These songs suggest the continuous struggle to be comforted, and Shauf finds himself stronger in the company of others. Even in the detail of lonesome battles, Foxwarren’s kinship and warmth persist.

In a way, the album simply highlights many of the reasons why Orbital have been so beloved for the past decade-and-a-half.

What's interesting about the sound they've hit on isn't so much what the two musicians bring to each other's styles, as it is what each sacrifices from his own.

Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine.

Production-value is high, with Ferg enlisting top-tier beatmakers like the aforementioned DJ Khalil but also No I.D., DJ Mustard, and even Skrillex. But the beats take a backseat to the lyrics. The overall sound remains intact, but he’s even more invested in what he’s saying.

Playboi Carti feels like a break from life, the soundtrack to a mindless good time.

Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

The result is a patchwork quilt of an album, stitched together from scraps gathered here and there—but then, those quilts are often the warmest, the most comforting. ... Especially after the unrelenting darkness of its predecessor, The New OK sounds all the more affecting for not being quite so dire.

Despite the album’s dark, damp, sepulchral title, light manifests numerous times on Tomb. In the dizzying chime of his careful fingerpicking and high-pitched howls, De Augustine captures love’s bright blaze.

But if The Chaos marks the point where the Futureheads admit to themselves that the past ain't so bad, closing track "Jupiter"-- clocking in at a career-topping four minutes-- points to an intriguing new direction where the Futureheads apply their eccentricities to lengthier, more conceptual pieces.

As “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” illustrates, !!! are at their best when making dance music that’s both unabashedly celebratory and stridently unsentimental. When the band veer into more typically romantic house terrain (“Our Love (U Can Get)”) and starry-eyed electro-rock (“Throw Yourself in the River”), their peculiar, provocateur personality is muted.

Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.

On The Hum Goes on Forever, the Wonder Years deliver the shredded vocals and taut palm-muted guitars that made them Warped Tour heroes without sacrificing the depth and nuance in Campbell’s writing.

Gwenno is in the business of pop artistry, not broccoli-boiling, so Tresor’s touch is light and breezy, even as its songs dive into analytical psychology, the patriarchy, the colonizer lurking up and to the right.

The collaborative nature of Sharpen Your Teeth, of course, yields a few missteps.... There are some damn fine moments here, though.

There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed.

Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.”

It's hard not to feel conflicted about Apollo Kids. Unlike Ghostface records that presumably get unfairly judged by the standards of his best work, it's tempting to overrate it due a general relief that he didn't try to make Ghostdini again.

The Night is a record uncomfortable with all the trappings of the corporeal world--time, words, its own skin--and occasionally, improbably, it actually breaks free of them all.

On Elastic Days, he’s somehow as accessible but elusive as ever.

Come to Life shows Cities Aviv putting post-punk, Oneontrix Point Never-like samples (“Realms”), and even a little bit of rap into one holistically new blend.

If you look at the incremental progress from Ames Room to Opticks, it's clear that this is the work of an artist who is still finding her way, and there is reason to believe that bolder, more immediately tuneful work will come in her future, hopefully without sacrificing the muted, low-key quality that makes her art so attractive and charming.

It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics.

Yes, this music gets dull--it’s supposed to. I can’t imagine listening to it all the time for the same reasons I can’t imagine trying to cook an entire meal using only a garlic press. But in their limited pursuits Bohren captures a mood other music either struggles to or just doesn’t bother with: Not sadness (too acute), not angst, but a sumptuous, all-purpose melancholy.

Too many shards of ideas are shoved into the long songs, and Fickeisen’s flash sometimes borders on showmanship, a glaring incongruity for a spartan outfit like Trap Them.

Wishy’s most cohesive moments come from their knack for memorable, solid melodies.

What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete.

There's certainly no shortage of well-crafted, playful, memorable tunes here, and that-- matched with Schneider's willingness to try on a few new sounds for size-- adds up to the best Apples in Stereo record in more than a decade.

Another Day falters when it gets too ethereal and singy—as on the Haliechuk-led “Follow Fine Feeling,” which doesn’t have the melodic juice of his excellent song “Cicada” on One Day—or too straight-up and untextured, as on the plodding closer “House Lights.” But at its best, Another Day showcases Fucked Up as masters of transformation.

The album's production and Vermue's economical, buttoned-down songwriting offer plenty of tonal and genre variation, but everything still feels like it's hitting the same mark.

As on previous albums from the Trio, the overarching vibe remains murky and muddled, like a strong joint on top of a hangover on a humid, overcast day. But they cover more range than ever before.

The shimmering, rapturous hook of the title track, for example, packs a euphoric punch, though the song slightly overworks the objects-as-organs imagery. She has a lighter lyrical touch on opening track “Good Intentions,” a would-be John Hughes movie outro, and the pulsating “Every Ounce of Me,” an I-don't-want-to-fall-in-love banger with synths brighter than the sun. After the opening flush of these songs, the record’s remainder doesn’t quite reach the same highs.

It’s a Myth is the natural progression from Gymnastics, and so across the record, Moolchan refines her sound within these limits. Inside and outside of the music, she embraces the self-built space that she crafted for herself.

Lord Steppington is just the latest remarkably solid offering from Alchemist and co. and the artists involved clearly think of the endeavors as fun and games.

The Listener is ultimately such a strange record that it's hard to really classify; Giant Sand fans are going to love it, naturally (all twelve of them likely already own it), but people new to Gelb and his accomplices might be left scratching their heads.

He’s constantly halving the distance to his target, getting closer but not quite getting there. But those infinitesimal improvements on Hell Below--indeed, the very places where it remains static--show, in some ways, what that Ideal Album might look like.

Black Metal offers few definitive answers, but this time around the hazy images he's projecting have come into sharper focus.

Laced is indeed bigger and bolder than previous albums, which is somewhat ironic since it has a more intimate, made-in-the-bedroom feel than the band's earlier basement forays.

Emotional Mugger still feels transitional--either the moment before he tucks in and gets way weirder or another stepping stone before he switches gears all over again.

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.

The specter of mortality haunts the proceedings. Despite all of this, it's a testament to Chinx's still-growing pop smarts that Welcome to JFK is sometimes a lot of fun.

While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality.

Pinch & Shackleton is a welcome return to each artist's peculiar roots.

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 interesting to hear how Alvvays nod to their vaunted indie forebears while also stretching against the limitations of being too closely associated with the past.

Total Dust undeniably taps into the same raw-nerved emotion that defined Borcherdt's previous solo efforts, wrapping its cutting sentiments in a grotty guitar fuzz that sounds like it was scraped off the heads on Lou Barlow's old four-track.

AWVFTS adapts, making ATOMOS louder and more mobile than its impeccably tentative predecessor—more volatile and disjointed, with basses you can feel in your body because this is for the body.

Nothing on Beauty & Ruin truly resembles experimentation, as Mould, unburdened of so much baggage of late, seems joyously unconcerned with proving anything to anyone other than the fact that he can still craft hook after hook.

They transform a solid album into something of an emotional journey, and hint strongly that beneath their low-key snarling, Fufanu have grander things on their minds.

As is typical when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas join forces, some of the project’s most exciting moments are snuck in the back door, laced into a dazzling breakdown or deep, hypnotic groove.

When celebration seems impossible, music like Harlecore can ferry you to a world that’s brighter and more interesting than your own.

Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work.

Almost without trying, the track becomes a perfect psychedelic blister--headstrong and hot, five dudes marching headlong in one righteous moment. Long live major-label debuts, then: This is the sound of Eternal Tapestry finally turning its instincts into conquests.

An M-80 blown up in an empty clearing--explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.

Like a lot of indie-pop albums, Program 91 is relatively quick and dirty. But despite its brevity, the album's second side drags a bit, as the skanked rhythms begin to bleed into each other with a lack of individual distinction.

For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving.

The sprawl is less generous than it is indulgent, rendering the album more intimidating and less accessible than it should be.

No matter where he dwells, Davies remains an outsider, and that alienation unites Americana’s jumble of eras and places.

This is Field Music at their most baroque-- a record of sweetly melodic miniatures that coalesce into form only long enough to tumble into the next meticulously designed song suite.... [Yet] Plumb is a little too fussy. Great hooks rise up, but are quickly abandoned in the rush to the next good idea.

Good Nature is SoCal to the core, a warm embrace of the area’s soft-focus spirituality and the optimism of young, beautiful creatives without much to worry about.

Since LFO hardly need to be innovators to produce a good record, I don't have much problem recommending Sheath, with the caveat that when pleasant, easy-going atmospheres set in, sometimes amiable disinterest on listeners' parts follow shortly.

Taken as a whole, Masculin Féminin is a scrapbook made of records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a portrait of a band more multi-dimensional than their Sonic Youth Jr. rep suggested.

Across Hunted’s seven tracks, Calvi contorts her dance along the spectrum of gender and sexuality into something more of a march, stomping between tenderness and brutality.

Around the Well is a great retrospective that heps fans to a lot of difficult-to-locate material from one of this decade's finest songwriters. While there is some fairly flat stuff on the first disc, it really gives the listener the sweep of his development as a writer, musician, and arranger.

Music has always been just one aspect of the Poppy multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one.

The throughline, as ever, is VanGaalen’s knack for crafting emotionally resonant songs out of absurd premises.

On 200 Million Thousand, Black Lips sidestep expectations and make a record less approachable than its predecessor.

Whatever Actually, You Can may lack in pointedness, it makes up for in raw energy. Yet with all of the intensity and musical bedlam at work here, the brief sections of calm somehow resonate the longest.

It’s an adventurous, impressive display of instrumental can-do, a music nerd’s romp through high-fidelity magic that’s only occasionally hampered by insipid writing.

They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet.

Throughout all 23 tracks, the score straddles the line between weariness and wonder, like someone constantly recalling the danger this stunning planet is capable of unleashing.

For the most part, it’s compulsively listenable, oddly moving, and stranger than it first appears, as the band gets existential on the dance floor.

Guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop.

His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words.

Coda is a great listen with a skip button close at hand.

He’s almost literally stopping to smell the roses, and the result is an album about growth and development, about the virtues of taking your time rather than the crutch of constantly sprinting forward. In the process, it advances Bachman’s oeuvre significantly.

Haley Heynderickx may not have a garden just yet, but if beauty can cure uncertainty, this album should be enough for now.

Bubu music is ancient; En Yay Sah offers a powerfully modern, cosmopolitan introduction to its complex and vibrant rhythms.

Soft Fall just works, whether as a dazzling display of sumptuous synthetic ambience, rich, romantic pop, and quite a few points in between.

Burnt Offering has its own kind of subtlety, and most of it is in the interplay between meter, genre, and mood.

Mister Pop stays the course for the rest of its relatively compact 10-song, 34-minute length, reshaping the Clean's core components into poignant bossa nova instrumentals ('Simple Fix'), propulsive Krautrock-outs ('Tensile') and, as only they can, bizarro fuzz-organ jigs that resemble White Light/White Heat-era Velvets auditioning for "Riverdance" ('Moonjumper').

[To Find Me Gone] finds Cabic nudging Vetiver toward the lost canyons of airy West Coast soft-rock and laid-back, country-tinged introspection, all harvested with a dreamy, narcotic warmth and just enough melodic grit to avoid a complete departure off into the twilight.

All told, Migration is an impressive improvement over The North Borders, and easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s fifteen-plus year career.

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.

PC Music is escapism whose primary effect is to remind us of what we’re trying to escape. We can’t trade body for avatar; we can’t displace longing forever. But for the space of an album--the sheer forcefulness of this intention smashed into a dizzy half-hour span--the sincerity within our most fundamentally artificial impulses comes calling.

You get the sense that pretty much any style could be Ware’s if she commits to it, but for now it’s nice to hear her explore a level of sophistication as her star continues to rise.

Oberst has traded in a lot of his post-adolescent trembling for a calmer, less unbridled melancholy, but Conor Oberst is still packed with disheartening realities, and Oberst refuses to temper his pessimism, even when it starts to feel heavy and contrived, more like a narrative tic than anything else.

If they can’t quite recapture the full force or stark originality that characterized their lodestar during his lifetime (who could?) they can and do evoke his broad range of moods and colors, which seem to befit this moment. And they get us to lean in and listen, with just the right tilt.

In keeping with the album's title, Never is uncompromising and direct.

While city pop and environmental music thrive in functional settings that immediately translate across cultures, Somewhere Between feels part of a broader refusal to be understood on the same terms, forcing listeners to engage with a history that goes deeper than immediate feeling.

Though it's no masterpiece, With the Tides is certainly a good record. At the very least it should ease your Britpop jones better than Menswe@r.

It’s music for small rooms with weird lighting, old churches where you have to sit on a bench, graveyards where you are always standing under a tree. It is also poetic but in an extremely self-aware and twee kind of way, doing things like meditating on the difference between “dog” and “god” or describing a weirdly sexy interaction with a doctor.

The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments.

This is raw and raucous rock-- pounding drums, throttled prog riffs and breathy, hypnotic invocations.

The results might be a little thin on actual "essential" moments, but they're working in the right direction.

It’s thrashy if not entirely thrash, it’s dirty and smeared at the edges, and they remain sick of your shit, with their definition of “your shit” an exponentially expanding, spiteful blob. Even without changing much, they’re still the freaks underground metal needs.

“Gold Feet” feels as if it could have been pulled off a hard drive that had been neglected since 2018, all the way down to its JID feature. But more often, the album pushes through that illusory ease to deliver heavier tracks and a more animated Gibbs than we’ve seen for some time.