Equally indebted to pioneering girl groups as well as her punk heroes, the album is a fiery and compelling—albeit slightly uneven—exploration of love, anger, and coming-of-age.

Part Lies makes a good case that their later period has value too, and that the group had raised the bar so high for themselves that merely being very good could be interpreted as a failure.

Every song on this singles/rarities set, for better or worse (and I’d argue it’s much more for the better), even the cover of Joy Division’s "Disorder", is instantly identifiable as Bedhead. They staked out the boundaries of an aesthetic, and they were not particularly wide boundaries; differences between their albums are subtle. But they explored every inch of terrain inside of them.

Their peppy, gleeful, headstrong guitar pop sounds a hell of a lot like yesteryear's Britpop.

A formula ain't necessarily a bad thing: Think of it as a carefully considered training technique, designed to flex and strengthen certain sonic muscles in aid of achieving ever more impressive results.

When you view the tracklist for Springsteen on Broadway and evaluate it from the perspective of one night’s performance, it’s an impressive list of songs. But when you look at it as representative of a body of work spanning four decades--which this production decidedly cannot escape representing--it is a more than suitable tribute to what Springsteen himself refers to as both his service and his “long and noisy prayer.”

With such simple arrangements, Sprague’s writing can sound like an intimate conversation, with larger context left unsaid. ... The more directly she composes her thoughts, the fuller the music becomes.

At just 28 minutes, HEIS moves with ceaseless hustle.

On Let England Shake, Harvey is not often upfront or forceful; her lyrics, though, are as disturbing as ever.

As close to a perfect hybrid of dance and rock music's values as you're likely to ever hear.

Heavy Heavy sweeps its listener along, churchlike, and conveys the feeling that resisting the urge will always feel worse than rising up and pushing the air from your lungs. And then, after a brief 10 tracks, it’s all over—as if the procession has marched on, out of earshot. But the invite is still there extended: It’s up to you whether to accept it or not.

It is a strange and sometimes brilliant album—one that only Linda Thompson could have made, whether or not you can hear her singing.

As a whole, though, Surgical Steel succeeds brilliantly in its return-to-form mission.

Power Trip’s fist-pumping choruses, ricocheting grooves, and ample charm are so animated that they leave us with something addictive and, well, fun.

It’s a graceful record. ... Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop.

The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.

Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one.

With Body Talk, Robyn ups the ante for pop stars across the radio dial and raises her own chances of appearing on yours. And for all her three-album talk, she never forgets that cardinal rule of showmanship: Always leave them wanting more.

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.

Largely forgoing the cinematic flair of Simz’s previous records, James surrounds her voice with unfussy arrangements that draw from jazz, Afrobeat, and rock. It’s a difficult balance but they manage, more or less.

The relative warmth and light here gives the music a nostalgic cast, which was at the heart of what made Endless Summer so memorable, but Bécs also possesses an added layer that doesn’t necessarily work in its favor. Fennesz once illuminated the beauty of a digitally scrambled memory, but Bécs is a memory of a digitally scrambled memory.

One Word Extinguisher shows a range of emotional grappling usually foreign to instrumental hip-hop.

More than simply an expression of her music, Time (The Revelator) is a glimpse into the artist's personality.

The vocals: a cloying, toying mix of insouciant sass and arty call-and-response jabs, all delivered with an unhinged sense of preening and play. That's pretty much the Method Actors method condensed, and it plays out to deliriously rewarding and consistent effect on a CD that collects songs recorded from 1980 to 1981.

This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don't be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.

Delineated acts aside, the disc maintains a certain sonic consistency, carefully balancing discord with grace; the structure does pay off, however--particularly the first two-thirds.

Drawing out stories across generations, Dawson captures the way memories loom large in the present.

Remind Me Tomorrow is not unyielding. It is the peak of Van Etten’s songwriting, her most atmospheric and emotionally piercing album to date.

The full enjoyment of Imagine This Is a High Dimensional Space of All Possibilities requires some imagination of your own, a sort of listening past the vaporous surface of the music. Like teenage Holden at the radio, you may sense a magical world there, just beyond what you can hear.

In the rare spots where the production is grating and the writing limp, Grande makes up for it with skill and intuition. thank u, next may be an imperfect album but it’s a perfect next chapter.

This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top.

The union of players and material inspires a new synthesis: the sound of Iyer consolidating strengths and discovering some new ones as he settles into the vibe created by his most potent band yet.

This album is an affirmation of global connectivity and an emerging global culture that transcends and repurposes tradition as it sees fit--the sound of Mali merging with the world at large.

Every song here could be a single, but taken together, they add up to a sum greater than its parts.

A warm, intimate debut album that leaves space for darker contemplation—those stray thoughts that light you up at the end of the night.

A Sailor's Guide to Earth is such a rearrangement of Simpson's sonic universe that any previous categorization now seems out of date.

Mirrored is a breathtaking aesthetic left-turn that sounds less like rock circa 2007 than rock circa 2097, a world where Marshall stacks and micro-processing go hand in hand.

On this pristinely preserved live document, the entire underdog-comeback narrative of a Rocky movie plays out and repeats itself in recurring five-minute intervals.

Are We There may be her most present-tense album to date, her most immediate and urgent--the peak of a steady upward trajectory.

It is the most relaxed of her recent LPs and by far the best, a return to form that privileges the emotional immediacy and kinetic sensation that’s defined the best of her music for years.

The tracks on this album coalesce and morph, more than they progress. They get more traction from a good drone than from an elegant harmonic resolution. There’s a process of real-time exchange and dynamic micro-attunement that only jazz musicians can achieve, but not many of the cathartic peaks you might expect from a jazz performance. What matters is a vibe.

He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion.

It's a rare thing for an album to have such a strong sense of what it wants to be. Bon Iver is about flow, from one scene and arrangement and song and memory and word into the next-- each distinct but connected-- all leading to "Beth/Rest".

What makes How I Got Over work is its sense of purpose. After the jaw-clenching stress rap of their last two excellent Def Jam releases, Game Theory and Rising Down, this record operates as a slow-build mission statement on how to overcome.

Smith may have abandoned his trench-coat persona in favor of a more honest self-portrait, but the line between the authentic self and the larger-than-life character remains provocatively fuzzy.

Afrique Victime is the fullest portrait of Moctar’s gifts that he has offered yet.

While it’s a creative step forward for Kiwanuka, it’s still tough to get a sense of just who he is at times.

If ever an album rewarded repeated listening, it's this one.

Masta Killa has delivered one the most urgent, straightforward Wu releases since the group's debut over a decade ago.

Simply put, this album sounds absolutely huge, its relentless attention to detail eclipsed only by the stunning emotional power it conveys.

However convoluted things get, you still wanna pump fist and bang head, even if you're not always sure when you should be doing so.

With Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You.

This is still a staggering monument all the same, an elaborately detailed portrait of a shambolic artist whose astonishing productivity, creative restlessness, and utter disdain for the niceties of civil society know no bounds.

The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection.

More than 25 years later, O’Rourke and Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, closing off their beloved project as finely as a tape loop.

The chain reaction these nine songs generate together produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong—and to keep whatever secret she’s trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers.

Lush, melancholic, gregarious, generous, both precise and a little bit unhinged--this is the most original American dance album in a long while.

For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one.

Syro contains some of his most tactile music; it’s a headphone record par excellence, an hour-long feast for the ears.

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

Its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back.

Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action.

Young Man in America, is just as ambitious [as her last release, Hadestown], but it's more intimate and accessible than its predecessor, focused on the textures of everyday life and the odd, stirring power of Mitchell's voice.

At the risk of overstating the case, Life Is People--the work of a 69-year-old family man, and the work of a lifetime--confirms its maker's own thesis.

Centres initially seems like a near-formless sea of sound and voice. But over time, it reveals patterns inside the swirl, and the more time you spend in it, the further you will to get lost in its wondrous confines.

More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless.

Listening back now it’s an album that would have sounded fresh and vital released at any time over the past quarter century.

Snocaps is a return to form, its sound landing closer to the ramshackle pop-punk of P.S. Eliot than Saint Cloud’s twilit majesty.

His restless style makes each piece sound three-dimensional, as shards of songs pass each other in a storm of string activity. It makes for exhilarating, sometimes exhausting listening. But it also makes for music that, though it hints at structure, never sounds predictable and rarely settles.

The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music’s most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener.

At first, Krlic’s soundtrack captures the instinctive panic that comes with the upset of environmental and cultural norms. But as Aster’s characters grow acclimated to their new surroundings, he relieves us with symphonic moments of clarity (“The Blessing”) and triumph.

What makes it work so well is that this anarchy is not an anything-goes anarchy: These songs are so carefully composed, so intentional, that every cyborgian burp and steel snare fits perfectly. Everything and nothing tramples each other.

Estudando o Pagode is an impressive album, musically, conceptually, and lyrically, and the cast of musicians and singers Zé assembled delivers on his singular vision.

Her pop fun is a bit knowing-- she's 26 after all. But trust the Swedes. They know what they're doing with this sort of thing.

Nas’ kingship goes down easy over Hit-Boy’s clean drums and neat arrangements, which indulge Nas’ nostalgia without kowtowing to it. ... When Nas’ rhymes aren’t clumsy, his storytelling is.

The frequent spoken-word interludes would feel less performative at a live show, but often take you out of the moment on the record. It seems RAYE is unwilling to leave anything on the cutting room floor, even if dialing back the razzle-dazzle could forge closer connection to the music. But the peaks often justify the adventure.

This stuff would sound great behind just about any garage-rock hack, but it turns Finn's dirtbag chronicles into something epic and huge and molten and beautiful.

In the past, he’d mix his voice to fit within the instrumental; on Process, he makes it the focal point. Co-produced with Rodaidh McDonald, Process brings to mind James Blake while nodding to mainstream hip-hop.

The songs, interludes, pacing and sequencing are all as they should be, helping to make Quicksand/Cradlesnakes Califone's best record.

BSP's performance art antics and throwback posturing come with a distinct set of innovations and surprises, and The Decline of British Sea Power proves that BSP have the song-power to back up their bullshit.

Their best album to date-- a bold claim to the upper echelon of rock.

This record explodes with song after song of endlessly replayable, perfect pop.

While Ovlov are still as wonderfully wooly ever, they’re unleashing the noise in more purposeful, sculpted spurts and displaying a greater willingness to let their melodies sparkle through the clouds of distortion.

DEACON could use a few more awe-inspiring moments, but by celebrating simplicity, it enshrines the Black, queer love at its center as something blessedly uncomplicated and precious. Love doesn’t need tragedy to be great, and neither does serpentwithfeet. On DEACON, Wise proves his musicianship can stand on its own—no melodrama required.

His pivot toward interiority gives his songs a new dimension. His bars are simple, straightforward, and can occasionally lean toward fortune-cookie wisdom (“Get the bread, avoid the drama/You can avoid the feds but not the karma,” he raps on “Fight For Your Right”), but throughout the album, he seems to be growing more secure in himself.

Yeah, it's a fun album, and it's probably the most affable thing they've done so far together. But don't take that for a weakness.

The first disc contains some of the loveliest songs Phil Elverum has ever written. .... The second disc, meanwhile, demonstrates that touring with the great anti-fascist doom duo Ragana has done wonders for his work.

Purely in sensory terms, it’s difficult to imagine many richer-sounding rock records being released this year. Tumor treats sounds so lovingly they sometimes resemble a director framing and lighting a beloved actor, and every sound on Praise enters the mix with near-visible entrance and exit cues.

As a career overview Minimum-Maximum far surpasses The Mix. This record's "importance" in the Kraftwerk story is up for debate, but there's no question it's a hell of a lot of fun.

It's respectful of tradition, quietly ambitious, and deeply personal, a wonderfully considered album from an artist who was starting to seem a lot like a forgotten gem in the wake of mishandled promotion.

It’s expansive and ambitious, and divorced of all the tweedy preening and aw-shucks raggediness the idea of “folk” has accumulated in recent years. It's dark, it’s angry, it’s even sexy, in a sly, subtle way.

Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.

Though they certainly do their fair share of sampling, they tend to use fragments as a means of fleshing out the battling, overdriven guitars, triumphant trumpet lines, and drum assaults that seem to break through walls with the barreling force of a thousand Kool-Aid men.

The relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here.

Kidjo finds her own way into these songs, infusing them with a tactile sense of empathy.

As when the biggest guy in the bar has your back, Vee Vee is filled with extra spittle and bottomless bravado.

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.

The most impressive thing about the album is how death is gracefully absorbed into this long-running franchise to reinvigorate the band.