Juxtaposing elegant chamber folk against the discord of lives out of balance, it’s musically more delicate than even her soft rock models.

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.

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.

As if to stabilize its weighty subject matter, Let the Dancers Inherit the Party is a remarkably steady album, at times to a fault.

The album straddles a line between being thin and casual, at times pulling back the curtain on the finished product to show Nabay chatting, humming, and tapping out the building blocks of the songs to his bandmates.

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

Throughout the album, he’s haunted by both the things that have and haven’t happened to him, what he has and hasn’t done, ruminating over a tight 32 minutes across eight tracks that feel haunted even at their hardest.

Pile could have remained in their amorphous realm of rock, but they needed to grow up. Here, as musicians, they did.

Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.

Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.

Sacred Paws have arrived, on the back of a troubled groove: a little preoccupied, maybe, but ready to dance.

She tears into every song with indomitable energy, and usually has production to match. Though it doesn’t quite mesh with the ballad, the twitchy percussion of “Carnival Games” at least livens things up.

The music hammers with industrial heft, vibrates with nervous pulse, and envelops with tactile atmosphere. Even when her songs achieve moments of transcendence, they still strike you directly in the gut.

If nothing here quite reaches knockout-blow strength, fine--it doesn’t really need to. Goldfrapp have found their platonic ideal, and that’s ideal indeed.

Even in its most indulgent turns, Star Stuff serves its purpose: After making an overly disciplined live album for zero spectators, it’s refreshing to hear Bundick really jam like no one’s looking.

Number 1 Angel is best at its most vulnerable. ... The other novelty of Number 1 Angel and Charli’s past work is that it showcases, and is largely stolen by, a lot of guests.

Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of.

Feel Infinite is warm and inviting, a taut mix of R&B love songs to finding your true self on the floor.

The songs are viscerally anguished, but they don’t wallow. There’s an essential, breezy levity to the music; the parts require one another. The whole of II moves forward and on.

He runs into trouble when he loses the self-awareness of it all. ... Ripe Dreams, Pipe Dreams finds its true comfort zone when it is simply sweet.

A few tracks are infectious enough to merit standalone listens.

Bringing it live is still crucial to metal success, and on that front they are ready to ascend to the next level. That doesn’t translate on Heartless, where too much space is squandered.

So simple, so tactile, so deceptively real are these songs. Their cumulative effect is that they become wobbly with metaphor, forcing the listener into the kind of magical thinking that transforms everything in the living world into a sign of the dead, only to snap back into a reality that for better and worse means nothing.

It’s neo-neo-noir music that draws you into its discomfort. If its vast expanses leave listeners vulnerable, at least there’s more space to let yourself roam.

While the productions are animated and spacious, creating openings for his jam-packed phrases, the sound doesn’t take the full step forward that would help spotlight and redefine Seattle rap.

It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

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.

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.

Amid Find Me’s otherwise downcast worldview, “Love Captive” lets in some light.

Unlike the effortless Atlas, In Mind exposes a trace of tension between form and content. For all Courtney’s synchronicity with his home environment, he sometimes sounds like he’s spinning his wheels rather than exploring the new contours of the recalibrated band.

The early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue ... add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.

Packs is a record by, of, and for New York City, espousing the romantic notion it will never change, no matter how much the world does.

It feels more like an intimate recording project than a live band document, mostly splitting the difference between routine electro-Stones rave-ups and strung-out ballads.

This isn’t a record you crank in traffic en route to an across-town meeting; it’s a record to unwind with later that night on your second glass of Syrah--a sturdy shrug to cap off the day

ADULT. still do a convincing showroom-dummies impersonation, but they’ve never sounded more human than they do here.

In 2017, the challenge for a veteran metal act is to not relentlessly innovate, but to mine any small new parts of their sound. Kreator and Immolation have proved successful in this regard already, and Obituary, while sticking closer to their roots, have also proven their vitality here.

This is a band whose effortlessness can misguide you into thinking they’re not trying. Don’t be fooled.

They sound twice as developed.

While it’s laudable that Jenkinson is always moving, never resting, Elektrac feels a bit of a sideshow: a flexing of technique with little to display but its own shiny spectacle.

Paradise challenges its listeners to emotionally engage with their surroundings in hopes that they develop a conscious understanding that there are consequences to our daily conveniences.

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

The tinkering of the trim Spoon attitude has become the most engaging part of their latter-day career. For a band that seems built on a reliable formula, they remain full of possibilities.

Her boozy, morning-after croon is still gorgeous, but now there’s elements of Puerto Rican bomba and salsa, son cubano, doo-wop, and even the spoken-word poetry of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe she haunted as a teen. Her band has gone through a variety of lineups, but this one feels like a clean slate.

Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women.

Though Salutations is one of Oberst’s most demanding albums, it’s also one of his least ambitious, even before taking these new arrangements into account.

The core strength of Love in a Time of Madness is its range of dance-pop appreciation.

Youngish American is a hapless vanity album, sad for all the wrong reasons, and all the more frustrating because it couches wokeness in songs about the extra advantages afforded to Tomson’s demographic.

Children of Alice is different from its predecessors. Its nostalgia feels less escapist than therapeutic, and its composure amid the mundane and deranged is more of a promotion for mindfulness.

World Eater does not seem like a doomsday device by design, though. It might sound like one now, but Power leaves open the possibility of it being his darkest transmission before the dawn of a new bright tomorrow.

Despite the lyrical punch, Yours Conditionally is hamstrung by Tennis’ drums. The keys and bass on the album are unfailingly warm, but the shabby percussion is one-note, almost the work of a different band.

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.

While a cynic might see New Gen as merely a reflection of Caroline SM and Renz’s taste and grassroots network; an optimist might say it’s an underground scene collectivizing for its mutual benefit. Nevertheless, it’s one of the more impressive collections of underground talent of late.

Just a few years into her adult life, and only one album into her recording career, Melina Duterte has swept past a milestone many musicians never even get in their sights.

The lack of honesty doesn’t really matter--nobody’s going to Sheeran for gritty soul-searching. But the lack of imagination does.

While never able to fully grasp the Japanese sounds they adore, Visible Cloaks nevertheless have created an album along the axis of Fennesz’s Endless Summer and OPN’s Replica, an abstract electronic album that’s readily accessible and an immersive listen.

Ohren’s mix is beefy but not outsized or over-processed like so much modern metal can be. The music reveals endless contours over repeat listens.

They sound exhausted, right where we left them.

There’s no explicit theme behind Piano Song. It’s simply strong, well-considered jazz, with Shipp’s piano leading a thorough dialogue with bassist Michael Bisio and drummer Newman Taylor Baker.

Some minor touch-ups would have gone a long way. Had Sprout tightened a few loose screws here and there, it would have told us more about who he is now.

With Chill, dummy, P.O.S avoids retreating into the program of Never Better, while also one-upping his prior outing.

The album as a whole has a lot of laser gun sounds. It also has frequent sudden shifts between high energy songs and mellower songs, so that even though the record has a unified sound, it sometimes feels disjointed. During the last two songs, however, that contrast works.

Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points.

It’s not a slight to call Impermanence functional music: If it helps someone else simply cut through the noise in their head, Silberman has gotten his point across.

It helps that most of the album sits squarely in Merritt’s musical comfort zones.

If English Tapas at times veers towards formula, it’s at least Sleaford Mods’ own formula, and one that continues to serve them well.

A decade ago, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah were a modest, rickety band bearing the albatross of hype; today, they’re an amorphous, musically adventurous entity basking in the freedom of no expectations.

His mixing is never ostentatious, but it generally emphasizes action. It’s rare that a song is left to play out unaccompanied; far more often, he’s got two and even three tracks running in parallel, resulting in a dynamic, shape-shifting fusion that’s far more than the sum of its parts.

Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.

A focused beam of hip-hop soul that rattles loudly in our present political moment.

Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away.

Respectable as it is for both men to avoid falling back into their bag of dub tricks, a few of Man Vs. Sofa’s attempts to expand their reach fall just a bit short.

Individual moments shine throughout FORGET: a stunning chorus here, a stirring lick of pitched percussion there. But the album’s strangest attribute is the way it can lull you into a state of absentmindedness regarding those same charms.

Power Trip’s fist-pumping choruses, ricocheting grooves, and ample charm are so animated that they leave us with something addictive and, well, fun.

Their music has never gone down easier, but their commentary has never hit so uncomfortably hard.

Sick Scenes, the British group’s sixth album, plays like a love letter to aging indie idealism; to the fans who have reveled in this band’s careening pop-punk singalongs, scathing neuroses, and charmingly specific soccer references.

Book of Changes is refreshingly exposed and intimate, as if Blakeslee has found a lingua franca for writing when it really matters.

It doesn’t always work—it’s hard to ignore the shortcomings of his singing voice, and the otherwise relatable lyrics on “Cigarettes & Cush” are mired by a trite composition. But from the themes to the production choices to the sequencing, it’s a remarkably well thought out debut from the ascendant 23-year-old MC.

As disorienting and overwhelming as any of Kozelek’s defining albums, Common as Light patiently reveals more of the artist to anyone who’s still paying attention.

Though it ranks among Chasny’s most gentle records, Burning the Threshold nonetheless accommodates a large supporting cast of avant-rock all stars who lend these intimately scaled songs a greater dimension.

Tears in the Club is a disappointingly genteel work, from an artist known for anything but.

In its best moments, In Between sounds both mellow and intense in ways only the Feelies can pull off.

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

Windy City never quite reconciles her genre history with her populist ambitions, creating an album that toggles back and forth between the two poles and then ends abruptly.

He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once.

If Flying Microtonal Banana’s randomized approach is ultimately less transfixing than Nonagon Infinity’s maniacal focus, it nonetheless shows that, after eight previous albums, this band’s creativity and curiosity knows no bounds, and their singular balance of anarchy and accessibility is still in check.

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.

Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.

Collaborations like this work best when there’s some meaningful contrast between the performers, though, and Joe and Remy Ma are too similar to establish any kind of yin/yang dynamic.

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

FUTURE is a fine mix of the stylings of past Futures layered in a rich blend of sounds from a now refined sonic palette. It doesn’t communicate the same intense and complicated emotional concoction that fills his songs when he’s at his most vulnerable and compelling. But it doesn’t have to.

It’s a perfectly fine album by a guy who wants to be much more than perfectly fine.

From the outset, Saturday Night both plays to expectations and subverts them.

Vermont have figured out how to make these comparatively short, sketch-like pieces work for them. They stretch out just long enough to draw you in and wrap you up in their atmospheres, but they never wear out their welcome.

The triumph of Life Will See You Now is how it suggests that the 36-year-old Lekman has never been more skilled at his craft, or had more stories to tell.

In his efforts to break out of one-hit-wonder-dom and demonstrate a wide range on his debut album The Chief, Jidenna sometimes comes off as shapeless.

O’Connor’s a true eccentric, but O∆ has a universal appeal. The hooks are so intensely hooky that you can find yourself singing along to them without even knowing it.

While Long only uses a steady beat and some deeply resonant chords to convey this revelation, he nevertheless moves like a poet to unearth that heartening sense of truth here.