They tease out old ideas and combine them with new ones, affixing Appalachian folk to classic rock, ambient, avant garde, and a kind of musical entropy that pushes many of their songs into sputtering, oddly compelling noise.

For whatever perverse reasons we want to be unsettled by their music, and made psychically uncomfortable. They’ve always delivered, but never before with this sense of style.

Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present--about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat.

Even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle.

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 album, and the woman steering it, are not only comfortable with their eccentricities but strengthened by them, and the effect is enthralling.

Shining are combining jazz and metal in original ways, from the filling up of jazz's precious empty spaces with ticking nervous energy to the replacement of metal's vocal aggression with creepy and disconnected noise. And if that's not the same as true originality, it's close enough.

Some may find that the new transparency makes his work a bit pedestrian, the work of another guy with a guitar and a few chords sharing simple sadness. But Ahmed’s senses of song and arrangement remain highly idiosyncratic, where verses spill into choruses and solos in unpredictable fashion.

Invoking Disintegration is ridiculous, but The Cure is remarkably more thrilling a listen than the band's most recent guitar-heavy predecessors.

Havilah broadens the Drones' sonic palette and continues to carve out a sound that is uniquely theirs, and in that sense it's an accomplishment, but wrestling with the record's dark subject matter makes it a difficult listen.

Unlike a lot of beat-based music, the focus here isn’t primarily on the precision of Coates’ patterns; Shelley’s is more about the way they scatter and change shape, like clouds drifting overhead.

Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy.

The Source may draw on Afrobeat and jazz to create something intricate and expansive, but the results are never contrived or academic.

Usually, it’s easier to fit the pieces together if you’re familiar with the political references, or if you’ve already been living under colonialism’s yolk. But Shook feels more urgent, more arresting, with performances that draw you into their world.

There Is No End is Allen as his most copacetic, polished self. It doesn’t feel like the finish line, but rather a passing of the baton—to artists who compelled him to evolve, and to fans always willing to be surprised.

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

Gumbo, along with his entire body of work, is evidence that there’s still new ground to be tread and fresh sounds to explore within rap itself. The blend of spices might be Nudy’s own, but the flavor of Gumbo is unmistakably hip-hop.

Migratory balances this restlessness with an equanimous serenity unruffled by the gales, confident that Fujita’s scrupulous hand will catch the next updraft.

Home Video is a bold statement, a powerful post-adolescent text in its own right.

Frequently the sharpest Chloe x Halle songs are the ones where the sisters are the most hands-on.

Even as the record is steeped in the long history of British folk music, that balance of the tactile and the spiritual anchors these songs in the present moment.

Lily We Need to Talk Now is wall-to-wall hooks. She draws on the entire history of pop-rock heartbreak anthems and ties it together with sugary-sweet vocals and a witty, whimsical sensibility.

Though the restless time changes and laser-show synth overtures betray prog-rock's ostentatious influence, the tightly constructed songs here (all but two of which stay under the five-minute mark) bristle with a passion and purpose that belongs only to the truly committed and composed.

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.

Too urgent to ignore, too pretentious to easily love, The Seduction of Kansas winds up feeling both high-concept and kind of hollow, whether inherently or in natural reflection of its subject matter.

kick iiii contains some of the most contemplative songs in the series—like the Oliver Coates collaboration “Esuna,” a mournful swirl of strings and plaintive vocal harmonies—but the widescreen intensity of “Alien Inside” fuels two more of the set’s boldest songs.

Although Cool World doesn’t stomp with the same weight of God’s Country, Chat Pile’s stylistic experiments pay off.

Solo ultimately reveals little we didn't already know about Vijay Iyer as a pianist, but to hear him explore these facets of his sound on his own, with no one to lean on, is still interesting. The central suite is where the album and the artist truly shine.

Bonet lets her imaginative, polymath inner child run free--but she never loses sight of adult reality.

Forsyth’s lyrics have never been sharper, or stranger.

10 Summers closes with four R&B tracks—two songs and two interludes, all of which act almost as palette cleansers after the unrelenting hardness of the previous eight numbers.

Aside from the sheer invention, what’s most striking about Viewfinder is Eisenberg’s ability to crystallize their complex, nuanced thoughts about the limits of perception without creating new dogma in the process.

With Weighing of the Heart, Iqbal adds another couple of strings to her bow, emerging as a pop auteur and songwriter of impressive emotional heft.

As Good as Gone is Nudge's best album so far, the kind of record that indicates a band has found its signature sound, and is poised to deepen and expand it.

Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.

Confinement prevents the EP from reaching GREY Area’s heights, but Drop 6 still contains deeply affecting moments.

The most focused Sparklehorse effort yet, the album flows along with the grace of a river occasionally stirred by a rapid or two.

There are moments on Mayday that feel essential, plucked out of the ether as if they’ve always existed. These chimeras of the past and present illustrate what Gendron does best—digging up timeless sounds only to disrupt them, reenvisioning what’s timeless for this precise moment.

Southeastern is easily Isbell’s best solo album--his most richly conceived and generously written. If it’s not quite the album that lives up to his considerable talents, it’s mostly the music that’s to blame.

Abrams’ music moves through time gracefully, adjusting to the demands of when and where it is performed, and who’s involved. The awe that his music channels lies in its grasp of mutability, tracking subtle changes in repeating patterns—whether from moment to moment or year to year.

El Último Tour Del Mundo gets at the core of what makes Bad Bunny so appealing. “Maldita Pobreza” isn’t just a trap-rock fusion experiment, it’s a reminder that Benito is less than half a decade removed from bagging groceries in Arecibo, daydreaming of exotic Italian sports cars. He toes the line between rap braggadocio and vulnerable everyman with relative ease.

In parts, Albion's shambolism is stunning, but that's no excuse for moments of total sloppiness.

The result is his best album to date--his most mystical and earthbound, all at once.

Saves the World approaches adulthood with unabashed honesty, so you’ll be ready to smash the system a little more gently. And while MUNA’s pop is preoccupied with that greater sense of purpose, it carries its heavy heart to the dancefloor.

Where The Best Day proffered a somewhat uneven mix of extended odysseys and rough-hewn sketches, Rock n Roll Consciousness is much more cohesive and smoothly sequenced.

On Chalice Hymnal, they’ve added another solid story to their growing skyscraper.

Just 35 minutes long, the album is a mix of downbeat mood pieces, more fully fleshed-out songs, and effervescent ambient miniatures.

Meluch and Irisarri have crafted a genuine, coherent album that conjures immense shadows and immense depths worthy of its namesake.

It’s as if she’s stepping outside those limited bounds for the first time in a long time, confident that she can take a risk and still find a soft place to land. Her quiet yet spirited second album offers one too.

It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. ... But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface.

Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless.

The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed.

The result is comfortably atonal--a headphones listen that's difficult but ultimately more haunting.

Whether he’s full of joy or howling into the void, he pushes his songs to their edge, which helps to deliver on the promise shown in his earlier work.

The Ornament's expansiveness owes a fair bit to Olsen's voice, which sounds like it's been given an emotional B12 shot. His lyrics are prettily--albeit somewhat emptily-- evocative, richly textured, and his tonal pronunciation (the "PO-lice cars" of "Hanging Window") adds temporal sentimentality to his words.

Unto the Locust does fall off a bit toward the end, but that's largely because the first four tracks add up to just under 30 minutes of the most exciting metal you'll hear all year.

Nothing else on Metamodern is quite so bold or quite so dense as “Turtles All the Way Down”, but Simpson comes across as a man deeply dissatisfied with the easy answers country music typically passes along as wisdom.

The question that all improvisers have to answer is whether something you play once can be worth listening to more than once. Experience and forethought ease the answer toward yes, and Drumm has both at his command.

Coming from such a creative bunch, the straightforward character of Crystal Fairy is surprising, but the strong, pre-existing rapport between its two pairs of players helps.

NOW bleeds with the awareness that tomorrow is never guaranteed.

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

Dalliance is the sound of a good band tightening to the point where they become something greater.

The album’s second half slows down a bit, but it maintains the focus on songcraft and mood.

Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.

Many artists of Wreckless Eric’s era and tradition have imitators, but few of yesteryear’s outliers can catch up with their descendants, let alone best them. amERICa is that rare record.

Although it's unfocused by design, Everything is still unfocused. Which is not to say it's inconsistent: a major improvement in this regard over Trainwreck-- which meandered off into ambient oblivion on its final four tracks-- Everything is markedly well assembled.

Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power.

Despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place.

Odd instrumental touches crop up throughout the album, and there's a welcome layer of grit and murk to even the prettiest songs here.

As the languid classical guitar that dots the album brings it to a close, it hits that this 44-minute opus is perhaps more inviting, and more melodic, than anything Jenkinson has done in a long time.

By combining American punk, British art-rock, and Swedish smarts to beef up their already muscular sound, they've not only developed a distinctive sonic personality on Das Not Compute, but they've developed a pose into a stance.

This is not by any stretch a turn toward the accessible, though there are a few great pop moments.

The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window. Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

Young may be famous for his maelstrom guitar, but in this case the apocalypse sneaks up on us with a whisper, Young's voice steeped in decades of watching the world go to hell.

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.

Remember the Life Is Beautiful isn't a triumph simply because it so elegantly captures the Balearic style; it's that it so elegantly captures its spirit.

So Z abandons the Skynyrdisms of It Still Moves, but that album's lessons remain intact: Compared to those on previous albums, these tracks have more guitar crunch and tighter song structures.

Magma’s not nearly as esoteric as the albums that preceded it--and considering how Gojira’s progressive tendencies have distinguished them from the get-go, the catchiest tracks on the record arguably take the biggest risks.

If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur.

The lyrics don't match the usually upbeat sound, and that disconnect helps make the band even more interesting.

She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing.

Their 13th album, La Isla Bonita, is among their most accessible, reaching for moments of escapism that never entered the frame on 2012's Breakup Songs.

A nostalgic return to happier times this ain’t; more like an indictment of the current malaise via a defense of the dancefloor at both its holiest and most profane.

For one reason or another, Modeselektor seem unwilling to trim the fat and here again, are a handful of just-okay songs that probably should have been lopped off. Cut some of them and you've got a great record instead of just a darn good one.

The record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown.

This album seems smaller than every record he’s made since 2011’s Chief. That modesty is the key to its very appeal: This is an album designed not for the moment but the long haul.

Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.

Although the album is the band’s biggest yet, with a cast of dozens including 13 violinists alone, it rarely feels bulky. Only the too-Arcade-Fire-for-comfort “Where Is Her Head” succumbs to grandiosity, prioritizing spectacle over purpose.

Born Again in the Voltage as an essential document of contemporary modular-synth music from one of the instrument’s great new explorers.

Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.

It’s sentimental, wry, curious, and highly synergistic: Even if the dialogue has its lulls, the silences never feel awkward.

The whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.

No matter how unambiguous the references, these don’t feel like imitations; they feel like Nathan Fake tracks.

Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.

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.

Just Like Moby Dick is worthy of an earnest listen.

The free-jazz vibe still makes for a visceral experience, regardless of whether not you can actually follow Quazarz’ path. They continue to eschew standard song structures in favor of free-flowing compositions whose direction is guided by instinct.