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

Fun House embodies all Duffy’s gifts at once, bringing their virtuosic talent into their own wheelhouse, on their own terms.

What it lacks in traditional hooks, it compensates for with distinct and weighty gestures.

She has discussed the idea of songs having multiple lives, and that people, too, can live more than one existence in parallel, always aware of their diametric opposite. These songs bridge the gap between the two, exposing the overwhelming darkness that unifies her eclectic output along the way.

Ryonen is an engaging first strike.

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.

What Legacy+ offers is a merging of Fela’s legend, Femi’s unrelenting struggle, and Made’s extension of the genre: three generations of Arobeats in one place.

The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.

Nothing on these songs sounds the least bit rote or comfortable, and that’s remarkable for a band so far into an unlikely career.

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.

Deep Fried Grandeur has a certain shelf life, but then again, the spirit of its origins was all about bright, short-lived sparks. You savor the brief chemistry, and then part ways, remembering it fondly. Above all, Deep Fried Grandeur is just a joy to visualize.

As passionately as All of Us Flames dreams of escape, it’s bound to a dystopian reality, where even the dreamiest, most abstract songs aren’t immune from fear.

Their career arc since 2001’s Beautiful Garbage suggests that wobbly songwriting is as much a tic as their masterful studio expertise. The cult still thrives, and we’ll happily settle for Let All We Imagine Be the Light—until the next album.

Co-produced by the band and Josh Evans, it’s filled with all the markers of cerebral, studio-born rock music: drum loops and programmed synths, swirling keys and fretless bass, wide dynamics and spacey textures. For the first time in a while, the winning moments are the slower cuts. ... The artistic rejuvenation that Gigaton aims to provide still seems somewhat out of reach.

A Man Alive's great virtue is that Nguyen can still sound like she's having the time of her life even as she's recounting the darkest moments from it.

The album probably doesn’t need to be 100 minutes long. Its length might have worked better if he had more neatly divided its 18 tracks into a right-brain and left-brain side, rather than breaking up its flow by zigzagging between satin-finish soul and misted minimal house. But the few surprises scattered along the way that make its unpredictable course feel worthwhile.

Sun’s Signature is among Fraser’s most illuminating and eloquent music to date, the work of a flesh-and-blood person rather than the chimerical Cocteau Twin of myth.

Spontaneity is a live band’s great asset, and that’s hard to convey in a recording studio, but the record is endearing and absorbing even when it stumbles.

Power and Hung have made either the year's most introverted party album or the most expansive loner's album; either way, there are few albums this year that offer this much space to get lost in.

Any live show will inevitably have crests and valleys, but besides these specific performances, Okonokos disappoints on a more general level: It too seldom sounds like an actual live album.

MADE might be a small album, one that never musically ventures outside Scarface's comfort zone, but it's a heavily personal work from someone with a whole lot to say.

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.

The first disc, a June 2005 concert at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall, starts out lifeless, with little variety in Smith's voice or Shields' metronomic guitar. Halfway through the hour-long performance, things pick up, as Smith yells fervent imperatives over shimmering waves from Shields' amp.

This is the rare album that reveals new depth within a catalog that already seemed so deep and ruminative while proclaiming rather unlimited possibilities for a band nearing the end of its first decade.

Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies.

Though often framed as the band’s discovery of R&B, Sunshine Tomorrow reveals Wild Honey to contain almost as many connections to brother Brian’s sad-boy masterpieces and psych-pop as it does to the surf-rockers of yore.

This music is so bluntly fatalistic—in idea and execution—that it feels life-affirming to experience, as cleansing as scalding water. The Body have embraced that sensation since finding it on their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. On I’ve Seen All I Need to See, it is mercilessly distilled and efficient, reminding us there’s no time to waste.

Mythopoetics advances Half Waif’s tendency toward plurality of voice.

BADBADNOTGOOD are known for turning tradition inside out, but Talk Memory is not just their finest album—it’s evidence of the historic appreciation that roots their reverence.

But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.

The best songs on In Times New Roman… are hiding in the back half, resulting in an unusually lopsided experience.

Despite Price's best efforts to infuse these songs with motion and finesse, Confessions never quite reaches its earlier heights after "I Love New York". When Madonna actually starts confessing, the album loses its delicate balance between pop frivolity and spiritual gravity.

Blitzen Trapper are no longer talented jacks-of-all-trades, but a master of one, and Furr is proof that this already-great band gets even better as they define themselves more specifically.

Works is a crisp, punchy-sounding record, not far from the unfussy, live-in-a-room feel of early triumphs like Prairie School Freakout.

It’s evident that Walker is talented and brimming with ideas--and there are moments on this record that mark the best music he’s ever made. But he needs to get a better understanding of his strengths if he wants to become more than just another nifty live-guitar throwback.

Black Sea is positively huge while also being much more accessible. You get a sense here of how far Fennesz has come, how far his music reaches, and the unexplored possibilities that still exist.

Colonial Patterns is a fine album title, suggesting so much yet giving little away.

It would have been a lot more of an interesting listen, however, had he decided to really get his hands dirty in feedback and digital fuzz.

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.

Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.

With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity.

On ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST, Osees begin their return flight to the garage-rock headbanging of their mid-2010s material. There’s too much synth and wooden drumming to sound like a full throwback to their Thee Oh Sees days, but you wouldn’t be misguided if you said the album’s title and art mirror Mutilator Defeated at Last from a decade ago.

In a sense, these thirty-six minutes show that the duo has basically been stuck in neutral since 1995.

Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

It's just straight rock and roll, really, and I mean really straight rock and roll.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step.

This meandering quality might put off some listeners, but to my ears, Azeda Booth have figured out how to reconcile pop music's infectiousness with ambient music's nebulous aura, and have produced one of 2008's most unique and immediately pleasurable albums.

A disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.

Even if their whole style is essentially a throwback, there's plenty of room out there for throwback done right. But on too much of Youth and Lightness, they're not the machine they could be.

Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade--you don't want to fuck with it.

A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless.

As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force.

There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.

Ellery and Skye are in their fourth year of music school—and they are still finding their way. But when they nail it, as on “The City,” their first-thought-best-thought creative bursts sound not just thrilling but genuinely new. For a group so steeped in retro modes, that’s no small thing.

There are other records like this one, but they’re few and far between.

It is a mark of Altin Gün’s ingeniousness that Yol never feels forced. The album glides along like a particularly elegant swan, musical dexterity and audacious spirit paddling away frantically below the surface.

Ballentine’s strengths are most apparent in the feel of this album, which is consistently rich and gauzy. Even the clearest acoustic guitar licks are somehow buried beneath a persistent field of sustain and mild distortion.

Even on an album steeped in melancholy, Berrin finds plenty of moments to be cheeky and theatrical, just like fellow teen queen Olivia Rodrigo and new pop star on the block Chappell Roan.

What's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.

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."

Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

[The minor differences between the early and official takes] are rare, illuminating displays of imperfection from a band that, for the subsequent 15 years, made no false moves.

It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.

All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting.

Free All the Monsters simply consists of a set of plaintive songs that draw on all the stylistic cues this band has worked hard to establish in the past (a Byrds-ian jangle, a touch of Velvets-style dissonance) and tightens everything up a touch.

As good as these renditions are, the emotional heart of Georgia Blue lies in those alternative rock covers, songs where Isbell and the 400 Unit allow themselves some freedom of interpretation.

True, a thematically consistent whole, sounds like the product of a lovingly forged artistic bond.

There is a ton of evidence of his genius at work here.... As an album, though, The Further Adventures of Lord Quas doesn't cut it.

Recalls last year's fine Halo Benders release, The Rebels Not In, the album Martsch recorded with Beat Happening's Calvin Johnson and former Spinanes and current Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf. And that's not a bad thing at all.

Though there is an overall whiff of the 1980s about Vapours, it sidesteps the traps of either sounding trendily vintage or indistinguishable from the rest of today's Reagan-era impostors. It works best, however, to think of the album as a return to "Return to the Sea," only, as its title suggests, in a hazier, less opaque form.

Bronson's biggest strengths are a goofy sense of humor and a refreshing lack of self-regard: at its best, Well-Done is like spending 45 minutes with the affable, roly-poly guy who cracked you up at your high school lunch table.

On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.

The prismatic, black-lit aura of their fascinating, endlessly explorable debut Psychic doesn’t try to stop anyone from making that connection and if you spot Jaar’s stated influences of Can and Richie Hawtin, that’s fine too: rarely has a record held such appeal for the high-minded while welcoming the simply high-minded.

The result is Manchester Orchestra’s most confounding, thrilling, and unintentionally loopy album yet.

The joy of being a collective bleeds into every bar and hook. For a change, it’s a Brockhampton album that isn’t telling you what to think or feel; it just sounds good.

In other words: Sure they're funny, but are these songs supposed to be any good? Surprisingly, yes.

Tromatic Reflexxions sometimes seems to work like a Fall album, wearing you down with its relentless energy.

Heart Ache suggests a sense of ambition and movement grander than that of any Jesu LP. Dethroned, meanwhile, suggests a deliberate move toward the middle, with relatively compact song structures and dynamic and textural variety. If Broadrick can unite those ideas into one 40-minute Jesu blast, this band might finally have its full-length masterpiece.

It's pretty good. That much anyone aware of Johnston's past highpoints probably could have predicted.

You may not love all the moves Orcutt makes, but together they quicken your pulse and pressurize the atmosphere, much as a good horror film makes even calm moments seem one second away from shock.

At its best, Sleep feels like compositionally rigorous new age music. It’s a place in which you can settle for a while, with or without a pillow, and emerge only when you are ready to rejoin the restive world.

The ensemble’s playing and the leader's compositions make Junun an easy stretch--though, crucially, not a condescending one--for listeners otherwise unfamiliar with the great variety of methods often obscured by "world music" market-speak.

City Lake is a glimpse at the raw materials before all the splinters have been sanded down--and it is all the more exciting for them.

The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.

Rooted somewhere in the corporeal fantasies that have always propelled dance music, Hesaitix unravels an imaginary realm that feels genuinely new in form.

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.

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.

Yes, this music gets dull--it’s supposed to. I can’t imagine listening to it all the time for the same reasons I can’t imagine trying to cook an entire meal using only a garlic press. But in their limited pursuits Bohren captures a mood other music either struggles to or just doesn’t bother with: Not sadness (too acute), not angst, but a sumptuous, all-purpose melancholy.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

The more voices he lets into the frame, the fuller and richer the results, and More Life bursts with energy and lush sounds--more guests, more genres, more producers, more life. It is as confident, relaxed, and appealing as he’s sounded in a couple of years.

SOUND & FURY is miles down the road from any of his previous albums.

British producer and Transglobal Underground vet Nick Page, aka Dub Colossus, got the ball bouncing with A Town Called Addis, an intriguing conflation of reggae and dub sensibilities with Ethiopian pop. It's an ingenious idea made more interesting by its roundabout mode of composition.

Her ambitions are bold, but the album has a sense of polished remove that prevents it from scaling real emotional heights.

The occasional bluebird-embroidered country-folk tune pleasantly drifts by, but most often, Found Light is riveting, and even its plainer moments are essential to its narrative arc.

Swanlights might be Antony's richest album yet, with musical and thematic charms that take their time to take their hold.

On Your Own Love Again has more earnest moments, but its unadorned emotional uncertainty is profound and relatable.

They're more interested in following intuition than patterns, and II is way more physical than mental. Its density, pace, and exuberance are, for anyone that likes to get lost in sound, basically a sonic amusement park.