Panorama skillfully and subtly creeps towards resonance rather than catharsis, an approach that can make even their own colleagues sound like they’re trying to cheat towards the big release. Even when La Dispute rock, they do so like they’re trying to tiptoe on a frozen pond.

Though it's one of the few songs on Last that isn't sad and bleak, their voices come together just so, and the result is mystifying and devastating.

My nervous system just can’t endure 17 tracks of uncut Jens at once; it’s a giddy squee! sustained for 80 minutes. But it has variety and inspiration throughout, and it works great when taken in two chunks, one spinning a relationship together and the other gently tugging it apart.

Cashion and Willen’s sense of melody is as rich as their textural layering, resulting in pieces that are immediately engaging yet hypnotically serene, and, at times, devastating in their poignancy.

With its amalgam of genres, tones, and tastes, Ivory goes beyond thinking outside the box: It’s as if the box were never even there to begin with.

Nighttime Stories plays like one seamless expression—its 50-minute runtime passes remarkably quickly—but it’s a statement heavy with meaning and memories.

The headspace it produces is calming but frequently, dreamily surreal, and it often seems like a better place to live than the world outside it.

Even if Live at Bush Hall wasn’t intended to be the next official entry in their canon, the accompanying soundtrack album certainly earns its right to be considered as such. Notwithstanding the occasional bit of stage banter that makes no sense without the film (“Happy prom night!”), Live at Bush Hall is as cohesive a statement as any other record in the band’s discography.

Although Heartworms never quite conjures the magic of those first couple Shins albums, it’s further proof that they weren’t a fluke. This guy always did, and still does, know how to write a song that sticks.

For years now, Shabazz Palaces have oozed a kind of creative wisdom, the type that can only come with age and years of lived experience, but The Don of Diamond Dreams demonstrates a sign of even deeper wisdom: living an entire life of your own, and realizing that there’s still value in learning and listening from the youth.

Nots’ third album is a guerilla campaign against surveillance in the service of systemic control. With 3, Nots make fierce rock music equally apt for moshing in solidarity or smashing an Alexa--all forms of control in chaos.

The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

They cast a powerful spell and sustain it over 11 tracks, yet at times you wish they'd jam, or perform a cover, or do anything to break it up somehow.

Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one.

The quality of the beats easily overcomes the somewhat odd novelty of hearing backpackers in close quarters with hardcore rappers, and with each listen it starts feeling more and more natural to have an all-star CD where M.O.P. and Little Brother both have hot tracks.

Mala is Banhart's best record in nearly a decade--largely because it's his loosest and funniest.

Their songs burst open upon inspection; you must first shrink to their size, but once you do, you'll probably want to stick around for awhile.

Surfing takes the disenchanted bits of Swearin' and blows them out into 34 minutes of honed unrest—it's a self-aware, deliberate, and ultimately truthful sophomore slump.

The constantly-disruptive feel of Hexadic makes it perhaps the most consistent Six Organs albums to date.

Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work.

It might be their weakest album, but Presence is among the most special; none of these songs sound like they could have come from another record.

She has an urbane sophistication that sets her apart from the likes of Ashanti and Nivea.

The disjointed juxtaposition of styles on this disc is so pronounced that it feels intentional; like The White Album or Jega's Spectrum, this record underscores its versatility at the expense of consistency.

Like Total Life Forever, Holy Fire threatens greatness, and whatever disappointment comes from missing the mark is mitigated by its scope: A bomb needs to be operational more than it needs to be accurate.

It’s a strong album, but it’s not another Forever Changes, whose accomplishments in retrospect were unrepeatable, or even another Four Sail. On the other hand, Lee wasn’t aiming to craft something in that vein.

Mini departures aside, Wreck is simply another strong Unsane album and another wrench thrown in the idea that an enduring band needs an arc.

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.

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.

75 Dollar Bill slyly nudges you beyond the familiar, so that—no matter your record-nerd knowledge—you’ll wind up someplace new.

They’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.

A rousing, unabashedly sentimental album that’s even more explicitly about recalibrating fading dreams than its predecessor.

For the sisters' part, their voices are steadier now, and richer.

The sounds of Touareg and Afrobeat and Ghanaian Highlife are rippling through the eight songs here, each a rollicking, warm reflection of appreciation.

Created in mere weeks, it doesn't sound fussy or fussed over, and manages the tricky balance of audible intimacy without crappy bedroom acoustics.

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.

Burning projects newfound poise and even joy through a sophisticated collage. Rashad’s collection of references and phrases plays like the inside of a jumbled but vibrant brain.

Whether it be for a lazy day under the shade or a muggy evening of shared, muted physicality, Tuff Times Never Last welcomingly meets you in the moment.

Presley finds melodic inspiration in classic rock, but blurs his reference points toward punk by coating the music in lo-fi grit. His third proper album, Family Perfume, doubles down on those zonked out inclinations.

Drawing from a few different traditions while making them their own, Future Islands prove here to be a well-versed group of wild, woolly storytellers.

Chin Up Buttercup is certainly an evolutionary leap for Austra, but it’s not a total departure.

Constant Future doesn't much build on previous albums, stylistically or qualitatively, but it displays a group of now-veteran dudes who know their strengths and who never stop playing to them.

The debut Big Joanie LP, Sistahs, is an impressively woven tapestry of affirmational lyrics, girl-group chants, and deep, slashing guitars that would have sounded very at home on Kill Rock Stars in the 2000s.

These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.

Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.

Her respect for her craft shines throughout the record, a surprisingly joyful release ostensibly about a bad business deal.

Its focus on the verities of songcraft suggests an artist confident enough to lean harder into tropes, formulas, and covers (including a spicy take on Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye”). It may feel like fiddling while Rome burns, but artistically it pays off.

Aytche is, for the most part, an easygoing album, but an unsettling undercurrent runs through it as well. The muted thumps and ominous dissonance of “Chopping Wood” play like an ambient riposte to Bitches Brew.

Though a versatile vocalist, Jenkins isn’t actually a Tier 1 rapper. His rasp can struggle when forced to take on too much, especially amid the prominent percussion and tough orchestration of something like “Ghost.” But this is a minor gripe within a major scheme. ... A gripping portrait of one human among Chicago’s 2.7 million.

Here, Horsegirl learn how dazzling it is to instead pull back and feel the invisible touch of what was once there, a fizzy tingling on the palms and cushion of silence around the ears. That growth is the most memorable part of Horsegirl’s new album.

The songs are the most intriguing ones to emerge from this Wyoming project thus far. ... A lot of the energy that "ye" seemed to be gasping for fills the lungs of this project, and it’s humbling to consider how much this material might have enlivened West’s own album.

Like Hercules’s first two records, Feast transcends mere homage not only through sonic innovations but by the quality of the emotional connection it makes with its audience.

His most distinctive release to date. While he initially garnered attention for his pastiches of ’80s art-rock, he’s channeled his influences into a record that’s both more expansive and more intimate.

That tension between conception and execution makes all the good energy of Sunshine Rock feel hard-earned and genuine; scars and all, it’s the sound of somebody who has weathered battles and worked to survive.

In the Same Room is spacious and restrained, at times offering concentrates of the songs’ emotive fundamentals. It’s also further occasion for Holter to sharpen material or else mine it for new meaning.

The band’s defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. That may mean that New Material lacks the punch of their feisty debut, but it also lends these songs a soothing quality.

At times, Nelson’s nonchalance makes some of the more topical concerns on God’s Problem Child feel a tad hackneyed. ... That leaves plenty of space for the other veteran songwriters to slip Nelson their own meditations on aging.

It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.

The record’s complexity reveals itself over several listens, its slow-motion quietude opening up into a not-quite-happiness; what might be described as flow, or else, focus.

There are a handful of solid songs on Humor Risk, though, without an outright dud in the bunch-- and if that represents a disappointment, then in the end, the joke might be on us.

Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation.

The most diverse and ambitious recording to appear under the Efdemin name, incorporating not just standard electronic kit but also dulcimer, sing-drum, hurdy-gurdy, and guitars.

These elements [traces of her jazz and blues-rock past] add splashes of unexpected color to these songs, bringing the extroversion of those styles to the too often introverted genre of indie pop and making Hummingbird, Go! sound to big for any kitchen to contain.

You get a good sense of just what kind of man Drew is on Darlings, reconciling monogamy with promiscuity, Broken Social Scene’s cheap-seats bombast with love-seat confidentiality.

An album that’s disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time.

Though it makes left turns and constantly tweaks its formulas, In Focus? is admirably coherent and cohesive, with each little pile-up of ideas finding its place in the big pile-up of ideas that comprises the album.

Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice.

A Color of the Sky wears its derivative textures as a superhero might don a form-fitting costume, transforming tales of creative defeat into high-definition triumphs.

Even if Hate stands as their most visionary statement, Universal Audio has a subtler strength.

Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable.

Yo La Tengo are still one of the most talented acts going, and whether they're maturing or simply cooling off these days, they're still evolving.

The relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here.

This sh*t is intended to be the soundtrack to fun, and listening to the individual tracks is indeed a lot of fun. Color bursts from the edges of every track, and most carry no interest in subtlety or dynamic range. The production pops like a seismic charge.

It arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.

It's experimental music, to be sure, but it doesn't conflate experimentation with alienation.

Rarely does an album this understated say so much.

The third album from this Canadian collective is their strongest yet, and clear proof that while yes, everything old is new again, there are a scant few armed with the passion and power to craft something worth revisiting.

AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is consummately smooth, but it rewards close reading and detective work. Brilliant things are happening underneath the gleaming surface.

As a whole, Fetty Wap adopts the same self-assured stance: Fetty's formula definitely ain't broke, and he doesn't seem in a hurry to fix it.

More ephemeral than Clor, more cerebral than the Rakes, Field Music has, like the Magic Numbers, fashioned a distinctive voice and near-perfect arrangements, but the songs hint at greatness nearly as often as they achieve it.

After that opening suite--“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”--the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips.

Bitchin Bajas’ music is about keeping on, and Bajasicllators does that as well as anything in their discography.

Their most focused and captivating work to date.

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.

There's an energy and charisma in this dosage that I find lacking in some of the younger contemporaries.

The catchy country-pop rhythm of the title track, buoyed by a twangy electric guitar solo, wouldn’t have sounded out-of-place in between Clint Black and Dwight Yoakam on Country Music Television in the 1990s, but Childers frequently channels a vision of the genre that predates the video era.

Throughout, and to the album's benefit, the duo's individual identities are more fully dissolved, so they can be more malleable in pursuing the idea behind a given song.

This might be BMSR's most accessible effort, but if you couldn't get past the vocoder and voodoo before, it's unlikely that you will now.

The Horrors' shoegazer makeover aside, the real story here is Badwan's growing confidence as a singer, and his willingness to sound more scared than scary. Primary Colours loses its radiance when he reverts back to bogeyman type.

The album’s stationary sound and glacial pace, ironically, make it a more demanding listen than Dirty Beaches’ more outwardly confrontational, punk-inspired previous releases.

Lone’s DJ-Kicks probably won’t get your party started--not in a great hurry, anyway. But it fits snugly into an illustrious line of DJ-Kicks albums that favor the mind over the feet and the bean bag over the dancefloor.

Throughout Bloodsports, Suede consistently strikes the balance between decadence and elegance that marked their signature work.

Danilova has taken these compositions about as far as they can go, and still there remains something intriguing about Zola Jesus, not just for her ghostly enigma or art world appeal but now for what really comes next.

Her follow-up, Silence Is Wild, sounds not only more assured in its arrangements and performances, but more lively for being so self-indulgent.

["Sometimes" is] a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself.

Scattering the puzzle pieces, as Cunningham and Stewart do on Parts, has its own function--that’s how you find all the strange little edges. You start to see the insight you can gather when you’re forced to look at each part of the whole.

Easily the slickest album the Fresh & Onlys have made yet, Long Slow Dance subtly expands the band's sonic palette without overwhelming the band's appealing simplicity.

On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative--like the album itself.

Heavy Ghost is, in Stith's words, "more like life:" sometimes challenging, sometimes confusing, but, in the end, rewarding.