Rub is the first album in her career where the music feels as foregrounded as Peaches' persona, which makes sense, as she co-produced it with Vice Cooler.

This isn't a record, it's a portfolio: it's noisy but catchy, it lets them try out different styles, and it makes you give a good goddamn.

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.

The album showcases her curatorial skills—honed from years of DJ sets, streaming playlists, and recently virtual shows as Aluna’s Room—and her range. Maybe as a challenge, Renaissance neither starts nor ends with dance music.

If you're inclined to Tennis negatively, they look like a group of blank people offering bland sweetness devoid of deeper meaning. While the band might've fit that description at one point, they've since grown past it, so if you're one of the listeners who dismissed their earlier work as banal and bourgeois, know that Tennis has since earned another chance.

His new record is another collection of effortlessly gorgeous ruminations on hip-hop expressed through thermal updrafts, babbling brooks, and cracking twigs.

Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks.

They have a knack for hitting the melody where some more experimental outfits might opt for a diverse array of craziness.

Lady Wood is short, but Lo finds ample darkness to plumb.

The communal, freewheeling looseness is one of the album's greatest assets, as you feel as if you were a party to the making of the record in Eagle Bay, too.

Burton sings about interior voyages and the tracks were usually constructed by no more than two musicians; it’s music made at home, for home listening. That’s all well and good, since the duo has considerable skill, but this existential lonerism underscores a chasm between the pair and their influences. Unlike the icons of the era they find so inspiring, Black Pumas rarely look outside of themselves.

1000 Days is a heartening record, a record that sees a young band picking up steam, playing with their influences more deftly than on their prior LPs, and bringing a thoughtful approach to old and well-traveled sounds.

C-ORE isn’t a Kingdom Come-like statement of return, but it’s also not a departure. As a collaborative work, it documents multiple experiences of life on the margins of America, of music—putting it all on blast.

They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh.

Plastic Bouquet marries their remarkably timeworn voices, entwining threads from country-folk, 1960s British pop, and even rockabilly to stitch a retro flare into their modern lore.

Build With Erosion is the kind of enjoyably sound-damaged effort where stylistic intrusions feel like just that, and not much more.

The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.

The disc is enhanced with gleefully absurd, marginally interactive cartoons, and packed with that Eisenhower-era zip-twinkle.

While something like 2007's Cendre benefited greatly from an occasional splash of his cotton-wool electronics, there are very few moments like that here, and frankly, it needs more.

Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for

The Chap couch this darker subject matter in their sleekest, most elegantly crafted songs to date, wherein the influence of pop's reigning sardonicists, Steely Dan, becomes as much musical as it has always been spiritual.

The mediocre filler that rounds out Half Smiles' lineup is, sadly, par for the band's late-era course.

Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.

After the atmospheric first track, the second shifts toward modern classical, centering on an uncertain harp theme that develops as McCaughan gusts in low, faintly jazzy harmonies. The third movement descends into a tense, quiet dark-ambient realm: as synth tones curl up like scraped metal and animalistic noises whisper from the darkness, harp notes drop and ring like silver pins. And in the last movement, a psych-rock interlude inflates to epic proportions.

Even though the surface is smoother and and the vocals less garbled than usual, it’d be a mistake to read Bubblegum as a true unmasking. Filters swaddle Copeland’s voice throughout, distorting and distending it but stopping short of intelligibility; lyrically, he’s striking a tricky balance between deadpan nihilism and pop troubadour nostalgia.

In its most fully realized moments, ...And Star Power is the album Todd Rundgren could’ve released between Something/Anything? and A Wizard, a True Star, its best songs striking an uncanny balance between the exquisite balladry of the former and the progged-out fantasias of the latter.

Soldier of Love offers listeners a rather narrow range of interest-- songs that (at their best) suggest strong feeling restrained by a fierce dignity-- but Sade remain the best at what they do.

Class Clown's odd-angled pop and jittery arena rock keeps the weirdness on par with its predecessor.

If Butler falls slightly short of convincing that this particular brand of old will be made new again, it remains hard to find fault with his survey of all the fun we could have had.

For the majority of the record, she sings alone, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. This elemental soundscape pushes Diaz’s finely crafted melodies and brutal lyrical observations to the forefront more bluntly than ever.

One Bedroom... signals a return to the half-on/half-off inconsistency that marred all Sea and Cake albums except Nassau and Oui, as a handful of misfires trip up the flow.

By not trying to shock us, Stewart actually surprises us, and OH NO makes it easier to be a Xiu Xiu fan than it’s been in years.

The further away from the 'Lab and into a more organic sound the band goes, the more satisfying their music is becoming.

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

Unsurprising, and not much of a main course, but a tasty and satisfying side dish nonetheless.

An album that gleans from prog, noise, baroque, hip-hop and more at will.

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

That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.

It's a promising sign La Roux might actually develop some range as this pilfer-pop duo continues to mature.

Petrichor’s many quick pivots are almost guaranteed to provoke occasional frustration that Shake has seized upon a great idea and then let it go. Which tracks provoke it is a matter of taste.

Like Hardcore, A Wrenched Virile Lore features 10 tracks, though it only references eight of the originals. However, even the mixes that draw from the same songs are different enough in approach and sequenced in such a way that the reappearances feel like purposeful reprises.

Despite its highs, Ultraviolet is a patchwork of arduousness, with some seams still showing.

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.

The record is not always as engaging for the listener as it might like to be. Gengras emphasizes the experience of sound over the process of constructing it.

Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.

Sex & Food is best in this spaced-out zone, where alienation sounds genuinely alien. The record’s disembodiment is precisely what makes it intriguing and, occasionally, unlistenable.

Anderson finds flashes of beauty even when she seems to be casting about for something to say; were she a less graceful guitarist, this stretch might derail Still, Here’s momentum entirely.

White Bird Release, while not as conceptual as For Waiting, For Chasing, almost by default flows as a sort of suite, with each track named after a fragment of this quotation.

Cloaked in reverb and atmospheric keys, it doesn’t quite bite, but it does gnaw. Even in his new role as free-jazz bandleader, Taylor’s work is strongest when left unresolved.

Unburdened by nostalgia, accepting the world as is while avoiding complacency, Made of Rain isn’t a comeback—it’s a new road.

It’s the sound of Zach Bryan figuring out how to paint on a larger canvas, how to sound like the superstar he has become.

Darkness and Light isn’t the political feat Mills and Legend had hoped for, but it’s a step forward in the singer’s evolution. He may never be a firebrand, but Legend proves there’s still strength in humility.

When it works, it’s revelatory in the way peaking in a big rolling crowd at the club can be, or in the way of a little hand on your shoulder. .... Idehen is onto something here. And listen, maybe you’ve heard it before. But maybe we all need to hear it again.

The Ascension is, by design, kind of a drag: a dark and emotionally distant mood piece whose lyrics rarely touch on the specifics necessary to anchor the music, and whose music is rarely exciting enough to elevate his words. ... The Ascension fares best when Stevens looks inward.

It's a record shot through with feelings of anxiety and anger seemingly related to money, art, and other artists.

Sure, the time-tested formula delivers as expected, but ultimately the rote freakout leaves you wishing the band could bring the hammer down like it used to.

Even as Punk Rock shows that The Mekons have far better musicians today than when they were first fumbling around with Gang of Four's instruments, it also proves they're better songwriters.

If you can make it past the album's frustrating layout, Hocus Pocus proves a fine collection of songs by pretty much anyone's standards.

Refreshingly, SweetSexySavage is at its best when it’s most exuberant, giddy in the face of haters and common sense alike.

The maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer. Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure.

Feminist Sweepstakes wants to be a terrifically fun album, yet with no deviation from the ceaseless politics and endless drum machine beats, things go stale.

If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself.

This album is far more challenging than the lush, sprightly Life, and Another; although a good deal shorter, it’s more dense, and it can feel overwhelming. For that reason, it can sometimes feel more rewarding, too.

Warmth and color fill most of the deluxe edition's (admittedly bloated) 60 minutes, an assortment of bubbly beats forming in gleeful, block party-ready disarray.

It's probably a smart move for Columbia to release a reconfigured sampler of her early songs to catch people up on her talent. Yet, as an ardent fan, it's hard for me not to feel a little let down.

There’s enough proof here that Post has the voice, demeanor, and goodwill to easily ingratiate himself into the Nashville scene.

Though his words reach for darker emotional valences, the album’s most honest moments come across in Carey’s compositions.

An album this guileless is bound to be polarizing, for the very fact that it resolutely resists the urge to provoke.

Hypnotic Nights continues with the Weezer worship introduced on 2011's We Are the Champions, but answers the fuzz-pop frivolity with equal doses of motorik groove and psychedelic drone.

Probably Rostam’s most compact and thematically cohesive project, with almost all of the nine tracks on the 30-minute album leaning toward folk and Americana. After the explosive energy of the first two tracks, things calm way down.

Whether yelping or mumbling, Avey Tare occasionally gets stuck on autopilot, but here he sounds like he’s trying out new things and, crucially, having fun.

Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends.

Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

Clay Class feels disappointingly stagnant. But it does offer encouraging signs that a blade of grass or two can sprout up from cracks in Prinzhorn Dance School's cold, concrete world.

Buzzkunst doesn't exactly offer any revelatory music, but it certainly is good, sometimes even great.

Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline.

A large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.

While the songs are wildly improved, I still can't say there's much of a discernible identity.

What keeps Tripla from being the kind of acrid, messy screed that sometimes tempts artists later in their career is the joy with which Berenyi and her bandmates play this music, the sense of wonder that clings to the sadness near the album’s core.

The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis.

On Art Brut’s last two albums, Argos’ act soured a bit, as he lashed out at a world that was buying less and less of what he was selling. Wham! Bang! is good-hearted in a way those records weren’t, and the newfound humility flatters him.

While the album’s open-endedness largely works to its benefit, Collagically Speaking occasionally meanders.

It's surprising to see how well Holes in the Wall holds up under the weight of its own hype.

Keeping Up Appearances, released under the moniker Basic Plumbing, collects the tracks Doyle and Skinner finished. Their beauty is immediate, accessible, and, at least for the moment, almost inextricable from all the loss surrounding them.

On her new full-length, Juno, she hones her scatterbrained Californian pop into an effervescent, hook-filled record that flirts with weighty emotions but often swerves for the safety of a joke.

As The Light in You’s dichotomous halves prove, Mercury Rev are much better at being trippy than being groovy.

He's at his most effective when he dials back the Rick Ross character, so the album’s standouts feature him laying bawse insight over slow-burners.

Every song on the record contributes to this air of reverie, a testament to Roosevelt’s strength as a producer, as one track languidly slips into the next. If anything, it can get a little too laid back--it’s the kind of record that's so uniform it ends before you realize it.

Even though it operates under the familiar laws of Mayer's universe, Mantasy's appeal largely comes from how self-contained and individual each cut is.

Barbarism is a deranged playground, a portal to uncomfortable feelings in an increasingly uncomfortable world. Like a half-remembered dream, it seems to continuously promise access to hidden answers, if only we could penetrate the chaos. And though it’s grating, uneven, and perplexing, Barbarism feels familiar.

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

There's nothing as great as "New Generation", "She's Not Dead", or "The 2 of Us" but there doesn't have to be, either, because the Tears have enough natural dynamism of their own to stand alone.

So while this may not be a great album or even a top-tier Beastie Boys album -- I'd place it somewhere between Hello Nasty and the inferior 5 Boroughs, neither of which can touch those first four -- anyone who cares about these guys will be glad it exists.

If not always up to their previous heights, Mohn highlights why these guys are still the masters, while so many of Kompakt's new-school driftologists are still students at best.

In the end, 13 isn't what every Sabbath die-hard dreamed it might be: a true pick-up-where-they-left-off comeback for the group's founding quartet. But the record does belong in the view of every metalhead--not just because such a seminal band still deserves obligatory props, but because, imperfections aside, the record embodies the kernel of the original Sabbath idea.

J.A.C. is ultimately a simple record covering well-worn territory that is no less engaging for its familiarity.

This band is still nearly as big, as slow, as lumberingly loud as they were in the days Kurt Cobain was trying out for a spot on bass.

There's a strong sense of someone not reaching particularly hard to get beyond their influences, but even that takes on an appropriate hue as the album progresses.