Although the tone can get a little one-note, this personal and cultural lineage deepens the poignancy of Fuse, in which Thorn and Watt broadly consider what we lose and hold on to over the course of a lifetime.

The record's most interesting bits--a keen sense of melody--disappear too quickly and can't carry the album over its production bumps.

Whether you end up jumping on board with Performance will depend on the extent of your own predilection for “real music” nostalgia, but those who do find themselves in the passenger seat are likely to have a pretty fun time.

What makes Losing Feeling so solid is how it begins and ends.

This is a merely pleasant album, and especially after 11 long years, pleasant is a low hurdle for such an inimitable singer.

Social Rust proves that real experimentation does not require impenetrability at every turn.

All the deconstructions and rebuildings on I’ve Been to Many Places are more visceral than theoretical, and you don’t have to know anything about jazz modes or music theory to drown yourself in Shipp’s waves.

Through little fault of Goatsnake’s own, listening to Black Age Blues can sometimes feel like watching wizened blues musicians play the music of their now-distant youth. The style is familiar enough to be comforting, but it’s also inherently trite and redundant.

WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here.

Coupling their graceful, intuitive musicianship with a resolute outward-bound gaze, Feathers appear ready to join the elite of the avant-folk underground.

This ability to summon intensity without a lyrical shock factor is new for Goat Girl, and they’re better for it.

This is electric music in every sense of the word-- amplified, processed, and imbued with a neon glow.

Farmer’s Corner is an album about labor and its rewards, about wanderlust and rootlessness, about memory and regret, yet for most of its fifty minutes, its mood is affable and laidback--as though Toth wants to make it all look easy.

Despite some missteps, Halsey’s appeal is clear: It’s a singularly difficult time to be a young person, and she is warmly attuned to that reality.

Vernon himself sings with more texture and conviction than ever before. He’s shifted fully from vessel to commander, steering the music instead of seeping into it.

Awfully Deep makes for churning, menacing background music.

Surrounded by young artists, it's remarkable how well Jansch avoids buying into his myth. The kids add spirit without the avant tendencies of their regular gigs, and Jansch seems rightfully at ease and assured with this new band.

This is smart, well-plotted music, which makes its anger all the more effective.

On The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years deliver the shredded vocals and taut palm-muted guitars that made them Warped Tour heroes without sacrificing the depth and nuance in Campbell’s writing.

Despite their detailed imagery and alluring melodies, the songs on Roach are ultimately less complex than Folick’s earlier work.

The Hard Quartet lets us into their circle for just under an hour; it’s hard not to want to bask in its stoned brilliance even longer.

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.

Calvi's outstanding vocal tone and arrangements carry the emotional punches, while her lyrics can occasionally take a backseat role.

More inventive than Soundtrack of Our Lives and less chillily austere than Oldham, Mercury Rev prove to be his most dynamic partners, framing his songs but never infringing on them.

Like many albums recorded over many years, at various studios with different producers, This Side of the Island can feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. .... Still, his ragged charisma holds it all together.

Without risking pastiche, the band gets plenty of mileage from its sonic references.

Electric Brick Wall is a far more coherent synthesis of those disparate influences, and possibly her strongest record since the Trux’s peak.

While some critics take issue with Rubin's underproduction, none of the songs on American III require ornate instrumentation. Whether they've been fluffed up or stripped raw, at the core of each is a compelling statement from one of our greatest humanists.

With huge, ballooning vocals and a shit-kicking rhythm section, the record consistently threatens to pop its own feeble seams; by carefully shuffling away from their past outings, The Von Bondies have produced a booming sonic statement that's far more glam than garage, and a lot less "Detroit" than we've been trained to expect.

On More Issues Than Vogue, Michelle's third album, the performer and musician delivers her most affecting, skillful, and innovative record yet.

The individual performances are gut-punching in their potency. ... But the discrete presentation of the songs sucks them dry, with the abrupt fade-outs robbing the album of any in-the-room ambience and natural momentum.

The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control.

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone is the musical equivalent of a late Woody Allen film (possibly a good or bad thing, depending on your temperament): The action unfolds predictably, but the dramatic effect can also be increased by your fondness for and familiarity with the idiom.

Give the People What They Want is a pretty short 10 songs, though its breezy half-hour leaves plenty that sticks and plenty more worth revisiting when it doesn't.

Kings Ballad still doesn't meet all the expectations Muldrow may have initially inspired, but it's a positive, measured sign that there's more to come.

Final Days’ exhilarating, cathedral-toppling spectacle could prove to be the career game-changer that ensures his band remains a cult no more.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Several tracks (“Curious,” “Ghosts”) rely on the tug of well-worn harmonic shapes and the weaving of legato lines to entrance rather than ideate, persuade, or startle. The standouts have more substance, musically and visually.

Wishy’s most cohesive moments come from their knack for memorable, solid melodies.

A grab-bag of a Fall album with brilliant highs and scattered lows.

Future was always straightforward, never ashamed to confess his depression or infatuation, but the narratives never felt so focused, nuanced, or vulnerable than here.

With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.

Gira's songs have many one-of-a-kind nuances that tether the album even when it ventures.

With Small Town Heroes, Segarra proves herself one of the most compelling stylists in a folk revival full of suspicious acts either too beholden to tradition or too uncritical to make much of it.

If previous Blanck Mass albums were each a step out from the shadow of Fuck Buttons, Animated Violence Mild shows that he’s outgrown the comparison altogether.

Some of its songs deserve to be cut into halves, while others should have been chopped wholesale. With those snips, Exai would be a really good Autechre album that summarizes the various successes of their career in an hour or so. As is, it's as much a frustrating obstacle course as it is a grueling marathon.

The songwriting falls a couple of times too many into timid generalities about love and loss; the melodies, though lovely, are sometimes interchangeable.

That's ultimately the sticking point with Infiniheart: VanGaalen's songs tend toward folly, yet it's impossible to discount his commitment to the material.

Olé! Tarantula isn't his best solo record, but it's in the top tier, and after all these years that's certainly something.

Regifted Light doesn't seem built to shock or cajole, but to connect with all sorts of people, and to last.

Libraries nods more to Burt Bacharach, and the record can sag occasionally under the drowsy weight of his influence.

Quakers is kind of a mess, and odds are that a not-insignificant number of people are going to find the beats more consistently entertaining than the verses... But ambitious messes are the best kind, and riding out the less-interesting moments is worth it in the long run.

The guitars are buzzy and loud, the rhythms are quick, the drums crash, the lyrics are densely packed into a short span of time, and Boyer spits them out with punk rock confidence

Soma sits still, paralyzed by the weight of a sound that’s too big for this promising band to manage, at least for now.

He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes.

Three/Three is stacked with features from Detroit area MCs (Danny Brown, Clear Soul Forces) and heavy-hitting veterans (MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah), but only a handful of his guests truly rise to the occasion.

The hour-long album honors all the work he’s put in and looks back at all he’s achieved, but it also looks forward to all he has yet to build and all those he can still inspire.

At 19 tracks in length, their debut appears daunting but proves to be light and accessible, with plenty of offbeat wit and many an unexpected twist down gothic country roads.

The warmth of Infinite Moment radiates from its symbiotic growth of melancholy and hope. Willner doesn’t privilege one over the other, but allows them to knit together, watching from a distance to see the shapes they might take.

Kempner has excelled at tracing anxiety, fear, and shame through expertly crafted rock songs, and there’s still plenty of those emotions throughout Black Friday. ... But on her third record, she also allows herself to experience pure joy, and what a treat it is to feel that euphoria along with her.

It’s a fairly conventional set of club bangers done right: This is an alluring, nonchalant flex between albums that’s weird enough to drop in the hyperpop Discord, but satisfying enough to play at your next birthday party.

“Mayfield” barrels out of the gate like a runaway Arctic train—the 2025 mix adds propulsion by removing a flanged drop-out section. As vocalist Paula Kelley winds black ribbons around Ackell’s melancholy topline, sheets of guitar clip overhead: proto-blackgaze. The two other EP tracks included here are dreamier, but no less impressive.

Up to the minute, well sequenced, and straightforward in its melodic chewiness and rhythmic intentions, Thee Black Boltz complements Dear Science and Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, Bush II-era canaries that have never stopped singing from their wretched coal mines.

Across 10 country-tinged tracks, Cornfield also broadens her view as a storyteller, but proves that her boot heels are still dug into terra firma.

As a showcase of a seasoned master in his element, Silver Age's bounty of direct, distorto-pop hits measures up to Mould's gold standard.

A Place to Bury Strangers may not be easy for would-be record buyers to find--it's currently limited to 500 copies and put out by, um, Killer Pimp Records--but it's worth every effort.

Keepsake is an album filled with small, inspired moments like this, but they don’t add up to much. Sugary but hollow, Keepsake melts like cotton candy, dissolving on impact.

His album is at once beyond footwork and of it completely--a case for the form being strengthened, not diluted, by the push and pull of influences over the years.

[Tormenta's] eccentric angles and willingness to take risks show up the slightly humdrum nature of much of Cracker Island, an album that walks a very thin line between playing to the band’s strengths and relying too heavily on old tricks.

Yes, Bishop takes the guitar on a few mesmerizing turns, alternately embracing frenetic strums and pleasant licks familiar from his past. But on an album inspired by the sounds and scenes of his dreams, Bishop finally seems tired of being confined to one instrument.

It’s the breeziest and most melodically generous of the trio’s reunion efforts, even flirting with power-pop on the compulsively hummable “And Me.”

On Every Acre, McEntire’s patient observations of the land provide her with a new footing: one full of possibility and promise. It’s in the commitment to stasis that McEntire finds the fortitude to begin anew.

Perhaps it’s deliberate that throughout The Take Off and Landing of Everything, hardly anything truly takes off. Instead the album dangles there, an effortlessly leaden exhibition of glum triumphalism--and an example of what makes Elbow, at its least potent, so subtly unsubtle.

An album that so movingly testifies to the difficulty of appreciating what you have while still reconciling what you’ve lost.

Though it’s as comforting as the whistle of a teapot, the music captures the feeling of storms—the atmospheric charge and churning motion—without resorting to volume or force. Being ordinary seldom seemed so wonderfully strange.

As she’s shed the trappings of distinctly 2010s R&B for something less easily time-stamped, she’s revealed a new and very telling set of inspirations.

Going Down in History may not mark a sea change for Langford and company, but between the humor, the honky-tonk, and the affable, full-bodied sound, it’s an awesome chance to catch up.

The sprawling, bittersweet atmosphere—shaped by those repetitive guitars and a perpetual search for meaning—at times recalls Barnett’s collaboration with Kurt Vile.

The band's debut was kind of a crumpled, nicotine-smudged affair, but Atlanta feels brighter, less muddled, not polished but certainly tidier around the edges. Smith's voice remains a friendly, mid-range yawp-- emotionally precise if not always entirely on-key.

When Weber’s composition is led by a sense of density—multiple musical voices all intertwining to create a sense of vibrant dialogue—it is at its most engrossing. ... Where Conference of Trees falls down is when its electronic elements talk over its organic ones.

It's gentler than its predecessors, relying on sweat and unresolved tension rather than a glorious gutter-poet deluge, though the change is more of subtleties than of substance.

Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.

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

Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful--warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid--but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling.

It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else).

There is no gotcha moment, no big replicant reveal; Mouse on Mars have bypassed the easy drama of deep fakes to delve into the realm of synthetic essence. Where Dimensional People’s voices were often run through electronic processing until they sounded almost like synthesizers, here the voice is a synthesizer, in effect.

Myuthafoo, however, dispenses with vocals entirely, and is better for it. The absence of singing brings Barbieri’s synths to the fore. Part of the wonderment of Myuthafoo isn’t just how she sequences; it’s what.

The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet. ... Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction.

The album’s minimalist moments are its strongest.

An unusually linear Mountain Goats record full of powerful moments that not even the eternally moving Darnielle can scrape into the whole it deserves.

While Pale Young Gentlemen is frontloaded and slightly naïve like a record of this sort should be, there's more than enough reason to anticipate what they're capable of when they decide to get darker, older, and less gentle.

Still Life is steeped in Dylan's back-to-basics period at the turn of the '70s, carefully adorned but never skeletal; from the beating-heart bassline that sits underneath "Drowning" to the drunken horns that close out the eight-minute "Amen", Still Life is sumptuous, slightly rickety, offhandedly gorgeous.

The Good Fight is a streamlined reminder to ignore the restraints. Great music is great music, no matter where it comes from.

Those looking for Graham from Blur will find it in his laconic vocal turns and occasional guitar explosions, while Dougall’s dreamily dejected melodies will resonate with fans of her solo work. But The WAEVE has its own chemistry, an alchemic mixture of psych, punk, folk, tenderness, and dread, laced with dextrous saxophone tones and a few come-hither drops of terror.

The contrasts within the songs are more interesting than those between style and source.

Give a Glimpse does, however, stick largely to well-trod paths, with not a ton in the way of experimentation. As always, it’s Mascis’ guitar that is the main attraction here, the reason for caring.

In both its lyrical candour and soft-rock accessibility, Boys Outside sees Mason ready to meet the public again, and in some cases, actually cater to it.

Com comes off as alternately uncomfortable and downright lazy, half-speaking-- or worse, singing-- new-age revelations to the masses.