pop heights of Arular and Kala. But it does give us an M.I.A. who, once again, seems to be having a blast doing what she's doing.

Live at Biko is quick to remind us that Benji is as much a comedy as tragedy, at times forcefully so.

This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.

Her lyrics often read like prose on the page, but she finds ways to bend them into melodic shapes it’s difficult to imagine anyone else finding.

There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding.

Throughout, Satin Doll warps these standards delectably, leaving you pleasantly dizzy.

Idiosyncratic yet understated, Atlanta Millionaires Club wraps in a little of everything without doing too much of anything.

Martinez may not be able to right the wrongs of the past, but he does Palacio's legacy proud on Laru Beya. And by bringing this music to a world stage, he may also help secure his people's cultural future.

Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience.

Personality is an immediate, alluring, and frequently arresting song cycle that plays to Steele's core strengths-- his dreamily effeminate voice and melancholic melodies-- while wisely abandoning Lovers' half-hearted attempts at mod garage-rock and electro-disco.

Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning.

At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

The residue of death that lingers on I'm New Here is wiped clean from We're New Here. It's replaced with brightness, an energy, and a historical milieu.

The shared characteristic that unites all four releases, though, is McCraven’s uncanny ability to alchemize hip-hop from jazz, structure from freedom, a collective effort into a singular vision.

Elephant Eyelash sounds less crisp and less striking than the folk-plus-beats arrangements of 2003's Oaklandazurasylum, but it brings more heart; where that earlier album's lyrics crackled with the anxiety of beating yourself up after a bad day at school, Elephant Eyelash soars like the last songs on prom night.

Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.

What’s transcendent about both the music and the lyrics of Magus is the way it lives in the build-up to a war that is only just beginning.

Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk.

Miami shows Brandt Brauer Frick to have reached new heights of imagination and technical accomplishment, but it’s undeniably a challenging listen. Break through its forbidding surface, though, and the rewards can be considerable.

Certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.

Music has a way of conjuring a sense of intimacy between listener and artist, and La Maison Noir weaponizes that rapport without dismissing it. Noirwave may not be a movement but it is a force.

As ever, MacKaye shrewdly distills macro calamities to personal, almost prosaic vignettes.

Choir of Young Believers have created a singular sonic world all their own.

Perhaps grimmer—songwriting, like therapy, has its limits. Loveless understands. With a sober approach to its less-than-sober characters, Daughter takes life one song at a time. She can’t do more but prepare to accept less.

Brown’s the sort of singer who’s starting a new sentence before finishing the previous one, and she seems less interested in our apocalyptic headlines themselves than in how we receive them.

One of the most impressive aspects of The Earth Is Not a Cold Dead Place is that it feels constantly in flux, growing and transforming with every note.

It’s hard not to tumble into Crushing’s vast emotional depths and look past everything else that makes the album exquisite, but lyrics like this showcase just how clever Jacklin’s songwriting can be.

It's as much heady, restive psychedelia as it is a punk rager.

Both in the events leading up to this album and in the music contained within, Vincent has proven imperfect. That messiness comes to define this album, making for machine music that’s lovingly flawed and human.

Built mainly from Powell’s knotty acoustic guitar explorations and lyrical musings that feel like fragments from an exceptionally perceptive diary, it’s the most satisfying Land of Talk album yet.

The most impressive aspect of 200 Years, especially considering it as the debut of a new collaboration, is its overall aura of cool confidence.

Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

It's so gleefully over-the-top that even the most absurd and token-tortured lyrics neatly circumvent being taken at face value.

La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.

The only times Plaza comes across as less than convincing are the moments where Shane Butler and company tip their hand a tad too heavily, such as on closing number "Own Ways," which falls just short of featuring faux English accents and sounds like Quilt’s musical answer to a '60s mod costume party. Elsewhere, though, they steer clear of slavish recreation, cleverly revealing new wrinkles in the arrangements from one song to the next.

Although only one song passes the five-minute mark, Touchdown overflows with ideas imaginatively sifted from a range of genres, and feels honest, infectious, and personable from beginning to end.

The passionate vocals stand out from the rest of Believer, with its glassine pop-R&B delivery. Smerz’s usual brooding, dead-eyed vacancy, punctuated with mumbled interjections, has a magnetic pull in concentrated blasts, but it can also feel like a slight crutch when songs like “Flashing” and the album’s interludes prove they can go in different, evocative directions at a whim.

Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.

Locks lets the past speak by keeping the grit and the grain in his samples, conjuring the dust of the archives. Like Madlib, another jazz-influenced samplerist, he leaves the seams in his loops and builds meta-rhythms from the clicks of his edit points.

Count Coming Apart as another fascinating step in that journey, and Body/Head’s musical path as one that she and Nace will hopefully follow for a long time.

Like Mum on a smaller scale, or a lightly medicated, loose-lipped Four Tet, his introspective songs sway hazily from image to metaphor, between yesterday's folk and tomorrow's digitalism.

After over an hour of totally becalmed drift, the bustling pace here at album’s end feels like leaving a day spa only to squeeze onto a rush-hour train. You might find yourself simply wishing the album extended just a few minutes longer.

Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals--the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves.

Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.

Better Oblivion is a collection of quiet, wandering thoughts: the sound of twin souls burrowing deeper into their common ground.

For all his clinical reserve and careful attention to detail--some of these beats might as well contain footnotes--Barnt has ended up crafting an unusually heartfelt testament to techno's emotive potential.

Even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today.

While the vocal tracks are well-realized, this is the first album RJ's made in a long time that actually feels like it's satisfied to say most of what it has to say in instrumental form.

Her third album in five years, İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir crackles with a live energy that stems from the 18 months of touring following its predecessor, 2016’s Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu. Producing the album with longtime guitarist Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Su Akyol is in firm command of her powers, adding a few more electronic textures to push to new heights.

Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points.

Even if it holds the most value for the Neil obsessives interested in the small differences, Live at Cellar Door provides another glimpse at a darkly formative time in his long career.

Something mysteriously blocks this very good record from being great.

De Casier’s got a soft voice but a big personality, and even at its most muted, Sensational radiates charm.

Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.

On succeeds not in spite of its simplicity, but because of it.

At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second--that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution--is as thrilling as it terrifying.

On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.

Much like records by the Smiths, Suicide Songs is both consoling and encouraging, revealing itself fully only after repeated listens and paying dividends each time. Manchester should be proud.

Every Ladytron album has a few extremely low points, and on Ladytron those are “Run” (a part two to “The Animals,” not a particularly necessary one) and “Paper Highways” (the first part is great, as if wrought from iron wreckage, but it veers into a saccharine, completely misplaced chorus, like they handed it to Disney for a second). Much better as a ray of solace is the quietly experimental “Tomorrow Is Another Day.”

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

Davila 666's sophomore album is still rowdy enough for an impromptu weekend binge with a few friends, but it also offers enough carefully crafted tunes and feedback-streaked textures to fill your headphones.

Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes.

That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

Like the Luddite lover pining for old-school communication in a digital world, GUV II is the sound of a pop classicist forging his own singular path in a post-everything era.

While The Grey Album is truly one of the more interesting pirate mashups ever done, it ultimately fails at the hands of perfectionism with several pieces sounding rushed to beat some other knucklehead to his clever idea.

Like Cunningham's entire oeuvre, each track unwinds into a tapestry of intense sonic detail if you just give it a little time to recline.

Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us.

The vibrant, expressive songs on Curyman II return often to this theme: how Brazil's unique cultural identity is a product of its diverse ethnic populations.

The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection.

Ultimately, Chasmata is slightly inferior to its predecessor due to a sequencing issue near the record's end.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

The music on HAGEN isn’t impenetrable, though it is gargantuan.

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

As with so many bedroom auteurs' debuts, it's tough to separate the creation from the creator, and Idle Labor shows the promise of a precocious songwriter who isn't claiming to have anything totally figured out just yet.

That feeling of being held at arm's length persists no matter how much time you put in with Voidist, and it's the record's only significant shortcoming.

I don't think anyone who already has some notion of wanting quebec could possibly be disappointed-- it's the genre-defying psych of The Mollusk and the incongruous irreverence of 12 Golden Country Greats, and some of the madness that is GodWeenSatan, and it's a lot better than the go-nowhere White Pepper.

Stretching the sinews of their sound almost to the breaking point, Religious Knives find a balance between the repetitive rhythmic skeleton of krautrock and the psychedelic keyboard thrusts of early Doors.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

His confidence is why he flies when he swings for the fences on his new album, Free TC.

At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once.

As scattershot and weirdly limp as parts of this are-- two guys just knocking things together, seeing what happens-- well, it feels better to hear someone trying.

Nausea is easier to listen to than Sunbathing Animal in part because it seems less ambitious.

Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together.

The three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility.

While she has a reputation for making familiar songs sound utterly new, here she finds a way to make Bramblett’s songs tell her story, to let them speak for her. She rewrites his songs simply by singing them.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.