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.

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.

Count Coming Apart as another fascinating step in that journey, and Body/Head’s musical path as one that she and Nace will hopefully follow for a long time.

Like Mum on a smaller scale, or a lightly medicated, loose-lipped Four Tet, his introspective songs sway hazily from image to metaphor, between yesterday's folk and tomorrow's digitalism.

After over an hour of totally becalmed drift, the bustling pace here at album’s end feels like leaving a day spa only to squeeze onto a rush-hour train. You might find yourself simply wishing the album extended just a few minutes longer.

Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals--the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves.

Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.

Better Oblivion is a collection of quiet, wandering thoughts: the sound of twin souls burrowing deeper into their common ground.

For all his clinical reserve and careful attention to detail--some of these beats might as well contain footnotes--Barnt has ended up crafting an unusually heartfelt testament to techno's emotive potential.

Even when he focuses his unflagging talents within fixed bounds, Lekman's still one of the most distinct and observant writers in indie rock today.

While the vocal tracks are well-realized, this is the first album RJ's made in a long time that actually feels like it's satisfied to say most of what it has to say in instrumental form.

Her third album in five years, İstikrarlı Hayal Hakikattir crackles with a live energy that stems from the 18 months of touring following its predecessor, 2016’s Hologram Ĭmparatorluğu. Producing the album with longtime guitarist Ali Güçlü Şimşek, Su Akyol is in firm command of her powers, adding a few more electronic textures to push to new heights.

Artistic restraint is a new concept for WHY? and it’s understandable if Moh Lhean as a whole feels slightly tentative at points.

Even if it holds the most value for the Neil obsessives interested in the small differences, Live at Cellar Door provides another glimpse at a darkly formative time in his long career.

Something mysteriously blocks this very good record from being great.

De Casier’s got a soft voice but a big personality, and even at its most muted, Sensational radiates charm.

Ava Luna are an exhilarating live band, and Electric Balloon is the first thing they've done that comes close to bottling that energy.

On succeeds not in spite of its simplicity, but because of it.

At Mount Zoomer is fractured and spastic, and at times, the band's ambition eclipses its strengths. Still, there's something about Wolf Parade's fragility that's profoundly relatable, and the sense that the entire operation could fall apart at any second--that we're all tottering on the brink of total dissolution--is as thrilling as it terrifying.

On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.

Much like records by the Smiths, Suicide Songs is both consoling and encouraging, revealing itself fully only after repeated listens and paying dividends each time. Manchester should be proud.

Every Ladytron album has a few extremely low points, and on Ladytron those are “Run” (a part two to “The Animals,” not a particularly necessary one) and “Paper Highways” (the first part is great, as if wrought from iron wreckage, but it veers into a saccharine, completely misplaced chorus, like they handed it to Disney for a second). Much better as a ray of solace is the quietly experimental “Tomorrow Is Another Day.”

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

Davila 666's sophomore album is still rowdy enough for an impromptu weekend binge with a few friends, but it also offers enough carefully crafted tunes and feedback-streaked textures to fill your headphones.

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.

That stuff was fun on their debut, 2002's Thought for Food, but today those easy jokes seem like a waste of their skills. Better to seek out the greater mystery of those weird and splendiferous sounds, and those voices that seem so close and so unknowable in the same breath.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

Like the Luddite lover pining for old-school communication in a digital world, GUV II is the sound of a pop classicist forging his own singular path in a post-everything era.