There's nothing hectic about the listening experience; thanks to its relaxed pace and gently abstracted shapes, Wald is every bit as contemplative as the forest walks that inspired it.

They're still honing the edge that's going to set them apart. But for the time being, the hooks are enough to convert plenty of true believers.

At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic--a work of volume and violence in tight spaces.

Yet for all its controlled chaos, The Long Walk is Uniform’s most stylistically consistent record.

A singer of remarkable power and expression, Staples essentially rewrites these songs simply by singing them, imbuing each line with fine gradients of emotion and authority. She emerges as the active agent in the project, delivering these songs from her perspective as a black woman, as an artist, as a daughter and sister, even as a Christian.

It’s not easy to breathe warmth into such notoriously cold music, but Detached From the Rest of You manages to be intimate, human, and emotive.

Bands like this often aren't lucky enough to find singers this subtle, striking, and strong.

The connections between past and present, between style and form, make Queen feel like her most creatively honest album. She remains a force--whether you’re willing to bow or not.

Marling may spend the majority of these songs and several others struggling to find wisdom and peace in the face of trials brought on by lust, money, and death, but she almost always sounds like she already has all the answers.

On Death Becomes Her, Angel-Ho beautifully transmutes any past anguish into a colorful network of global sonics, a bold statement of trans femininity, and a rallying cry for resistance. At once, Angel-Ho shatters binaries and encompasses dualities.

Choreography stands as a most impressive debut: one that captures a young rock 'n' roll band buzzing with raw energy and inspiration, while already displaying the sort of rapidly sophisticating songcraft you expect to hear on a sophomore release.

Levitate leverages rave nostalgia to get to a deeper truth: Free your inner child, and your ass and mind will follow.

Diotima's glory is often in its details. It has fewer stops, starts, and redirections than its predecessors. Rather, the big shifts are now often misleadingly subtle and slight, created more by the way the musicians move against and with each other than how the band moves as a unit.

Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves.

It fits alongside the best of his career and adds another solid release to a solo catalog which will hopefully become more cherished in time.

RiotUSA is behind the boards on every track, and Y2K! is a testament to the strength of their long-running creative partnership. Its weakest moments are those featuring outsiders—Gunna and Travis Scott just get absolutely rinsed here. What makes Y2K! so instantly memorable is Ice Spice’s refusal to be pigeonholed.

Tuttle and his backing band reconnect with the naturalism of the energy around them, harnessing an ever-present whimsy. Sprawling and varied, Fleeting Adventure uses instrumental music as a way to convey imaginative transcendentalism.

Even as they explore alien aesthetics, the Body and Full of Hell are constantly finding ways to uphold the spirit of each other's work.

Even those accustomed to Sloan's effortlessness will find the first half of Parallel Play almost flawless. There's still little in the way of artifice or innovation, but it's still easy to admire the architecture.

Every strength this record holds draws off the symbiotic relationship between Martin's beats and Robinson's voice, which adapt to each other in a way that the last two people in a barren environment might.

Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you.

This is music just about anyone can enjoy, either for close listening or simply ambient sound.

Bazan sings better than he ever has on Phoenix, his voice round and worn with intricacy from years of use, like a hiking stick toted in the same hand for a thousand miles.

Matched to this sophisticated, admirably restrained music, Turner's Submarine songs have a backwards-looking quality, a guy who's been through it calmly reexamining the scars and renavigating the pitfalls.

Earthly Delights shows their career is less a series of sprints than one exhilarating marathon.

Owens has created a leaner and more direct record that uses ultra-crisp and gleamingly bright production to find a whole new way to dream.

McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion, and on this oddly affecting album he comes across as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers missives from another plane.

Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery.”

Don’t Trust Mirrors is the snake’s head and tail: the project’s flash of inspiration and its culmination, the point where Moran lost her passion for the prepared piano and found it again.

It's an enjoyable listen in the here and now, which is all an album has to be, even when created by giants.

The 2004 session at Maida Vale favors songs from 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound; there are hints at that record’s more extemporaneous approach here. ... The second session, recorded with a live studio audience shortly after Peel’s untimely death, feels like a funeral procession cut with an air of irony. ... As far as Shellac songs go, “The End of Radio” is a postmodern masterwork, balancing Albini’s nihilism with an evergreen critique of the centrality of mass media.

More than a remix album, then, Source ⧺ We Move is like an expansion pack to Source’s electric, eclectic universe, opening up paths and byways that shed new light on Garcia’s work while staying true to her vision; a modular musical adventure that is best enjoyed in context.

The Edge of Everything is perhaps too esoteric for either camp—a 5D rendering of the genre rather than a simple homage. But in calling back to concept-driven works like Goldie’s divisive Saturnz Return or the Japanese swordsmanship references of Photek’s Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu EP, The Edge of Everything proves that drum’n’bass can still wield an awesome experimental power as it enters its fifth decade.

This feels like a step down from the last two albums.

The album is full of nebulous renderings like this, where we’re left to interpret Dare’s personal mythology. It makes Milkteeth feel suspended in time, more dream than recollection.

Even in their repeated defiance of having anything to prove, Pond still scramble with the passion and irreverence of underdogs.

The album is spritely, frequently bright, as intensely melodic as Ex Hex’s triumphant Rips and more playful than a record this heartbroken probably should be.

Part Three sounds much better. The songs are more linear and of a piece: dank bop compositions that often gnarl up in the middle and leave no room for extended solos. The pace and form of their songs no longer springs from jams, and there’s new tension and spacing to show for it.

Thankfully that mixture of modesty and reticence didn't endure, because Zayna Jumma is a densely layered piece of cultural cross-pollination that consistently spills over into outright joy.

Some might lament the fact that so many tracks feel like teasers pointing toward something longer and more developed, with most of these two- or three-minute ideas fading out as soon as they get a good, eerie groove going. If so, you can take comfort that he's given himself so many possibilities for album number three.

Nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past.

Smith’s voice is assured and grounded: She reaches far less frequently for belting high notes and runs than she did on Lost & Found, instead sitting back comfortably.

Consistent, concise and stylistically compelling, Hyperview is a good set of tracks, and a worthy crossover attempt at that, provided you’re OK with consulting the lyrics booklet and willing to take a ride on the undertow.

The songs may arise from turmoil, but the production is enveloping and inviting, suggesting there’s a path out of the darkness.

The opening Wright sample is a hard look back at a year most people would already rather forget, but it's a perfect intro for Gutter Tactics, an album that draws much of its strength from the same well of outrage and disaffection.

We get his best on How to Get to Heaven From Scotland, an album any Arab Strap fan could love.

She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life.

The tension between those two poles--refusing to grow up and yearning to move on-- is the emotional engine that drives the band and its impressively confident record.

These songs are bolder and more brutal, less interested in florid wording or oblique metaphor; they express feelings of alienation and self-loathing with discomfiting clarity.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement.

Given its relatively seamless mesh of spiky, aggro party music and the more contemplative electronic moments created by Martinez and Moore, Spring Breakers is the rare soundtrack that covers both extremes and makes it work as a whole.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

The Posterkids sound positively ageless through No More Songs about Sleep and Fire, not having missed a flailing beat through the intervening years of decreasing tempos.

As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of.

For every bit of overcompensation--he actually cracks a bottle over a dude's head in "Raw"--there's something vividly rendered and honest.

In less capable hands, music so meticulously researched and constructed could sound like pure mimicry. Instead, Dummy have transcended their influences and crafted their own record collector gem.

Buoys is a sad and wistful album, though in a non-specific way.

When asked to rank the group’s previous albums by Noisey last year, Kugel ranked them in reverse order. On The Devil You Know, their evolution continues.

HTRK are at their most vulnerable here, sounding in desperate need of sating desires before they are paralyzed by listlessness and disappointment.

Much sharper-edged than the sounds one would usually associate with healing, Daijing’s music still seems to cultivate a space in which one might grow.

Lost in Space leaves you feeling that she's already covered this terrain.

Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns.

This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch.

The result is a vibrant, bold record that is, at its heart, a love letter to her home country.

It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes--but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.

As a songwriter, Giddens achieves immediacy by imbuing her stories with striking interpersonal drama and emotional depth.

Robinson sings with a newfound clarity on Nurture, writing directly about his struggles and the ecstatic realizations that have come from hard times.

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.

Most rewardingly and remarkably, Nudes, Singles & Backsides manages to present a fairly detailed portrait of an artist who found himself suddenly back on the pop music margins.

It’s when Fujita moves unaccompanied that he ascends to a more contemplative and numinous realm.

Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods.

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.

It’s been more than a half-decade wait for Chronology, but in a genre known for singles, Chronixx has produced a complete, solid album.

Whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.

Beabadoobee is well-suited to imaginary worlds: Her lyrics are often more form than function, her words merely vessels for sounds.

The music they make together is remarkably coherent. Crowded as it is with instruments and ideas, Grumbling Fur doesn’t sound like a collision of sensibilities.

The soundtrack album Les Revenants contains not a shred of the terror Mogwai is capable of wreaking, and it works terrifically--it rarely comes off overly dramatic or leading, and matches the unsettling feel of the show.

The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever.

The Oranges Band's playing is impressive but never flashy, and the melodies are inviting without being cloying.

For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.

After 30 years, Esoteric Warfare is a Mayhem album worth talking about more for its sounds than its associated baggage.

[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.

The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.

At first, Krlic’s soundtrack captures the instinctive panic that comes with the upset of environmental and cultural norms. But as Aster’s characters grow acclimated to their new surroundings, he relieves us with symphonic moments of clarity (“The Blessing”) and triumph.

A maddeningly spacy, fairly inconsistent, but very rich set of songs that capitalize on the leftover space from guitarist Gibb Slife's departure.

Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song.

Though it is abstract, Old Punch Card is playful. It's like the sound of a guy bumping around in a room filled with weird noisemakers, trying out one and then another until he finds one that sounds especially interesting.

Taken as a full-length by two groups that treat the format with some suspicion, You, Whom I Have Always Hated is a remarkably cohesive and singular album. Though it shows signs of both responsible parties, it also proves their inherent restlessness.

Citay remain controlled and careful. Songs are constructed so that each line plays a certain role, every note tells its tale. Maybe that's where it will lose some listeners, too: It's not tough and rough and wild around the edges like Green's old band could be, or a lot of heavy metal can be. And it's not open at the ends like jam-band music. But this is Feinberg's third album of eight tracks in about 40 minutes, all exploring the same excitable intersection of psychedelia and pop.

Corrosion of Conformity does overstay its welcome with a couple of second-rate tracks, but overall, the album manages to both recapture Animosity's feral energy and reach compositional peaks that the 1985 versions of Dean, Weatherman, and Mullin couldn't have accessed.

A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess.

private music—like A Moon Shaped Pool and Fossora—is unlikely to draw in unconvinced listeners, but like those records, it shows them fully in control of their instantly recognizable sound, able to effortlessly bend it around whatever structures they put in its place.

It's not fair to Forster, of course, who rose to the occasion with his warmest and most welcoming solo album. But even beyond the imherant emotional baggage, songs such as 'Did She Overtake You' or the slightly bombastic 'Don't Touch Anything' still sound like they could have used a pass through someone else's filter.

By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality.

A clumsier artist might turn this self-excoriating streak into something brutally caustic, stripping back the layers until only rawness remains. Houghton resists that impulse on Lung Bread’s later songs, purging her past while leaving her strange, spiky magic intact.

True to its title, Voices in a Rented Room is modestly scaled and simply structured; the tone and form established in a song’s first verse don’t change by the time we reach the third. But even within these confines, New Bums rarely retrace their steps.

At every turn, Total Life Forever is inviting. Much more alive than earlier efforts, it's an album with a complexion that constantly changes with time....[But] the album's second half doesn't fare so well, drowning at times in aqueous atmospherics.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.