Any Hanna-related project is prone to vanishing beneath her mighty specter, but the deeper collaborative process that went into Hit Reset shines through.

Versatility, it turns out, may not be Clams’ strong suit, though that’s hardly a problem; as the first half of 32 Levels demonstrates, there’s still plenty of room left for Clams Casino to grow into his own sound.

Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.

Jackmaster lets his choices breathe and doesn’t hurry from cut to cut for the sake of covering more ground, even as tracks pool together and reform anew.

The result is a captivating, dizzying record by a band aware that they can do anything--so they’re doing it all.

Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener’s focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record’s hour-plus running time, and he does so.

At times it may feel cheesy, or like “naive romantic shite” as they say at one point, but in the end, it’s honestly comforting.

The album may be musing or abstracted, but that’s his hallmark, and blackSUMMERS’night is polished to a blinding sheen.

Even though the surface is smoother and and the vocals less garbled than usual, it’d be a mistake to read Bubblegum as a true unmasking. Filters swaddle Copeland’s voice throughout, distorting and distending it but stopping short of intelligibility; lyrically, he’s striking a tricky balance between deadpan nihilism and pop troubadour nostalgia.

Into the Light is the kind of record that requires rapt attention, best enjoyed in still solitude. But even as Anderson’s instrument simmers, it still reaches for the great beyond, and she makes you ache to reach along with it.

What we’re left with on Dream World is a solid project that flies in multiple directions.

What elevates Take Her Up to Monto--and all of Murphy’s records, frankly--is a fearless, restless spirit.

In anyone else’s hands, Summer 08 might seem strange and cold. But from Mount, as ornery as it is, it feels like a gesture of trust.

In the age of glossy mixing and instrumental auto-pilot, their ungovernable racket’s refreshing and woefully needed.

It works in part because of the surprise factor (who knew Lewis had this kind of record in her?) but mostly because Lewis does what she always does: She sells the material.

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.

The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades.

Crucially, with his beats less busy, it has left James more room to focus on spine-tinglingly rich tunings and timbres. And that’s where Cheetah really stands out: To sink into it, preferably on good headphones or better speakers, is to be immersed in woozy, viscous frequencies far more vivid than you’ll find almost anywhere else.

Rarely does a band bid you farewell and admit it overstayed its welcome in the same breath.

There’s no laundry list of injustices or outrages to be found here: just an uber-compressed pop rune that muses on the sheer, disorienting helplessness that results from realizing that we’ll never be able to help everyone. Maybe, just maybe, stolid songcraft can be rescue enough.

The hooks aren't quite as catchy or well-written on Murder For Hire 2 as they have been in recent months.

At their best, these songs share the self-scrutinizing intimacy of Elliott Smith and the imaginative melodic intonations of Joni Mitchell, two of Glaspy's most obvious influences.

Weaves is most compelling when it’s thrashing right along with Burke, giving into the urgent hunger for connection. It grates when the band is more intent on pleasing itself with quirk for quirk’s sake.

The earnest California takes plenty of time to sprawl out, from wound-licking power ballads (“Home Is Such a Lonely Place,” “Hey I’m Sorry”) to high-shine navel-gazings that hew closely to past hits.

Post Plague is just another stop on an increasingly adventurous course through the genre map.

New English is so woefully derivative it almost builds itself a new vocabulary from the Lego blocks of other rappers it stands on.

Harvey remains mostly reverential to his sacrilegious source, but Delirium Tremens is much more than just Gainsbourg fed through Google Translate. Rather, it amplifies the unsettling undercurrents that always stewed beneath Gainsbourg’s impeccable arrangements.

By improving his craft, layering sharper melodies over increasingly sophisticated arrangements. Steinbrink’s music--so often insular, gorgeous in its way yet tentative--has grown up, becoming wiser and more confidently strange, ready to embrace the world outside his bedroom window.

Luckily, by the time we get to lead single “Sunday Love” The Bride has hit its stride, the track’s shuffling drum loop and plucked strings transporting listeners directly into the mania of the Bride’s pure heartbreak. From there, what began as a slightly unbalanced collection begins to take shape.

At the very least, “End of an Era” is a disturbance to Autodrama’s surface-level shimmer and proof of Puro Instinct making an effort to provide depth.

With I, Gemini Let’s Eat Grandma not only hold their own with their predecessors, but they also create a world that demands you come to it on its own terms, not the other way around. An impressive achievement from musicians of any age.

Despite its clear seriousness, Brigid Mae Power runs on that sense of newfound freedom. Power and Broderick find glimmers of light even in the darkest moments, and she learns to trust the kind of love that enables independence, after some period of coercion.

It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.

There's something more naturally personal about Pythagorean Dream, in the way its multitude of vibrations emanate from Chatham alone.

Yoncalla highlights all the best elements of Yumi Zouma, wrapped up in some of the prettiest music they’ve made yet.

Freetown resonates with everyone sagging under the weight of systemic oppression.

It's punchier; the themes are weightier; the emotional range is more dynamic. And it finds Kodak Black sounding like nobody but himself.

It’s clear that the artists are well aware of the risks of throwing themselves too eagerly into the wine-dark churn, but here, O’Rourke isn’t quite capable of reining in Fennesz’ more impetuous inclinations, and by the end of it, you find yourself craving a quiet patch of warm, dry land on which to catch your breath.

Within the context of Deerhoof’s oeuvre, The Magic is a bit of a back-to-the-garage reset that doesn’t approach the heights of career apexes Friend Opportunity and Runners Four, but offers a fresh energy that rewards the converted.

The new songs point in some directions Butler might go in the future: the raw heavy metal riffing of “Public Defender,” which is simultaneously bracing and ridiculous; the homemade ‘80s soundtrack rock of “Sun Comes Up,” which sounds like a Moroder sequencer held together by duct tape. But that quest for pure spontaneity can reveal the cracks in Butler’s craft.

Listeners of Black Terry Cat will have no doubt: Rubinos is a unique presence, with a sharp ability to make pressing issues about identity and society into funky, exhilarating music.

Otero War is a centrist indie rock record at a time when a center doesn’t really exist and there are vastly more interesting and inclusive things going on just outside the frame.

After confidently striking out from Delorean’s cocoon of reverb on Apar, Lopetegi has returned but the rest of the band hasn’t, giving Muzik a curiously unbalanced, deflated mix.

A step left of center yet still striking familiar chords right on time, Allen Toussaint show us his understated brilliance one final time.

True Sadness is a record that can’t seem to get out of its own way. Almost every track is bloated with instrumentation.

Far from aiming for some grand unified statement, The Mountain Will Fall feels a lot more like a DJ set--a curated grab bag of ideas that overlap and collide, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Track-by-track, it tells a clearer story than her excellent debut and a more sweeping one than many movies.

At their best, they achieve late-’90s VH1 rock heights, which is not such a bad target to hit. ... At their worst, they’re affected and not in an interesting way. But these are both extremes, on a record otherwise scrupulous to never sound at all extreme.

Blood // Sugar // Secs // Traffic smolders with emotion, and yet Kasan’s aloofness—even when he’s shouting—sounds like a protective mechanism against truly letting himself go. Framed by the derivative music, Kasan sounds as removed from his feelings as the rest of us do expressing them via memes from inside the stultifying safety of our digital cubicles.

On Puberty 2, every note she's played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from--and above--much of the genre.

Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap.

The love in his music is as terrible as it is beautiful, a wrenching act of spiritual determination. Swans make this sound effortless, though, in a fitting end to a remarkable chapter of their career.

When Silkjær traces his vocals over the lead guitars, it’s enough to make “Uncombed Hair” and “Pills” stick. Otherwise, A Youthful Dream can only push through its weaker melodies and reverb through self-will.

You Will Never Be One of Us will live up to the expectations of anyone who’s experienced a Nails album before.

The sweetness of their gaze only makes the melodies on case/lang/veirs seem more familiar, resonating deep within some distant memory while still sounding fresh. The hooks are mostly vocal-led, but producer Tucker Martine and the small band of players (including Glenn Kotche on percussion) color them perfectly.

Were it not for these issues [the album’s lyrical stasis scans as disappointing] and the B-Side's proliferation of yawn-inducing, stoned slow jams, The Getaway could have potentially bested By The Way as the Peppers’ best work post-Californication.

The good news about The Digging Remedy is that it’s lovely and listenable for any longtime followers, or for anyone remotely interested in the kind of melodic IDM defined by this piece. However, it is neither an exciting deviation nor a refinement; as such, it’s really just more of an already-good thing, albeit packaged less delicately.

Tracks such as “There Was a Button” and “Traanc” are acceptable as minimal-house DJ tools, but as greater parts of a long-playing whole, they seem lost for a broader context--a context Dear previously had no trouble offering. Only at Alpha’s tail end does Audion’s (and Dear’s) personality assert itself.

On My One is precisely the kind of mistake that pop stars make when they think they’re smarter than the system.

It may not go down as one of Neil’s definitive works, but Earth achieves something Young hasn’t been able to accomplish on record in a while: he's made an album worth spending some time with.

Liquid Cool is just another likable if unexceptional lo-fi electro-pop record.

While the result is a 12-track standard edition full of potential hits, the brunt of it rests on interchangeable tempos from existing, already-charting singles.

At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once.

The first third is playful if not quite memorable. ... But as “N” swoops down, with its slow, throbbing bassline, primitive drum machine pattern, echoing chimes, and flecks of flamenco guitar, you wonder if Lissvik might have pulled a fast one and gone back into an old hard drive to plunder some old Studio session, so dead-on is the sound.

If Diarrhea Planet’s goal is just to be a memorable, messily great live band, they’re well on their way. But if they want their records to live on, they need to decide what they're trying to achieve, and figure out how to deliver it more effectively offstage.

Tape-chewed textures and digital glitches initially defined Wyatt’s first few releases, but there’s a remarkable clarity throughout Union and Return that belies the fact that for all the beauty of his fourth album, his inherent weirdness still squirms beneath the surface.

Jackie Lynn’s only significant weakness is that, even though individual songs benefit from brevity, the record is too short. Its eight tracks take up only 22 minutes, and two of those tracks are micro-length instrumentals; it’s half an album at most.

Every darker, weirder impulse got glossed over while the music gives an agreeable shrug.

Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.

It’s fitting the trio recorded it in a repurposed slaughterhouse, because Fall Forever is the work of a band gutting its sound and watching it bleed out.

Before Wild Things, Brown scrapped an entire album that, from press indications, probably sounded a lot like Anxiety; neither she nor the people she said heard it was happy with the results, but one wonders if it was really that bad, or just not commercial and crowd-pleasing enough. Wild Things collapses over the strain to be both.

Taylor is no stranger to wearing his heart on his sleeve, Piano takes that notion one step further--it’s as if Taylor is taking his heart out for everyone to see, then discreetly leaving it on your coffee table.

The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

Despite these superficial similarities [to their 1995 debut album], repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective.

Light years from a mere slap-dash rarities compilation, The Other Side of the River takes some of a seminal rock musician's most interesting sketchworks and reimagines them as his magnum opus.

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

[“Hard Sleep”] stands out as a rare home-run on an album too blandly ambitious to stick in the memory.

Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds.

It's rare to find complex, personal songs about love and relationships matter-of-factly sung from a queer perspective, and in that respect alone Tegan and Sara remain a crucial voice in the pop landscape. Elsewhere on the album, things a just a little less distinct.

The sonics are familiar, as is the trajectory.

Ash & Ice is an album of quality comedown tracks surrounded by run-of-the-mill rockers that plateau instead of peak.

There’s just enough to think about without getting fatigued, as the Strokes continue to toy with the sound of their late period.

Get In was recorded last year, but it sounds like it could have been made at any time over the intervening decade.

What doesn’t work as much are the attempts to make Masterpiece feel overly homemade.

By embracing the expanse, his music has gotten bigger, and more universal.

With its variations in mood, tone, and personnel, Basses Loaded plays more like compilation of B-sides culled from multiple recording sessions spanning several years.

Whitney might not reinvent anything, but they sound perfect right now, and it’s hard to argue with being in the right place at the right time.

When Krug sticks to his strengths—off-the-beaten-path keyboard-driven rock n’ roll, with taut, wiry tunes that match his voice and wry wit--he generally succeeds. But his tendency to slow it down and draw it out leads him to take risks that often don’t pay off.

Despite Dâm’s preference for playing tracks pretty much all the way through--which suggests an infectious, wide-eyed passion for the music that fits into his mind-control powers--the mix is properly appreciated as a whole.

Finally, albeit in flashes, there are hints that Fifth Harmony may reach that peak.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

[“Wall Fuck” is] short and snappy, gone too fast in an album that could’ve been streamlined to let moments like it shine. But maybe it’s the sound of floodgates opening.

His words come off poetically, and in its totality, Ology is a slow burn that grows more infectious as it plays.

At its best, the casual atmosphere makes for one of Kozelek’s loosest, lightest collections to date: something to throw on when you don’t have the emotional capacity for his more distinctive albums.

Congrats isn’t incoherent in its diversity, it just never seems to build on itself--the record lacks a definitive peak, and most of the individual tracks tend to just state their main idea fairly early on.

Folding Time serves as a stopgap for an aging sound without a firm grasp on its bearings. Should Sepalcure continue writing from their fixed point, they'll have to project further and further from its origin.

The results resemble dance music as glimpsed through a funhouse mirror: strangely distorted, sometimes goofy, and deeply pleasing on a simple, almost childlike level.