To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.

Vulnerability has powered Tomberlin’s music for years, and “Collect Caller” aside, these songs are sweeter and more inviting than anything she’s done before.

Dirty Projectors’ ornate arrangements can’t hide the fact that these songs are as direct and unguarded as Longstreth allows himself to get.

The album’s hypnotic quality grows ever more romantic and tense with repeat listens, a prescient-feeling experience that matches a zeitgeist: strung-out maintaining in the face of impending doom.

Fittingly, on Sin Miedo, Uchis dares to trust herself more. She pares down the guest list, opting for feature production by Puerto Rican hitmaker Tainy and a smattering of artists. Her voice, still thick and sultry, looms larger in the mix.

In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine.

There are great stand-alone songs here, like the 1960s-at-78-rpm sugar rush of "Eyes", but Apollo Sunshine is best listened to in a full dose and appreciated in all its messy glory.

The music carries within it the idea of form coming into being; it moves away from the freeform drift of her previous albums and glides toward a nascent kind of order.

Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him.

The result is a revelatory experience that requires no legible revelations: vocals of ecstatic defiance matched to music seemingly composed of pure magnitude; melancholic synths, sparse guitars, and bombastic strings and drums. The overall feeling is of an all-hands, against-the-odds triumph against staggering forces.

While she makes some big strides here as an artist, she’s also made sure to keep one foot planted firmly in the style that some of us consider nearly perfect.

Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning.

You could take issue with Spiritualized for sticking so closely to the blueprint they inaugurated more than 30 years ago. But the band always felt built for repetition and refinement, a cosmic home for Jason Pierce to grow comfortably old, away from an ever-changing musical world.

Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy.

Iyer and his cohorts have spun the piano trio format into great art here, acknowledging their contemporaries and their musical ancestors.

Greenspan's singing is the best it's ever been on It's All True, proving the band's mixing desk skills aren't the only thing that's matured over the past eight years.

Home is an ace of a second album, one which maintains the most important elements of Chung's painstakingly crafted sound while progressing nicely into a friendlier arena.

How Do You Burn? boasts a mixtape-like eclecticism, communal bonhomie, and psychedelic texture that feel untethered to the Whigs’ past playbooks.

This new album is in line with what fans of the band’s more recent (as in, post-2006) material have come to expect, but with a new twist—namely, the outsized impact that traditional doom bands like Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus seem to have had on the songwriting. Darkthrone still stand firmly in the heavy metal (with a dash of punk) camp, but they’ve definitely got a soft spot for old-school gloom.

Resonant Body celebrates 1990s rave anthems with a bittersweet sense of vanished time—the party ended long ago, the dancers shut their eyes against daylight, but balloons still float around the room on inherited breath.

Anna Calvi has found her voice with her third album would be reductive; both literally and figuratively, her voice has always been crystal clear.

This isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos.

In its brief onslaught of sneery fun, Vicki Leekx only occasionally reaches the dizzy pop heights of Arular and Kala. But it does give us an M.I.A. who, once again, seems to be having a blast doing what she's doing.

Live at Biko is quick to remind us that Benji is as much a comedy as tragedy, at times forcefully so.

This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.

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.

There’s nothing wrong with a good glacial pace, but Von Hausswolff’s slowly unfurling arrangements, as well as her reliance on the organ as the primary rhythmic vehicle, occasionally make the record tough sledding.