Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent. On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case.

Though the album can be quite funny, it delivers the goods with no funny business—16 songs and not a throwaway among them, each an example of what works, rather than an experiment in what might.

All Hands on the Bad One finds the Northwest power-trio at their most melodious, playful, sarcastic, and punchy-- both musically and lyrically.

Yes, it sounds quite a bit like The Books' debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.

A strong experimental record that draws on Cee-Lo's malleable style of rap... one of the year's strongest hip-hop albums to date.

Phonte and Big Pooh sound rejuvenated, and while 9th Wonder isn’t on this record (or part of the group), the beats compiled by Khrysis, Nottz, Zo!, Black Milk, and Devin Morrison have a sophisticated bounce, making this feel like an old Little Brother album without dwelling too much in the past.

The record stretches deeper into a pool of contemplative, ambient-leaning pedal-steel records that’s expanded significantly since Balsams. Based in Oakland, California, Johnson makes inventive use of both space and place on The Cinder Grove.

We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment.

The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top.

If This Is How You Smile was the complete house tour of Lange’s psyche, Far In is more like an afternoon barbeque in the backyard. It doesn’t tell as complex of a story, but you’re more than happy to hang out in the sun for a while and enjoy his company.

The structure is as expansive and freewheeling as any strange trip.

All the best songs stretch toward seven minutes and beyond. A toast to decadent culture! The evident pleasure in the construction and writing of these songs is strong enough to justify lingering on this side of the veil.

It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.

On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons.

MR COBRA solidifies her as an avant-garde curator—not only of sound, but of broader pop culture and camp touchstones that shape the public imagination of what a woman can be.

David Comes to Life is absolutely worth the commitment, a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations.

While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating.

Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan.

As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus.

It amounts to something tougher and more original than merely the sum of classically cool influences—a sound that activates Shaw’s disparate imagery, making the setting seem more dangerous.

Gojira's best work to date.

Algiers have produced a record that is timely and necessary but also scatterbrained and messy, one that is so over the top it becomes a political melodrama, undercutting the issues it seeks to amplify.

Synthesizers appear sparingly, but contribute to weaving tense and expansive atmospheres, further deepening the emotional breadth of their music.

Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

Occasionally she steers into blander territory, like the well-written but sleepy “Fun Girl,” but a rotating collection of R&B’s most toxic crooners keeps the energy level high.

Though the songs on Rose Mountain were tighter than ever, the record felt like it was gritting its teeth, waiting for a fever to break. On All at Once, it does. Bayles is back, and so is the band’s storehouse of killer riffs.

Rarely does dark doubt sound quite so inviting.

His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career.

The lucidity and beauty of this music feels hard-won, something to revere and cherish.

Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest, and in its controlled weirdness lies real liberation.

With such sparse arrangements, the album’s grandest moments come from Giddens’ vocals. She delivers her originals with the same spirit as more familiar material, like a show-stopping take on “Wayfaring Stranger.”

Better to track down this decade's insane explosion of tangents individually than to be given a brief summary by a hit-or-miss marketing device.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.

Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.

These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. .... arish knows the seance-like arrangement of microphones that will allow the transformation to occur.

Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience.

As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.

Musically and lyrically, Mutiny plays like he’s expanded 2016’s “Call to Arms” to album length. .... The best songs here are lean and sinewy showcases for his backing band, the Dark Clouds.

Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes.

On Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.

Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

The Mysterious Production of Eggs might wrestle with unsavory topics, but it does so with a shrug of the shoulders, a wry smile, and a heart full of awe-inspiring song.

It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal.

The album may not shock the singer’s die-hard fans, but Broken Gargoyles is a moving, painful listen and an ideal access point for the uninitiated.

Beautiful, strange, and stoned, Hitchhiker lets us in on one of those nights.

Determined to give fans a jolly time after a five-year absence, Lucifer on the Sofa doesn’t let up and won’t change minds.

While it lacks the iconic significance of his debut, BLACKsummers'night is a record more than worthy of Maxwell's talents, because it trades the physical sensuality of his earlier work for a deep emotional resonance, the performance of an artist whose focus and attention to detail gives his expression a singular veracity.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

Whether bellowed by Philip Cope or sung with witchy intensity by Laura Pleasants, just about every song has a chorus that immediately stamps itself on your brain. In that sense, Spiral Shadow is damn near a pop album.

If you come to Girl in the Half Pearl looking to find a soothing voice in the wilderness, you will instead find a complex maze of battered beats and warped shouts. The gripping soundscape doesn’t allow you to watch its protagonist’s transformation from the safety of the back row—it shoves you through the screen.

Her lyrics often read like prose on the page, but she finds ways to bend them into melodic shapes it’s difficult to imagine anyone else finding.

If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment. Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality.

If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.

It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.

Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music. Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album.

This is a slow, steady album; if you thought MJ Lenderman was uncompromising in his lolling tempos, this album might make you feel like time is flowing backward after a few tracks.

While do it afraid doesn’t have the snap and verve of the more structured Ten Fold, there’s a charming coziness to its loose sound. These open-aired songs evoke backyards and block parties, the rhythms gentle as breezes.

As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come.

Weather Alive is a testament to her conviction, an eerily physical experience with the power to make believers of the rest of us.

This sense of tragedy seeps through nearly every song. It’s what unites the vast material and makes Workin’ on a World feel pivotal in her catalog. These high points also help recontextualize DeMent’s continuing evolution as an observer of American life.

Across these 10 uncommonly beautiful songs, she finds the spiritual in the everyday.

Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds.

Party Music is an effort both entertaining and politically motivating, a feat which many have attempted but few have successfully pulled off.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

Morbid Stuff is 37 minutes inside a sweaty venue process your worst feelings when a half-assed meltdown just won’t cut it.

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.

For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.

Rarely does an album this understated say so much.

What once again prevents Case from delivering a front-to-back classic is a perfectionist streak that accounts for Flood's mannered meticulousness.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.

Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.

I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece.

Tough, impressive, astonishingly good debut.

All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.

This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Ratboys bring their best, most compositionally advanced songs, moving from tightly wound indie pop to the serene hammock sway of country rock to territories far dreamier and uncertain. Their performances are varied and versatile without feeling like a different band has taken over each song.

These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here.

Here, Richard and Zahn have captured grief like a carved piece of obsidian—glossy, beautiful, and sharp.

Locks lets the past speak by keeping the grit and the grain in his samples, conjuring the dust of the archives. Like Madlib, another jazz-influenced samplerist, he leaves the seams in his loops and builds meta-rhythms from the clicks of his edit points.

Despite all its aggrieved poses and statements, the often astonishing rapping, the fastidious attention to detail, and its theme of self-affirmation, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers ironically never settles on a portrait of Kendrick.

That deliberate smallness, that inner focus, is the source of much of this understated record’s outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, feels as simple and as steadying as breathing.

Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.

In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.

Holopaw's cover art and Depression-era script logo might be indie-folk standard issue, but the music contained within is a refreshing, effective new use of the boundaries: a wood-paneled Powerbook.

Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.”

Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.

Squid’s most wide-ranging album yet, and somehow still the one that hits closest to home.

Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential.

It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration and her own fear of parenthood. It is delivered entirely in costume. The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother.

It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle.

Girls Can Tell is more mature and accomplished, but at the expense of the spark of spontaneity.