Where past efforts buried its intimacy under coldness and severity, Will To Be Well offers a warm, familiar embrace.

Dance on the Blacktop is music at the edge of Hodson’s “everything.” Its theme might be resolve, tenacity, or redemption itself--the sound of hitting rock bottom, looking up, and still catching a glimpse of beauty above.

Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges.

It seems almost unfair, though, to criticize Gallab for the minor crime of engaging with a sound that’s not as inherently interesting as what he’s proven capable of elsewhere, as Mean Love cements his reputation as a capable musical wanderer willing to engage with a variety of sounds.

It's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.

Burton sings about interior voyages and the tracks were usually constructed by no more than two musicians; it’s music made at home, for home listening. That’s all well and good, since the duo has considerable skill, but this existential lonerism underscores a chasm between the pair and their influences. Unlike the icons of the era they find so inspiring, Black Pumas rarely look outside of themselves.

Restless Ones establishes Heartless Bastards as a straightforward arena-rock band, one that's grown more refined with time.

In League With Dragons is light on mythical beasts; only four songs here come from the original wizard musical Darnielle was writing. Instead, he fills the record with the subjects of his own escapist fantasies. ... The record occasionally delves into the arcane, as Mountain Goats records can.

Though Modern Guilt is more direct and consistent than his last two scattershot LPs, it also finds the disillusioned L.A. hippie struggling to balance his deathly outlook with his more crowd-pleasing inclinations.

A utopian epic, a sweeping musical argument for love in the time of Fallujah.

Doves' fourth album is another sterling example of why the Doves should be household names and why they probably won't ever be: their unwavering flair for producing mountainous, Wembley-worthy pop anthems that are nonetheless invested with a palpable degree of grace and humility.

Wainwright does lean pretty heavily on this formula of mild, occasionally rocky folk-pop doused with generous measures of vocal swooping and diving.

As rewarding as this new album is, it's even more impressive when you consider its context: Crystal Castles may have come on at the tail-end of the blog-house/nu-rave/French-touch mini-rage, but they've now transcended it, moving from scene linchpin to indie stars.

Guilty of Everything is loud, it’s distorted and it’s heavy, but it’s not aggressive. It’s actually quite comforting.

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

It’s evocative and complex enough to establish Snoh Aalegra as a name worth remembering, even as it leaves you wondering what it might sound like when she finally faces the full extent of her feelings.

While The Melodic Blue is indeed flecked with more intimate writing than usual, it isn’t exactly a confessional. Instead, Keem uses the opportunity to expand his well-established fascination with trap and melody to feature-length—with mixed results.

Dimensional Bleed introduces a bit more subtlety than Death Spells, with bookend tracks “Hexsewn” and “Blood Memory” in particular making use of minimalistic sound design that goes far beyond “rock band adds synths” stereotypes. These quieter moments are Holy Fawn’s most unpredictable.

No Highs ultimately works as an example of what ambient music can be, rather than a suggestion of where it might go.

I’m Bad Now is a more forthright, steady-going listen than Thought Rock Fish Scale, and, on first pass, it seems a touch less enchanting than that record’s nocturnal reveries. The new album shows Nap Eyes can certainly excel at tight, snappy power-pop (check the incisive opener “Every Time the Feeling”). But there are also all-too-brief flashes of viscerality that you wish the band had explored further.

In the Shape of a Storm is an album’s worth of that feeling. In grief many cloak themselves in distractions, or hide away entirely: Jurado treats it as an invitation to look closer, feel deeper.

Mirah, it appears, has made the album we've been waiting for.

A superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks.

The whole of Playground in a Lake suffers from the flatness of its instrumentation and emotional range.

The one-time Blur frontman has transcended some of the post-modern artifice of this project, and created the group's most affecting and uniquely inviting album. Joke's over, Gorillaz are real.

With Ash Wednesday, Elvis Perkins has emerged as an assured, fully-formed cosmopolitan able to merge readily recognizable influences with a sense of theatre too often missing from the legion of similarly-intentioned performers.

Whatever her bad luck might be down to, Kelis can take some small comfort in having made her best album since Kaleidoscope.

Sure, the twitchy alienation of their earliest records is long gone, but the Old 97's are still fighting the good fight against respectability.

While unassuming on paper, there’s something about Possible Humans’ music that sticks; there are hooks hidden in these songs, obscured by Macfarlane’s production but present enough that you might hum them after even a passive listen.

Silversun Pickups tap into a well of quarantine-bound inspiration that results in some of their most varied and carefree songs in over a decade, even if the majority overstay their welcome.

At 40 minutes, Walk Around the Moon is a brisk reverie—and their shortest album ever. That cutoff means their zesty solos are shorter and moments of all-in instrumentation are subtler. When they do go for it, Dave Matthews Band might be having too much fun.

A Thing Called Divine Fits might seem the Platonic ideal of indie rock collaboration, but the most memorable moments have Boeckner's signature.

On I Don’t Run, the Madrid quartet wade through these messy feelings with confidence and exuberance to spare, taking us on a pleasure cruise through choppy waters.

Isles has sparkling moments but it’s all a bit constrained, like a potted plant on a window sill that craves the natural wildness of a garden.

Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. Marshall still has a blood-freezing voice, someone to pay attention to, but 6 Feet Beneath the Moon doesn't feel like his Big Statement, not yet.

While the Good, the Bad & the Queen are skilled at providing a wide breadth of styles here--from the woozy, carnivalesque organ of “The Last Man to Leave” to “The Truce of Twilight”’s militaristic chants--they especially succeed at conveying a crumbling and isolated Britain.

The story here though is the album's simmering, intimate moments--and despite the fanbase-building qualities of their new-wave past, the more the group embraces an inky, ambient future, the better it could get.

Hyetal has a firm grasp on his spin of sweeping, beat-infected sentimentality, and Modern Worship is strong enough to see him lead a crowd, or keep dancing on his own.

There are plenty of bands that mapped inspired paths to greatness, but Big Star's story, as seen on film and heard on these songs, is a potent reminder of just how beautiful failure can be.

For a notionally darker work this album ends up being more enjoyable than some of his prior records, mainly because the sense of exploration is heightened with each turn taken.

On Help, his latest album, Timothy works with a number of collaborators from the London scene—Mr. Mitch, Vegyn, and Lil Silva to name a few—to create a piece of music that takes equally from modern jazz and UK bass. With their help, Timothy sings the song of a community that he carries within him, voicing their past oppressions even in his most abstract pieces. Timothy constructs a vast castle out of his reference points making music that feels filled with the spectres of the past.

Perhaps the point is more about feeling good than seeming interesting, and at least the piano equivalent of cowboy chords makes sense in the Americana context. Any given moment sounds wonderful, though not much lingers beyond a deep sense of calm.

The set devotes each of its four discs to performances from a specific decade, but even if you don't think Iggy has produced a front-to-back great album since 1979's New Values, Roadkill Rising is still worth your time.

Real Estate doesn’t upend their own foundation; they instead find beauty in filling in its empty spaces.

Despite some lyrical cliches and careless redundancies ("Come out from the burning flame" being the most glaring example), Kozelek's songs change mood fluidly, and the contrast between the serene settings and his own tumultuous thoughts raises even the most languid instrumental passages above mere aural wallpaper, lending it the gravity of his best work while giving it a character all its own.

The moody guitar solo at the end is deflating endpoint to a well-trodden path, but Shepherd’s band nonetheless exhibits a rare combination of restraint and brawn.

All My Relations boasts a syncopated charm that stems from the freedom of groove inherent in jam sessions. But the album’s spiritual elevation comes from Gastelum’s songwriting process.

Without being told how to feel, one can simply feel; the music meets you where you are.

It’s easy to understand why Young felt these songs didn’t fit in with the lovelorn mood of Are You Passionate?, but they’re all worth hearing at least once.

The best songs here are warmed and colored by instrumental flourishes, as with the bright guitar and piano notes on “Demons” or the opening electric noodle of “Tangent Dissolve.” .... The album’s weakest moments come when the band leans on contemplative vibes without evoking any whiff of danger or hallucination.

This time around, the edges of the Quazarz universe feel smoother, the ride less jarring. The low end is still intense, but it feels more like a deep tissue massage than a trunk-rattling rumble.

Holley’s vocals knock Broken Mirror half a stride out of Davis’ considerable shadow, the singer’s unique charm forging something genuinely new out of White’s inspired but retrospective musical work. Broken Mirror is a tribute to risk-taking and unlikely musical chemistry, an improbably fruitful fusion of unstable elements.

Everything is delicate, but nothing is muted. This aesthetic certainly isn’t for everybody, but after her ambivalent pop experiments, Marina no longer needs her albums to be. It’s a beacon out for the highly emotional people of the world, of whom she clearly is one; it’s for her.

By matching their ever-evolving, exploratory musical ethos with less eager-to-please, more confrontational modes of performance, the album marks the moment when the Flaming Lips become whole again.

while Ghost Blonde can feel like it's keeping the listener at arm's length, further listens reveal a record full of vibrancy, the kind in which you soon find yourself fully immersed.

Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter.

These songs run too long, even to the point of faking fade-outs and then bursting back for another coda.

Like the Betas' Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold isn't a flashy record.... But unlike Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold sounds agreeably homespun.

Though 7s is a step down in scale and inspiration from Cows on Hourglass Pond, the triumph of Time Skiffs means it’s hardly a worrying sign for his career.

Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it--she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.

Viet Cong has only seven tracks and more than half don’t pass the five minute mark. Yet all are heavy, ingenious contraptions.

Ryan Adams is a persuasively dark album, one defined by themes of struggle, instability, isolation, and regret.

Will may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed--just a room with a piano, a synthesizer, and a looping pedal--but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there.

As with most of the 70s sensitive guy genre though, a lot of the music here toes the schmaltz line. And by the second half of Three, Prewitt's tripped right over it, landing in dangerous Neil Diamond territory.

For a band returning from a decade-long sabbatical, these guys are surprisingly spry. Their consistency is also, to some degree, their downfall, since they still sound uncannily mid-'80s.... But even past their prime, the Go-Betweens are still better than anything on present alternative radio playlists.

With its illusory, ethereal production, wistful melodies, and oft-funereal pace, this is one of those rare albums that can completely absorb you in such a way as to almost dissolve the world around you, and make you feel like you've been transported to another realm of existence within the course of 58 minutes.

There's lots of good stuff on Age of the Sun. It's just that sometimes, there's a bit too much of it.

Juvenile, simpering, weak, preachy, pointless and accidentally snooty, Dying in Stereo is about as empowering as Legally Blonde 2.

Though Everything, Everything is unquestionably a swan song for the Emerson years, it's far from a mopey affair. In fact, it tackles early tracks like "Rez" and "Cowgirl," and pumps them up with megawatt power.

Such dedication to an aesthetic means Far Side Virtual gets a little tedious: It's 16 songs that aren't all that catchy but aren't exactly ambient either.

Despite its three-disc bulk, it exhumes too few buried-but-necessary takes and does little to illuminate what Isis did, why they did it, and what it all means.

The Victoria OST marshals more instruments than his solo piano works, but not many more--each new sound, whether it's a husky-throated cello on "Our Own Roof" or the subcutaneous hum of organ keys on "The Bank", tiptoes in carefully and gingerly.

It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.

On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.

Chris Dave’s accomplished chops demand that he should be the star of his debut--but too often he’s lost in the firmament.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia.

Lily We Need to Talk Now is wall-to-wall hooks. She draws on the entire history of pop-rock heartbreak anthems and ties it together with sugary-sweet vocals and a witty, whimsical sensibility.

72 Seasons, at a marathon 77 minutes long, delivers everything you could possibly want from a Metallica album in 2023, and so much more on top of that. Too much more. Like Hardwired, its predecessor—the same length, incidentally—72 Seasons is both a thrill and a slog.

Rather than in volume and intensity, Sings Dylan finds subversion in its very form, as a covers album that celebrates and estranges its source material at once.

The duo’s latest, Rong Weicknes, is their prettiest, poppiest rush-hour prog-jazz clusterfuck yet.

Trees Outside the Academy is, in fact, a song-based album--and they're good songs, too.

It's fair to say the songs lack the epic sweep of the last couple of albums, but there's still little about Hey Venus! to fault beyond the faint whiff of musical conservatism.

The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle.

At times, the blend of their individual rock styles with country creates something fresh, but some efforts feel more pastiche than inventive.

If there's anything that keeps Faithful Man from equaling My World, aside from the occasional orchestral overkill, it's that the songwriting overall isn't quite as strong.

Idols of Exile is consistently solid; the songs are fully realized and, ultimately, memorable.

The group balances tension and relaxation with the timing of a master storyteller. It’s a talent Bitchin Bajas has shown on previous records, but here they’ve perfected it, instilling direction and purpose into what could easily be aimlessly pleasant music.

Broke With Expensive Taste glides through all of these, just like the faithful 1 train sampled on "Desperado". Both album and the artist revel in the freedom of a New York City where divisions between these sounds and scenes have ever so slowly ceased to exist.

At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed.

The brilliant writing on First of a Living Breed ... would position the album as a candidate for one of the year's best rap records if it weren't for those drawback tracks ["For the Kids", "Cedar and Sedgwick"].

T.I.'s confidence seems effortless and second-nature, his self-aggrandizement turning relentless and convincing.

Prophet's widescreen music is wonderful to listen to; it's just hard to really feel.

There’s nothing as intimate as breakthrough single “Hey Now,” but in return, the greater variety avoids the sameness of past albums. While Soil doesn’t always fulfill their ambition, it still suggests that the more sound this group makes, the more they’re worth hearing.

V is a perfectly capable record, one that showcases what we’ve come to expect--and in many cases, enjoy--from Williams and his band. Even so, you wonder where else they might have gone.

Dull tempos, disengaging moments, recycled ideas--all egregious offenses, yes. Luckily, Les Savy Fav have earned a decade's worth of goodwill to cushion a just-OK album or two landing in their discography, which makes Root For Ruin a well-deserved victory lap, if nothing else.

Celebration, Florida doesn't simply reflect the hubbub of America as the Felice Brothers see it. The album becomes a part of the spectacle, which is surely not what the band intended.

While Honus continues to prove himself one of rock's best working lyricists, Life Fantastic contains as many musically compelling moments as Rabbit Habits and Six Demon Bag.