These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.

Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble.

Vocals play a prominent role in roughly half of the album’s songs, and while they sometimes work—UK trans activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s spoken-word poetry cuts powerfully through the moody “Human Sound”—they sometimes feel like Throssell is straining slightly for gravitas, pasting emotion on top of tracks that communicate plenty of it on their own.

While Free Company and Wayfinder were rife with wry one-liners and observations to offset the otherwise emotionally knotty writing, Art Moore is a bruising and remorseful record that aches without reservation.

Don’t Trust Mirrors is the snake’s head and tail: the project’s flash of inspiration and its culmination, the point where Moran lost her passion for the prepared piano and found it again.

The impeccable cool of Sadier's approach freezes out political engagement in lieu of a brand of fashionable leftism to match the sofa.

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

These records, steeped in reference and atmosphere, draw on memory but, being so textured and tactile, they bring the focus back to the present moment.

There’s no chest-puffing here, no braggadocio; this is only the very sincere statement of a person doing his best to work through the worries of living and share any delight he’s stumbled upon along the way.

It's a kitchen sink-like flood of sound, always on the verge of resembling a gigantic curveball being forced down your throat, but with Vibert pulling back from the humor brink at all the right moments.

Diehard fans of Goldfrapp will no doubt find something to love here, but for the rest of us, it’s a thin record that doesn’t do much to prop up its skeletal frame.

In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music.

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 not that Tribute To isn't on some level deeply felt, but it's just not deeply considered, and while it's nice to hear James focused and playing to his strengths after the scattered "Evil Urges," his tribute eventually loses the one thread it sets out to carry on its cover.

On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound.

Holy Fuck have carved out a unique and identifiable sound of their own, and as the band itself has solidified, it's made their identity even stronger.

Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime.

Fortunately for the diehards, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is devoid of the stylistic overindulgence or inflated self-importance often associated with hiatus-ending efforts.

Even those accustomed to Sloan's effortlessness will find the first half of Parallel Play almost flawless. There's still little in the way of artifice or innovation, but it's still easy to admire the architecture.

"Ash on the Trees (The Sudden Ebb of a Diatribe)", [is] the real reason this set of reissues is worth the investment.... It's a terrifying maze of tangents, like the early works of Nurse With Wound cronies Current 93 and O'Malley's own Khanate remixed by some actualization of evil.

On Seven Psalms, the speeches are the main event: The fact there is music playing at all seems largely incidental. Cave is a much more reliable narrator this time around, ditching the previous album’s flashes of mania and hilarity in favor of solemnity and sobriety.

Compared to Morrissey's oblique but resonant lyricism, the Jarmans deal in provocative sound-bite slogans, but the Cribs prove themselves worthy successors to a lineage of cheekily erudite Britpop that spans David Bowie through to the Smiths to Pulp.

It is his most personal record, but not because it's bare and raw, but because it's surreal and dreamlike.

Even when their songs pass muster, the performances feel ineffectual, which makes long stretches of Venus on Earth drag semi-miserably.

For all Madlib's eclecticism and supposedly short attention span, his work here sounds focused and sharp. The beats aren't wasted here by any means, but a different crew could have brought out even more potential.

The North Borders is not a bad album--for the most, it’s as inoffensive as those decade-old chill-out compilations--yet a frustration persists because Bonobo is better than this.

Primal Heart is a collision of hard electronics with light sprinkles of au courant R&B making for Kimbra’s most mainstream statement yet. ... However, her most ambitious efforts don’t quite reach their apex, causing her somewhat cocky assertions to land flat.

Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”

Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor.

It’s rarely bad, just safe, doing more to remind us of the old days than to embrace the musical crossroads he’s at. That feels like a missed opportunity to fill in the blanks that are still there.

However disparate its geographic points of reference, Temper is an artistically consistent, tonally temperate, record--depending on your taste, maybe a little too balmy and dispassionate.

Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward.

Although Good Arrows is aimed in the direction of a synthesis between the band's two predominant elements, the result misses the target by just a bit.

It's generally a meditative set, and only on the album's final track, "Exit the Acropolis", does Dozzy return to the sound with which he's most closely affiliated: Tapping out clicks like 808 hi-hats, and weaving three or four layers of mouth harp into enveloping contrapuntal pulses, it's the perfect approximation of Berghain-styled techno.

A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.

There’s a gauzy thinness to the sound, an inescapable two-dimensionality that occasionally hinders Lynne’s mission. Still, this is a fine addition to their catalog, perhaps not as consistent as 2001’s Zoom but much better than these late-career revival albums tend to sound.

It’s clear that the artists are well aware of the risks of throwing themselves too eagerly into the wine-dark churn, but here, O’Rourke isn’t quite capable of reining in Fennesz’ more impetuous inclinations, and by the end of it, you find yourself craving a quiet patch of warm, dry land on which to catch your breath.

The Documentary 2 solidifies him a grade-grubbing student of hip-hop, one with far more resources and drive than natural talent, but a student all the same.

With that title, Songs for Singles practically announces itself as a stopgap release, a breather after the breakthrough. If it doesn't shake the earth the way Meanderthal did, it's not really supposed to. But the EP does show that this band remains in fine working condition, and another full-on album from these guys would be a welcome thing indeed. Until then, this will do just fine.

Whether he’s full of joy or howling into the void, he pushes his songs to their edge, which helps to deliver on the promise shown in his earlier work.

Late Night Feelings is not the first recent record to treat the sadness of women as a healthy response to all manner of hurt. It is, however, a worthy entry in this still-developing pop pantheon, authentic and honest in its rendering of many shades of feminine sorrow.

SremmLife 2 collects all of the quirks in the margins of its predecessor and develops them; more than anything else, SremmLife 2 is the ultimate middle finger to grouches who think this brand of rap can’t be complex.

On first listen, his second album as Death Vessel may seem passive, even flat-- just competent, non-descript folk-rock. Give it time, though, and Nothing Is Precious Enough For Us proves more intriguing.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.

As an album-length wallow in bad feelings, it's an impressive thing indeed. But I prefer Jesu when their music is about connection rather than isolation.

Gun finds songwriter's songwriter McCaughey slightly stuck in his own unique, nuanced niche.

Kudos is considerably more laid back and vibe-heavy. The guitars still jingle-jangle, just with a little more economy.

It is hard to parse all that's disparate here, and in searching for its most personal form, Son Lux unwittingly dipped into the uncanny valley of digital music trying to become human--something a little too perfect to believe.

The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses.

While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio.

For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated.

While Millions of Brazilians is easily the most potent and concentrated effort Dianogah has yet to produce, it still lacks tonal variation.

He's playing the same old marshall vs shady real-or-fake game as usual and its as interesting and complex as it ever was.

What prevents Inevitable from arguing for Three Mile Pilot as one of the lost treasures of 90s indie is that they sound too much like themselves; it's a weird situation when a band who achieved success amongst a small, intensely dedicated fanbase in their infancy could return from a 13-year hiatus without having become increasingly beloved in the interim

Maritime's musical development has become a compelling narrative of its own, each subsequent record in many ways both improving upon and elucidating the last.

Mini departures aside, Wreck is simply another strong Unsane album and another wrench thrown in the idea that an enduring band needs an arc.

The collection has the potential to appeal a number of different audiences--Converge die-hards, Motörhead speedfreaks, Southern Lord hardcore kids--but partially on account of its stuffiness, falls short of those marks.

Hour of the Dawn sounds like a summer record, meant to be played when emotions are high and the sun is out. Most importantly, it shows what she’s capable of when the shine has worn off.

With The Physical World, Grainger and Keeler haven’t entirely scratched the itch they instigated a decade ago. But they’ve learned to live with the burn, and that’s the next best thing.

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.

For New Alhambra, his seventh and latest release as Elvis Depressedly, he's crafted a utopian sort of indie-pop, an ecstatic evocation of the second coming, professional wrestling, and radical positivity.

Artificial Dance is enough to make you rethink what you thought you knew about that era--and to make you wonder what else might be out there, just waiting to be rediscovered.

Since the memorable tracks on Metalmania are so good, the tracks that don’t quite rise to the occasion feel all the more frustrating.

If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience.

Already in possession of telekinetic players and a distinctive fusion of indie-rock hooks and jam-band dexterity, Garcia Peoples grow more intriguing as they step out of the shadows of their inspirations.

The result is an opulent, elegant, and occasionally exasperating farewell. This is the Weeknd’s most expansive-sounding album that’s also narrowly focused.

Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.

In many ways, Thrashing Thru The Passion is so alive and elated that, if not for Hold Steady’s well-documented track record, it could be mistaken for the work of a band just hitting its peak.

More than a simple clash of teen-angst noise and old-soul poise, Mourn’s debut album is a reminder that a big impetus for the former is the frustration of wishing you were old enough to savor the latter.

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

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.

This debut itself is compelling but because, at last, it represents a clear synthesis of so many of O’Malley’s activities.

Though worthy, at times enjoyable, and well-intentioned, as a standalone work it’s uneven and hemmed in. Its greatest tribute will be to lead listeners back to the source.

Lewis' crisp alto shines on every track... Unfortunately, the songs (and especially the lyrics) don't give Lewis the support she deserves.

The album is much larger and brasher than it would first appear--the closer it hews to a mix of sad-sack indie pop and elegant, monied Patrick Bateman commercial 80s sounds, the better it works.

On Hotspot, the best-selling duo in UK pop dampen the euphoria; the result is a tuneful, wan album: a mid-tier effort.

It works both as something to take to heart and a to-date career statement, as the making of Honeyblood turned out all right, after all.

Like all Pastels albums, Slow Summits feels like the work of a tightly knit gang of outcasts.

We're left with some pretty pictures for our refrigerators and some worthwhile domestic jams, but little to be excited about.

The musical flourishes and pitch-black noir that run like a current underneath American Nightmare bring the album into a wider world.

It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.

While their formerly peppy mode could be exhausting, it's difficult not to yearn for a bit more razzle-dazzle on Heza.

Far from a downer, the album is breathlessly chic, less chaos-for-chaos’-sake than their previous work but kookier where it counts.

While State Hospital lacks for pure visceral pleasure, Hutchison can still convey such a deep, muscular ache in his vocals, indicating that Frightened Rabbit still know their strengths.

A deeply passionate, impossibly noisy twee record.

In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece.

Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge.

Tapscott's specific words can get muffled, but more often than not that only helps to add a welcome sense of mystery to The Blue Depths, as for the first time it seems Odawas know precisely where they want to go and how they plan to get there.

The whole album is so impressionistic and free-floating that you'll likely hear something else, as Delt intended.

Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots.

Intimate and slow-moving, Woman is good but underwhelming.

The Incredible True Story is a pleasant voyage to Paradise orchestrated by an artist who’s earned the approval of legends from Rick Rubin to Big Daddy Kane. Logic has the tools to create music that has longevity, but has yet to unlock the characteristics that truly set him apart.

Mosey isn’t all gloom, though it boasts plenty of excellent bummer songs.

The Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.

The end result is a delectable pop record, with Koushik's heavy ambiance and amorphous production combining to nudge his songs to their tingling crescendos.

At its best, this music feeds into a similar sentiment, pushing close to the kind of deep introspection at the heart of Jarmusch's films.