Cronin’s dulcet hesitance has given way to slightly meeker delivery. The hooks are there--in the engaging vocal counterpoint to a descending horn line on the bridge of "Say", for instance--but they’re difficult to appreciate.

By sticking so closely to the script laid out by their debut, II is the one thing punk rock should never be: careful.

Fated is an overwhelmingly pleasant listen. It is decidedly un-dazzling.

California Nights is a professional album: heavy-ish, filled with hooks, somewhere between "fast enough to dance" and "slow enough to sigh to while looking out of a window."

McCaughan has a gift for capturing simple, affecting moments without tipping the scales to sentimentality.

The busy arrangements and serious frontloading make Born Under Saturn’s 54 minutes a demanding investment, and the effort it takes to simply get any sort of visceral pleasure out of it makes it feel twice as long.

Hairball is certainly an evolution for Nai Harvest, but it’s tough to really call it progress.

Fading Love is set up to reward the same focus it demonstrates: if you dig into each new muted meditation and immerse yourself in FitzGerald's bubbling little temples of thought, you'll find yourself entranced.

For as bullish and dramatic as the music seems, the songs here often escalate for several minutes before making a point you think they’ve already made, like a series of false floors that open to bigger and bigger rooms.

Mew’s most consistently engaging record, even if it’s also the longest on both a cumulative and per-song basis.

Each song on Fast Food, her second LP, feels offered up and expertly framed, a series of rock songs given the lighting and treatment of museum objects.

The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.

The glitchy, warped surface is offset by the clarity and versatility of Standell-Preston’s narrative vocals, which pull everything into focus.

Trickfinger often provokes an engaging anxiety, but when Frusciante's not pushing at the edges of the form it can lack the magic of his otherwise unapologetically experimental solo work.

For all its minor stylistic differences, Ripe is very much forged in their image. But if any traditions in British indie rock are worth perpetuating right now, this inventive, engaged stable is the one to back.

The highlights of American Wrestlers reveal themselves immediately, but elsewhere on the record McClure demonstrates a curious ability to bury concise hooks in otherwise-doughy or unfinished songs.

For all the album's modest ambitions, it doesn't lack for variety.

Even more denatured and opaque than the soupy Melbourne, Sunshine Redux is self-produced to a gooey, garish, gritty and barely mobile gel.

An endearing collection of pastoral narratives and humble melodies that sounds unearthed from the Gaslight Cafe, where minor folk singers plied their trade and presented their authenticity for analysis in the early '60s.

Yelawolf sounds like he's just going through the motions instead of actually covering ground.

In the moments when The Magic Whip is most interested in sounding like a Blur album, it is perhaps too interested.

Who Is the Sender? effectively doubles his recorded output and moves him from the category of a curiosity who returned after a four-decade absence to make a third great album to someone perhaps capable of doing so in perpetuity.

Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals--the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves.

Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened.

There’s moments where the Very Best show that rather than merely parlay exuberance and global harmony, they can also manage the somber aspect of their music.

Unlike ...For the Whole World to See, N.E.W. does not sound like a lost proto-punk classic; it's just a pretty good rock record made by guys who have been at it for a long time.

Sound & Color is not an electronic record. But it is strange and mystical and unexpected.

Edge of the Sun sounds newly invigorated and inspired as Calexico reconsider their own past and find new music to explore.

Too often, he strays from the hushed mode he's mastered and ends up supplanting the band’s strengths with its weaknesses.

It’s only 10 songs, and the songs themselves are more interested in speed and economy.

The-Dream's deft "That's My Shit" is a return to that just-right poise of the serious and silly.... The rest of The Crown EP does not thread the needle quite so gracefully.

All that touring and woodshedding has apparently taught them not to waste a note, because the first side of No News from Home has a determined cohesion, sequenced to evoke the choppy rhythms of the road. Almost inevitably they lose some of that focus on side two, whose songs don’t have quite the same sense of purpose or that same sense of movement.

Wire feels at first almost strangely normal. Lewis is credited with most of the lyrics, Newman does most of the vocals in his gentler speak/sing mode, and the feeling generally is calmly inviting.

If you’ve loved Built to Spill’s music your whole life, Untethered Moon will have this same comforting, classic feel.

As an album, it feels complete but transient: True Romance has the capacity to lift and inspire, but that feeling doesn’t linger.

Dead is a frustrating record, one that finds the band on the cusp of making something truly great. While consistency and better production do work in Ascension's favor, some of the spontaneity of the first record would have been rendered even more powerfully here.

The mercurial, combustible potential within suggests we may not be laughing at it for much long.

Even on an album as wholly electronic-sounding as Damogen Furies, Jenkinson's musicality remains organic and responsive.

As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.

The wearying volume of Jackrabbit is the most taxing aspect of a record that already arrives intentionally overstuffed.

She is an artist who knows who she is, and Froot luxuriates in the confidence that we do, too, relaxing in the space and power that Diamandis has claimed.

Fast-Moving Clouds benefits immensely from its mid-fi, almost homemade sound, which lends weight to her inventive pop flourishes.

The intensity rises and falls with the rolling hills, but the vistas remain the same, and the horizon never gets any closer. Despite the uniformity, there are clear highlights.

His greatest strength has always been world-building, using a synth-heavy blitz of candy-colored jazz chords taken straight (sometimes blatantly so) from the Pharrell handbook. Cherry Bomb isn’t exactly a hard left turn from this lane, but it is a quick swerve.

Dark Energy has all the hallmarks of footwork--its frenzied pacing, arrhythmic kick drums, a graphic command of blank space--executed with clear-eyed self-determination. This gives the album an opaque, thoughtful quality.

Sure, stylistic and mechanical hesitations pepper these seven songs, but even those instances feel mostly like the charming reservations of a brilliant beginner.

These new songs don’t sound terribly different from Stables’ first recordings nearly a decade ago, but the music is bolder and more purposeful, with a broader, richer palette of sounds.

In Calder's songs solace proves elusive and fleeting, but when she finds it, it's always during moments of calm.

Batoh's new act, the Silence, is at once a continuation of the past and a break from it.

Keeping up with it requires careful attention, though unpacking it hardly feels laborious. Just don’t expect Ava Luna to do any hand-holding for you throughout the process.

Like much of People of the North’s catalog, Era of Manifestations comes across as an attempt at extreme therapy; I secretly find myself hoping the band never quite finds the peace that its raging towards.

What is frustrating are the infrequent but genuinely interesting moments of creativity and cohesion, which suggest that if Marching Church had taken their time and laid off the improv a little, there might have been something special here.

Sonnet positions Meluch somewhere beyond the insular place he occupied before.

For an act so consistent in their sound, it’s hard to get a bead on their ambitions.

New Glow may be Matt & Kim’s most polished album, but their songwriting has never been more amateurish.

Suuns and Jerusalem in My Heart does leave you wondering what more the two entities could have accomplished had they worked on this for more than a week.

An album that delivers a gorgeous, if somewhat restrained, step forward. It’s a document of quiet, if not necessarily earth-shattering, revelations.

For a record so bent on impressing the listener, Culture of Volume somehow never manages to leave a mark.

Curren$y may not do "new," but he is very good at what he does: riffing on cars, money, women, weed, and obscure moments from television shows.

There’s a very palatable poppy sheen on all of these tracks: Glitterbug is packed with anthemic hooks and synth pulses that sound like they were composed solely to lure Lexus.

It’s triumphant music for the hyperactive, plural city; it’s confrontational as a means to achieving communality, with no particular loyalties except to an anonymous, shifting collective of people who all want the same thing as Young Fathers--to be one thing, then the next, then the next.

There are good ideas somewhere inside The Air Conditioned Nightmare, and anyone determined enough to look might get something out of them. Lyrics ranging from naively clichéd to slyly astute.

Wilson’s chipper duets never reach equilibrium. Either his presence feels underutilized--the syrupy "On the Island" with She & Him, in which his vocals are scant--or the guests feel shoehorned into musty production that undermines their own charisma.

There are times on Captain of None where the album’s architecture is so compelling it's easy to miss the resonance of the songs themselves.

Insides is Fort Romeau’s second full-length record, and although it doesn’t continue on quite the same upward trend of his recent discography in the risk-taking department, it does boast some of his most fully dimensional and impressively produced work yet.

As the tempos stagnate towards the album’s back end, though, the affective force of her vocals loses potency—particularly on the pedestrian ballad "One Day"--and all the runs in the world can't distract from the sameness.

Iit never feels forced or like she's making some kind of push. It's unhurried and natural and real.

With Dark Red, he’s taken another turn, slipping out of the pop-shadowing path he was on in exchange for something darker and bolder, but compromised by its own disorder.

What For? is so passive it leaves your system the moment you’re done with it.

The rest of the record isn’t as brassy as "Foreign Object", an obvious crowd-pleaser, but it’s occasionally as bold.

Occasional goth clichés aside, Deeper is a thing of beauty.

In truth, they display a confidence in declining to chase or win over new fans that is exceedingly rare in legacy acts.

R&B informed the Sonics’ unhinged passion from the get-go, and This Is the Sonics pays proper homage to the group’s roots.

Despite production from current-day heavy hitters like Da Internz and Mike WiLL Made It, he still comes off like a relic from the past, the class clown who never quite grew up.

While Hunter seems more enamored of radio hits by the likes of Gary Numan and Flock of Seagulls here, Lower Dens never quite settle into an easy genre hook.

Nothing is a long album, with one cut coming in over the six-minute mark, and when it is sludgy, it is exhausting.

Little of Kintsugi gives the impression that Gibbard’s motivation to reboot Death Cab is matched by legitimate inspiration.

Cosmic Troubles sounds a sadder, vaster album than before, but one whose meditations can soothe your bones like an inviting stream.

You have to let your guard down, and Godspeed have to transform feelings into compelling records. They're still on track.

There is nothing new in Malin’s depiction of New York, and that may be the whole point: He wants this milieu to be instantly familiar.

While Primrose Green is a great statement for a '70s freak-folk cosplayer, I just hope it’s not a career-defining one for Walker.

It doesn’t always reach the level of spiritual purity it could, but there’s a touch of steel and a sense of pacing that was missing from Föllakzoid’s prior work, positioning III as a gateway for a much a deeper dive into altered states.

This record is a return to the spare folk of Seven Swans, but with a decade's worth of honing and exploration packed into it. It already feels like his most classic and pure effort.

There are easily as many misses as hits on the album, and 14 tracks is probably about seven tracks too long.

Without an overarching conceit like Once I Was an Eagle, Short Movie comes off sounding like a transition record, a short movie in the sense that it’s a prelude to something bigger.

Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful--warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid--but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling.

Though enjoyable, it may land in a limbo, too simplistic for fans of great chamber music or its challenging modern variants; too classical--lacking bells, whistles, samples and beats--to make it more than pleasant dinner party music for people coming from the indie side.

The band plays with tremendous power, verve, and energy, but the results feel leaden, even after dozens of list For all of its dense conceptual underpinnings, The Ark Work comes up curiously short on new ideas long before the album ends.

Time to Go Home is a beautifully composed record about confronting your fuck-ups, but it’s also a record about feeling numb to them.

For All My Sisters is a scruffy, buzzy and very hooky guitar album that doesn’t quite scan as "punk" or "indie".

The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises.

What follows is a musical of sorts wedged into the gut of the album.... This digression is conceptually ambitious, but the execution seems to purposefully undercut the exercise, as if the suite was the result of an argument between a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other about what the album should accomplish that was won by neither.

The album’s backward-gazing perspective doesn’t detract from the fact that Freedom Tower contains some of the Blues Explosion’s most inspired, vital music since their mid-'90s peak.

Earl is carefully whittling away at the proclivities he's always had, remaining confident that he’ll light upon something that feels fresh and honest. So far, he's right.

Fortune packs a subtle yet undeniable emotive force whose impact can linger long after the projector has gone dark.

After six albums, Cabic has yet to build a discernible and discrete identity for this band. It remains the ongoing also-ran from a loose freak-folk confederation that’s splintered in a dozen surprising ways.

It’s a cohesive listen that doesn't quite translate into a cohesive statement of purpose.

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.