Wire is continuing to make greatness look easy.

Tranquilizer is the most immediately pleasurable Oneohtrix Point Never album in some time.

Isolation is a star turn from an artist who has proven she’s ready for it.

Dark Was the Night comes off as a gray, monotone look at the current indie landscape and, as a result, works best in small batches.

David Comes to Life is absolutely worth the commitment, a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations.

Half the fun is in discovering where Grey takes them from there. “Innuendo” and “Lovefield” both get blasted into trance hyperspace. .... Beneath its high-gloss surface, every detail on U rewards close scrutiny—even its one-letter title.

That idea, the notion of music as a cheapened, battered object, touches nearly every aspect of Ravedeath, 1972, a dark and often claustrophobic record that is arguably Hecker's finest work to date.

With these highly capable ringers driving the arrangements, Howard pushes the boundaries of sound and space in search of fulfillment and decency. In a world that requires so much fixing, the music works effortlessly. Armed with a deeper understanding of self, Jaime becomes her gospel of empathy.

It amounts to something tougher and more original than merely the sum of classically cool influences—a sound that activates Shaw’s disparate imagery, making the setting seem more dangerous.

This is a mammoth collusion of synth gasps and distorted swirls, darker and more urban than its meadow-bound predecessor.

An exhaustive presentation of Mitchell’s process in this era. Some of the recordings are so good that it’s difficult to understand how they sat in the vaults for this long. Others are brilliant, but close enough to the released versions that anyone with less than a scholarly interest in Mitchell would be better served by the official albums.

It’s got at least one song that instantly joins the ranks of his very best (“Will Anybody Ever Love Me?”) and plenty that draw direct lines to previous high-water marks, both thematically and musically.

There are a lot of things about Heartland that feel like Pallett is presenting himself more and more fully as an artist; the scope of breadth and mood of it are all grander, more assured, making ever more of a case that the guy shouldn't be viewed as a side note (string arranger for the Arcade Fire, the Pet Shop Boys) or a minor interest.

Though it draws upon the distant past, Julia Holter's made a timeless people-watching soundtrack: an acutely felt ode to the mysteries of a million passersby, all the stars of their own silent musicals.

An epic album that speaks with grand gestures and a refined eloquence rare in young songwriters.

jj's full-length debut is as easy to enjoy as whatever the last CD was you brought home with a giant cannabis leaf on the cover. They're as naive as they are cynical-- or is it the other stupid way around?-- and they manage to be pretty, touching, funny, and motivating, in different ways, in all the right places, for nine songs lasting 28 minutes.

The Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's most diverse and progressive album yet, a deft transition to a very different sound that explores new territory while preserving the best aspects of Beam's earlier recordings.

There Is Love in You always has just enough going on to pull you back in any time you feel like relegating it to the background. It works best taken whole, rather than broken into individual tracks.

These spry melodies and generous arrangements are the stuff of pop fantasy, while the reach of Tyler's music offers calling cards for fans of folk and more textural avant garde pieces.

With every album, Fennesz's music has become prettier and more accessible yet still retains his distinctive style-- and Venice is no exception.

It's angry and ferocious, but always triumphant.

Fabulous and melancholy.

M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self. Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X.

It’s not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI, but it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk.

The lack of instant-gratification couplets may disappoint at first, but each verse's rewarding intricacies become more evident with multiple listens.

The production values are higher, and there’s even more of Palomo's queasy pitch-shifting, 16-bit synths, and disembodied samples--more of everything.

I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018.

Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP.

He's sad and pathetic and needy and yet somehow still smooth, which is sort of the central animating paradox at the heart of the Walkmen. They make these wounded, anxious songs, but they make them so confidently, with such unearthly rich-guy assurance.

The closing “The Enduring Spirit of Calamity” is the hard-won culmination of the band’s evolution, and the song that cements The Enduring Spirit as their best album yet. At 11 and a half minutes, it’s also the longest, most ambitious Tomb Mold song to date.

The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge.

It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.

Their sources are varied, yet the pleasure isn't recognizing the different sonic elements, but in relishing their almost supernatural co-exist

While this record is sure to please longtime fans, it also works as a compelling introduction.

In many ways, God's Son is lyrically superior to Illmatic. Nas has created an album that is at once mournful and resilient, street-savvy and academic.

What's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.

Its visionary ambition recalls the fertile sprawl of Villalobos’ 2003 debut Alcachofa; baroque techno blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, dressed up in tie-dye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.

As obsessed as Pallbearer is with endings, the music here is timeless.

He's made tremendous strides as a producer, to the point where his touch exceeds Rodaidh McDonald's work on his debut. His sound is more three-dimensional, a series of shrouded corners and murmured conversations. This is wandering, grey-skies music, finding pleasure and even sensuality in solitude.

By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy.

A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish.

As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.

The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience.

In the end, Barnett returns invariably to herself, a subject she finds hard enough to understand. If all this seems a little heady in discussion, it's to the credit of Barnett and her band--Dave Mudie, Dan Luscombe, and Bones Sloane--that it doesn't sound that way on record.

The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.

Iceage write brilliant songs; on You're Nothing, they've found a way to clarify these compositional skills without stripping away their power.

As menacing as it is hooky, this is some bracing stuff.

As a first step, both Teenage Hate and Fuck Elvis Here's the Reatards are astonishing. All the energy one could hear in Reatard's better-known work is here in it's rawest, most volatile form.

The album naturally lacks the shock of the new, the jolt of Boy in Da Corner-- instead, it's a consolidation of his strengths, lyrically and sonically, and a more satisfying listen than its predecessor.

The quiet-to-loud dynamics aren't forced, the ahh-ahh backing sighs come at the exact right moments, the church bells on the title track sound like god. These songs are simple, mostly, but they're executed perfectly.

As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage.

Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious.

The lyrics are elusive at first, darting behind fast-moving songs and delivered in impressionistic, conversational bursts that recall the delivery of Joni Mitchell. But the fearless generosity behind them communicates itself loud and clear, and it's a spirit that animates the entire album. With it, Spalding has once again redefined an already singular career, dictating a vision entirely on her own terms.

These songs rip and burst and go.

Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way.

Somehow L’Amour sounds less there with each spin, beckoning you into its hazy world even as it dissolves into gray. The mystery is so perfect that it’d be a tragedy to solve it.

The music is poignant and meticulously arranged, and all you have to do is surrender to it. It helps that the engineering of ¡Ay! is pristine, often evoking a smoky, afterhours lounge, the kind you might find in a spy film from the 1940s. At times, it is so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly in your ear.

As exhilarating as Fourteen Autumns is at its most anthemic, the vividness of the lyrical themes ultimately carries the record over.

St. Vincent continues Clark's run as one of the past decade's most distinct and innovative guitarists, though she's never one to showboat.

Compared to the last two albums, Zonoscope has precious little guitar crunch, which makes it hard to even call Cut Copy a dance-rock band anymore.

The one new track is “Devotion,” a showstopping slab of new-wave twinkle. Outside of a killer opening punchline (“I don’t feel emotion/It completely takes over me”), it’s uncomplicated and blissful, a portrait of codependence that begs to be read as a you’re-the-real-stars diva move. It’s a victory lap, and I don’t begrudge it. But Hot Chip are far more compelling when they’re navigating the course.

While some will complain about Boards of Canada's failure to cover new territory, the rest of us will delight in what we see as a very accomplished album packed with great music.

Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing--but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.

As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.

Like those on their last album, these songs reveal themselves gradually but surely, building to the inevitable moment when they hit you in the gut. It's the rare album that gives back whatever you put into it.

What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing.

It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.

The best-sounding version of the Charli XCX promise to make the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again. .... BRAT’s most intriguing moments regard her relationships with women, which she unpacks with striking candor.

A Light for Attracting Attention sounds more like a proper Radiohead album than any of the numerous side projects the band’s members have done on their own. ... The Smile spotlights the creative relationship between Yorke and Greenwood like never before.

Sunbathing Animal's considered, whip-smart rock revivalism is a work of substantial growth from a band that already did "simple" quite well, placing Parquet Courts in their own distinct weight class.

As with each of Cox's projects, Let the Blind works best as a swirling, disorienting whole, organizing traditionally abstract styles like graphic-design elements within his unifying vision until they communicate like good pop.

These aren't 11 songs so much as 12 blood-riling arguments.

Where Aromanticism was intimate and sleek, græ is rangy, sprawling, a riot of moods from lustful to angry to broken-hearted. ... The most powerful moments on græ examine the distance between this wariness and the loneliness it produces.

Saturdays=Youth meaningfully diversifies M83's catalog while retaining Gonzalez's indelible fingerprint.

From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette.

Complex enough to reward repetitive listening and compact enough to encourage it, Blue Record is one of the year's most generous hours.

The leap in range and ambition from their 2015 EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power is huge: There hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.

Cancer 4 Cure's closest analogue may be Portishead's Third: the textures and tones are distinctly different from past releases, but it's unimaginable that it could be made by anyone else.

It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback. .... On Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages.

The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime.

These songs feel less like songs and more like treasures, ones that fill you with power and wisdom, and as a result, Too Bright seems capable of resonating with, comforting, and moving anyone who's ever felt alienated, discriminated against, or "other-ized," regardless of sexual orientation.

Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.

While Sonic Nurse isn't quite as strong as its predecessor, it's equally as imbued with instrumental dexterity and impressively coherent ideas.

Less an exhumation than a celebration, The Seeger Sessions is the best proof we've got that America's folksongs are also our finest artifacts.

Zoomer is a very, very good album, but one thing it makes clear is that the songwriting aspect of this sort of lap[pop] hybrid must continue to improve.

A startling and inspiring record. Eno’s been involved with quite a few of those in the past, but it’s especially nice to experience a new one that reaches us in the present moment.

Tobin's definitely out to have some fun with this record, though the immense density of these soundscapes prevent them from being reduced to chop-shop filler.

Mature Themes is as vital as anything he's ever recorded.

Alex G is playing with new toys that make records sound both more organic and expensive—banjo, accordion, mandolin, actual string sections. This puts Headlights right where it should be, in conversation with major-label debuts from the likes of R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade.

On Lookaftering, it comes as a relief to hear not only how pristine Bunyan's delicate vocals remain but that she has retained her understated abilities as a songwriter.

It’s a testament to the band’s ambitions and execution peaking in lockstep that Diaspora Problems can be appreciated as both a fully visceral experience and a cerebral one.

Immaculately produced, fantastically sung, and loaded with memorable choruses, this eight-song effort has plenty to please everyone from post-dubstep crate diggers to teen tweeters-- often at the same time.