As catchy and well-crafted as these songs are, they never feel restricted or overly polished. Each track is given room to grow, stretching into extended intros, impulsive solos, and oft-repeated verses.

With that in mind, the album is perfectly titled, as Actor proves St. Vincent as an artist capable of crafting believable, complicated characters with compassion, insight, and exacting skill.

Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced.

You sense feelings of longing and unease all over Nepenthe, which makes it a less blissful place to spend time than her previous album. But that also makes it a much more cathartic listen, and perhaps a more rewarding one.

The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

Parklive showcases Blur in top form, but live albums are about a little more than a band; they document a moment too.

One of this year's most remarkable "punk" albums.

Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

They're pleasure-pushers, filling tunes with riffs, phrases, and beats a five-year-old could love. But, on Wolfgang, those same songs are unfulfilled--and this band wouldn't have it any other way. There's beauty in a sunset. Phoenix are wringing it out.

But while Random Spirit Lover is dense and thorny-- even opaque, at times--it's never haphazard.

The new-stuff disc offers few hints as to where the label is headed next, which is unsurprising, but the variety on display is only matched by the quality of the tunes themselves.

Her best music, this album included, has the effect of putting one in the kind of treasured, child-like space--not so much innocent as open to imagination--that never gets old.

What it is is the announcement of a stunning and unexpected late-career renaissance; Prodigy is tapping back into the fearsome frustration that once drove him.

On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

On Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.

Each disc stands on its own as a powerful document; together, they genuinely earn the word "epic.

Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too.

Yet another leap forward for a band that has constantly pushed itself in new directions.

Friend and Foe follows through on the potential of their unique sound, proving their wildly great debut was no fluke.

Blitzen Trapper are no longer talented jacks-of-all-trades, but a master of one, and Furr is proof that this already-great band gets even better as they define themselves more specifically.

Divers is not a puzzle to crack, but a dialog that generously articulates the intimate chasm of loss, the way it's both irrational and very real.

Like The Clash before them, The Libertines draw primarily from decades of rock tradition-- blues, dub, a healthy whiff of the English countryside, and a few gorgeous rock riffs straight from the brainstem of Chuck Berry-- and fuse them into an unruly and triumphant monster of an album.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.

The Endless Not features some of the subtlest songwriting of TG's career, playing that knot of tension for all it's worth and all the more disturbing for how pensive and restrained it feels.

There is not a single second of new or unreleased music waiting for you inside this handsomely designed object.... His three studio albums have settled into cultural totems, albums that anyone hoping to know something about rock history buys sooner or later. Even 40-odd years later, their thumbprint remains unique, a strange and compelling mix of timeless poetic melancholy on the one hand, and cloistered, pampered schoolboy modernity on the other.

Blood Incantation not only understand, but delight in what makes the best prog endure: lush textures, dizzying interplay, undeniable groove, a sense of worlds beyond. Toward the end of the album, the band digs into an unsuspectingly aching black-metal churn, the maelstrom building to supernova levels as Riedl’s screams stretch to an infinite howl.

Magnetic Fields-like numbers 'Winter' and 'Undeclared' seem vanilla by comparison to some, but by making room for both, Visiter ends up being one of the most welcoming (and welcome) records of 2008 so far.

Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another. So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall.

On a lyric sheet, Titus Andronicus may appear to espouse the sort of wrist-cutting histrionics emo's typically lambasted for, but the magic lies in the band's oddly enthusiastic grass roots delivery.

Barnes’ work is less concerned with trends or scenes than experiences and memories that everyone has had, regardless of what music they’ve listened to before. On that count, Engravings is a broad success.

The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

It's the kind of record that will have a profound impact on a small number of people, be ridiculed by many more, and never be heard at all by almost everybody.

[A] collection of seven gorgeous, baroque-folk songs.

By stripping away the experimentation, Sinister Grift is a reminder of something that’s always set Lennox apart: He’s an exceptionally gifted songwriter. Nearly every track on Sinister Grift feels like it could’ve been written at any point in the last 50 years—or even longer ago.

Another thrilling, excellent record.

He's brought all his skill to bear on Looping, as composer and arranger and texturologist, in order to build something this simultaneously sweeping and subtle, deep and immediate.

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.

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.

Easily the band's most accessible effort, hipsters and headbangers will likely agree it's also their most intricately imagined.

If it doesn't quite confound like "They Were Wrong" or thrill like "Drum's Not Dead," Liars still finds the band ignoring whatever you thought you wanted or needed from them, and doing what they damn well please.

Without risking pastiche, the band gets plenty of mileage from its sonic references.

This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going.

While it's pleasing to see Ripatti further hone his familiar sound, I can't help but prefer the alchemy of the new: The best moments on Convivial transpose that unmistakable air of aching longing onto a broader, less predictable sonic palette.

Encapsulating and elevating the best of Destroyer's back catalog, Destroyer's Rubies serves as a potent reminder that the intelligence of Bejar's songs has never obfuscated their emotional weight.

Compulsively listenable.

Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus.

Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther and farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses.

His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said.

Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

These are some of the biggest, strongest songs the Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best.

After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.

The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades.

Sea When Absent has the quality of one of those spectacularly bright summer days when they color in everything seems a little over-saturated, and it induces the same dizzy, woozy feeling you get after staring directly at the sun.

Spontaneity is woven into the fiber of every track; it's easy to hear how some of them may have begun with the same sounds and patterns before the musicians' hands worked their magic on the filters, EQ, and delay, rendering each take unique and unrepeatable.

Wakin on a Pretty Daze breezes past like a Klonopin dream, and radiates an easy confidence that is as rewarding to return to as a melody.

Dopesmoker is an infinitely explorable listen, the kind of record that will goad your attention through miniscule rabbit holes whether or not you're as stoned as the people who made it.

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

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step.

A marvel of pure songcraft.

The Magic Place, her first album for Asthmatic Kitty, stands above her earlier work in virtually every way.

Through whatever process they use, the band has also managed to create yet another wonderfully singular indie rock record, unafraid of unfettered passion or self-sabotage, and which affirms a shrouded, hybrid style as unquestionably theirs.

With Niagara, he's taken strengths from his entire oeuvre to reach deeper into himself and produce what may be his best record yet, one that brings all the fulfillment of noise and transcends them all the same.

On Puberty 2, every note she's played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from--and above--much of the genre.

Revelatory, if somehow pompous.

Their most focused and fully realized effort yet-- an album that adds an imperial hugeness to the teen noir and garage-y psychedelia of their past efforts-- and one of the better pop records we've heard this year.

At just over a half hour, Cults feels like the perfect length-- just long enough for the bus ride to school (or to work). But more importantly, it executes what it sets out to do masterfully while allowing the group room to grow and mature.

The cacophonous, vexing, endlessly fascinating The Collective represents the experience of logging off and finding that your perception of the real world has been forever altered. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.

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.

For its breadth and complexity, [Blur 21] actually tells a simple story: Blur are a band that did an astonishing amount of different things really, really well.

On Man With Potential Pete Swanson's ability to encompass many sounds and moods knows few bounds, if any.

Nothing Hurts is full of that kind of excitement: the sound of a fast, fuzzy rock band racing from hook to hook, plowing happily through breakdowns and guitar blasts, springing through scrappy melodies with style. It's one of the happiest surprises of the year so far.

With its accomplished fusion of debris and warmth in a place somewhere between b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism, Los Angeles is a big step forward for a still-young career, an album well worth revisiting years from now--preferably on vinyl, where the pops and clicks can only multiply.

There's a surface graininess that amplifies the corrosive qualities of the band's sound and the strep-throat rawness of Edkins' voice, but also serves to accentuate some of the more surprising elements in the mix.

Woody at 100 may be the most successful attempt to capture Guthrie's sprawling essence, but it's hardly the first.

Against the Odds perfectly captures the band’s legacy precisely because it presents the history, music, and memories with an admirable degree of honesty and doesn’t try to make the story into something it wasn’t.

For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.

Earthquake Glue meets any GBV album that isn't named Bee Thousand or Alien Lanes.

URGH is both headier and more visceral than anything Mandy, Indiana have made before. This isn’t body music or brain music; it’s spine music, homed in on the bony junction where mind meets matter.

Hospice answers silliness with solemnity, jitters with nerve. Their band name simply describes their music: a delicately branching instrument of force.

If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. ... Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff.

Despite the summery song titles and the beach balling associations that might follow these guys around, this music transcends the notion of seasons.

Yet it still feels honest, like something said out of necessity instead of opportunity, and the result is an album that engages with the idea of loneliness in exceptional ways.

Rhye's music itself feels deeply intimate. Much of this comes from Hannibal and Milosh's deft arrangements--each of Woman's 10 songs makes its point with a bare minimum of moving parts.

What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music.

At its core, this is a record about accepting and even embracing the smallness of human life, and how difficult that can be, given our damnably innate sense of adventure, ambition, and restlessness.

The results were massive--the myriad "best show ever" kudos deserved.

LongLiveA$AP delivers on and even exceeds the promise of LiveLoveA$AP. Like that mixtape, the album is a triumph of craft and curation, preserving Rocky's immaculate taste while smartly upgrading his sound

He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once.

Shepherd feels like his most something album ever—his warmest, his most generous, possibly his most profound. It is his longest, for sure, lounging comfortably across four sides of vinyl, none of it wasted. It is a high note, fond and deep and sustained.

What the Isley Brothers achieved can't be contained in a single album nor can it be adequately summarized in a hits collection. They seized all the tumult, all the excitement, all of the sounds of their time and turned it into enduring commercial art whose endurance and depth is best appreciated in a set like this, where the actual records can be heard in their entirety.

Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation.

The Promise is also a good demonstration of how Springsteen mines his unused songs from material, and shows how many ways he tried to record things before figuring out how they worked best.