His latest album, a collaboration with the saxophonist Gilad Atzmon and the violinist Ros Stephen, is again evasive, seeming at once defiantly old-fashioned and defiantly quirky.

For perhaps the first time in the Bajas’ catalog, there are parts of Inland See that can get stuck in your head.

For the most part, Sorcerer succeeds, moving their sound forward while maintaining their penchant for detours.

That's what's so great about it, though; save the Vaseline-on-lens Fleetwood Mac number that closes things out, there's nary a dull patch or an awkward spot to be found here, just a sublime (if sorta schizoid) trip through the warmest, spaciest parts of your record collection.

This is the sound of Simz reconciling with Simbi. And it sounds great. Cue the ovation.

Together also continues to emphasize the newfound clarity and purpose in Duster’s arrangements and production. There are still fresh experiments—like the kosmische synth swells that open “Escalator”—but this record is largely a refinement of the band’s sprawling, slow-paced sound, giving a little focus and momentum to their once-opaque instrumentals.

Armchair Apocrypha is ultimately another object of strange and unique beauty from this inventive songwriter and performer.

Across age/sex/location, Lennox refreshes classic R&B stylings for a contemporary audience, sounding at ease with herself as she offers up her sexiest and most assured music to date.

Molina still sounds rootless and displaced, but Sojourner triangulates a place that's as close to home as he ever seems to get.

And yet all these reworks and revisions stay in the general vicinity of the original album's tone of massive yet starkly open spaces, adding a few new facets but always staying close to the fine line Waiting for You treaded between bleak and euphoric.

It plays like the last record’s darker shadow. As with every DIIV album, it sounds timestamped from the year that punk broke, but the mood is heavier, louder, queasier. The guitars jangle less and brood more.

Under Stellar Stream is filled with such fertile repetition.

It isn’t fair that it took years of label mishandling to get here, but Tinashe has finally found equilibrium.

59.59 could use a few more fiery moments like these; as the album settles into its more temperate second half.

In a humbler, warmer, more openhearted way, Reigning Sound have risen above themselves--as well as the garage-rock idiom that spawned them--while spiritually hewing true.

Good Lies toes a fine and, yes, functional, balance. There’s beauty in all this precision too—like an Eames chair, a perfectly weighted spoon, or the cone of a 15-inch subwoofer pushing air out of the bass scoops.

A batch of songs guaranteed to be huge hits as soon as we're all sucked into a giant time warp and plunked back down in 1974.

Half the cuts here don’t make it to three minutes, but they still drill into your mind with ease.

Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark.

With its 34-minute runtime, its cartoon cover art, and the pervading levity of Tobacco’s beats, Malibu Ken may seem at first like a minor work. But there’s nothing diminutive about a record this sharply written. It’s a side project every bit as substantial as Aesop Rock’s proper albums. That it also happens to be more fun than most of them is a bonus.

They continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around.

It's no reflection on him, but Go-Go Boots goes a long way to proving him wrong, suggesting a band that knows where all the bodies are buried.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

These songs are generally not the type to grab you right away, but there's enough mystery and melody there to call you back.

Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

Twenty-odd years ago, when Poly-Rythmo last made a studio album, they were at their lowest ebb. Cotonou Club finds them at another high.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

Chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe.

Two Ribbons retains all of the light-hearted surreality that made their first two records so bewitching, but out of necessity, the songwriting is braver.

Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor.

Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age.

Small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary.

Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.

Yaral Sa Doom’s production frames those sessions as a beautiful dream. The gleeful disbelief, the happy hunch that things are not as they usually are, dizzies up the record just a bit, pulling it slightly out of time and space—all while staying close enough to terra firma to not lose sight of where it came from.

My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues.

So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop.

If you can resist getting totally stranded in its opiate-friendly atmospheres, the joys of 936 are easy to pin down.

If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity.

The Charm... is surprisingly great as conciliatory moves go.

If the band’s homespun and deliriously catchy 2014 compilation record Sunchokes captured the kinetic energy of a sweaty college party, The Refrigerator is the sound of a 10-year reunion, subdued and sentimental, reflective and a little restless.

If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer.

Star Wars is their strongest record in a decade.

Though Everything, Everything is unquestionably a swan song for the Emerson years, it's far from a mopey affair. In fact, it tackles early tracks like "Rez" and "Cowgirl," and pumps them up with megawatt power.

Surrounded is polished and persuasive enough that everyone should give it a try.

Long rows of evenly pulsing notes paired with streaming harmonies make for a low-stakes default mode. But when an album's mild downsides are all relative to its overwhelming strengths, it's hard to complain.

For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.

It’s when he sticks to the highly personal that Curry’s music is devoid of all cliché--the power of his performance, the veracity of his pen, and the color of his wordplay make him an expert at voicing the tribulations of this doomed condition we call being young.

Not to malign their previous catalog, which certainly trumps most of today's post-punk regurgitates, but Family Myth proves fewer studio tricks lead to tighter songwriting.

Despite a culminating victory lap in which riffs from the group’s past albums come back for a curtain call, the album doesn’t feel like a nostalgia trip. Instead, it’s a consolidation of the strengths that this band has been amassing over its long life.

Not All Heroes Wear Capes doesn’t just broaden Metro’s sound, it’s a showcase for artists relieved to be working with Metro again, because that’s when they are at their most creative. ... Metro stumbles a bit when he deviates from that Atlanta sound.

Staking his place as a fully formed singer, composer, and producer with All Our Knives Are Always Sharp, Njoku unsheathes his blade.

One of those albums where a couple of creative renegades flip out over every stylistic possibility available to them, overextend their ambition, and still come away from it making its missteps sound exciting.

Several of the new versions on Crime Rock just amount to tighter, better-quality recordings. In other cases, the changes are quite dramatic.

Ultimately comes out a very solid if not revelatory record.

Tapscott's specific words can get muffled, but more often than not that only helps to add a welcome sense of mystery to The Blue Depths, as for the first time it seems Odawas know precisely where they want to go and how they plan to get there.

Part vibraphone-laden, Chicago-style post-rock, part electronic minimalism, and part pure melodic exploration, Happiness occasionally manages to slip into an immensely blissful groove.

Metals is a vivid evocation of a place that touches on fittingly vast themes about nature, love, and life itself.

Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits.

LaVette is a proud interpreter, and even back in her earlier days she was covering David Bowie and Neil Young, but on Scene of the Crime her choices are a little less NPR-friendly than they were on the all-female critics darling roster of "Hell to Raise."

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.

A unique, gripping listen that's certainly not for everyone, but manages to carve out an appealing niche for itself.

Tell Me, her second album, matches and at times even surpasses her debut in terms of rueful atmosphere and unflinching songwriting, and Mayfield works to break free of her country confines and showcase her vocals in new, unexpected settings.

Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming.

The songs here are shorter, less cluttered, and just generally easier to listen to than Bitte Orca, which will disappoint you only if you love Dirty Projectors because of their relentless complexity.

This is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.

Having developed a sound so distinctly her own, Parks has liberated herself from any preset expectations of genre or style.

The biggest critique is that as an album, This Gift is perhaps too far in the red too much of the time, but even that complaint is tempered by the fact that the ride is so good

Fabriclive 73 is complex and confrontational but resolutely unshowy, an honest indication of the kind of pummeling 3am set you would have heard McAuley bang out over the past 18 months; all told, a worthy completion of the Hessle triptych and an excellent standalone in its own right.

Unknown Rooms is a short album, but its nine songs capture and sustain free-floating fear and menace.

Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin.

Some of Banks' best lines are elegantly self-aggrandizing and enemy-deflating, but she's just as capable of executing those moves in more straightforward terms.

More than just an autobiographical document or a manifestation of Charli’s impressive work ethic, How I’m Feeling Now is her answer to questions about the viability of music in a crisis. It works better than anyone could have anticipated.

On By the Time I Get to Phoenix, they reintroduce themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.

The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.

Zango is rooted in classic Zamrock, and it builds on the inherent malleability of the genre’s sound.

DEACON could use a few more awe-inspiring moments, but by celebrating simplicity, it enshrines the Black, queer love at its center as something blessedly uncomplicated and precious. Love doesn’t need tragedy to be great, and neither does serpentwithfeet. On DEACON, Wise proves his musicianship can stand on its own—no melodrama required.

Such an ambitious sophomore outing is a lot to take in, but with its blend of live drumming, textural guitars, skittering electronics, and wistful harmonies, it's worth braving Jojo's, uh, storm.

Produced by John Agnello, Here With Me features a small roster of musicians, including her regular backing trio, who do a fine job of complementing O'Connor's melodies without intruding on her personal space.

The songs on Internal Logic are like triple-exposed photographs, their nebulous, hazy qualities occasionally belying the acute skill with which they've been composed.

Scott already has his songwriting tools in place; once he finds his voice, look out.

Belladonna removes the buttress of Amaryllis’s horns and rhythm section. At times, the guitar and string quartet move like a single amorphous organism, untethered from any particular pulse. At others, one voice will offer a steady ostinato as a home base for the others to wander away from and return to at will.

Think of Glimmer as a little symphony, just with singles, and made by a musician who can't decide between the roles of producer or composer. Really, he shouldn't anytime soon.

[An] entertaining, varied rock record.

In these songs, that ravenous, sinuous jumble of muscle and gristle swells within Tagaq’s body. It is a fearful presence, but a righteous one. It speaks with a strength that the young girl at that long-ago house party did not yet know how to wield. The violence this being threatens is the protective kind. But there is room, too, for tenderness.

Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.

Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs.

Everything rolls along like it’s actually going somewhere—not a flatulent dubstep waddle, but an aerodynamic gallop that brings to mind a deeper lineage of loud and obnoxious dance music, from the technical end of drum’n’bass to “proper” dubstep, Northern bassline, and Chicago juke.

Sus Dog is warm and immediately gratifying, offering the musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate and sometimes breakneck production.

Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced.

On Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing.

These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite.

Snocaps is a return to form, its sound landing closer to the ramshackle pop-punk of P.S. Eliot than Saint Cloud’s twilit majesty.

It's this sense of fearless overreach that unites This Ain't Chicago's best moments, with producers capitalizing on house's additive structure by piling on every trick they can think of to create top-heavy epics of bristling sonics and contradictory moods.