Black gets the Art Brut spirit down on record better than anyone has before, with the blazing pop-metal vainglory of Weezer, the scruffy cheekiness of early Rough Trade bands, and lots of enthusiastic backing vocals. Fun for them, fun for us.

The vibrant, expressive songs on Curyman II return often to this theme: how Brazil's unique cultural identity is a product of its diverse ethnic populations.

The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection.

Ultimately, Chasmata is slightly inferior to its predecessor due to a sequencing issue near the record's end.

Sun God is an unapologetic, all-or-nothing proposal.

The music on HAGEN isn’t impenetrable, though it is gargantuan.

Many of the songs on The Quanta Series were released in previous years as singles. Sequenced into an LP, they carry more dramatic weight.

As with so many bedroom auteurs' debuts, it's tough to separate the creation from the creator, and Idle Labor shows the promise of a precocious songwriter who isn't claiming to have anything totally figured out just yet.

That feeling of being held at arm's length persists no matter how much time you put in with Voidist, and it's the record's only significant shortcoming.

I don't think anyone who already has some notion of wanting quebec could possibly be disappointed-- it's the genre-defying psych of The Mollusk and the incongruous irreverence of 12 Golden Country Greats, and some of the madness that is GodWeenSatan, and it's a lot better than the go-nowhere White Pepper.

Stretching the sinews of their sound almost to the breaking point, Religious Knives find a balance between the repetitive rhythmic skeleton of krautrock and the psychedelic keyboard thrusts of early Doors.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

His confidence is why he flies when he swings for the fences on his new album, Free TC.

At various points, Faraway Reach is: a shrug; a call-to-arms; a balm. At its best, it's all these things at once.

As scattershot and weirdly limp as parts of this are-- two guys just knocking things together, seeing what happens-- well, it feels better to hear someone trying.

Nausea is easier to listen to than Sunbathing Animal in part because it seems less ambitious.

Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together.

The three slick, glitchy tracks on You Know You Like It also pull from the left-field sounds associated with the LA label Brainfeeder and the Knife's creepily synthetic vibe, but a large part of their appeal comes from their glistening pop sensibility.

While she has a reputation for making familiar songs sound utterly new, here she finds a way to make Bramblett’s songs tell her story, to let them speak for her. She rewrites his songs simply by singing them.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

Grinderman may be intended as a somewhat goofy reassertion of punk vigor and virility, but the disc is no laughing matter.

There’s little left for the DJ crew to prove with the fourth installment of their mix compilations for Strut, but that doesn’t mean that IV fails to please. If anything, it clarifies that when it comes to crafting dance mixes, Horse Meat Disco find a way to stretch out, queue up the campiest of disco cuts from their shelves and wring the most aural pleasure out of them, whether they’re from the dollar bin or in the triple digits.

Paisley understands that personal lyrics don’t have to read like a diary excerpt--that specificity creates universality.

The key difference to Knats’ self-titled debut, which was released in 2025 and dealt in similar jazz fusion trappings, is A Great Day in Newcastle’s scope and ambition. Here, the group marries jazz-kid experimentalism with taut punk, sprawling worldbuilding, and social commentary.

Braid don’t have the athleticism or explosiveness of their earlier days, but in a Tim Duncan way, they’re craftier, better about picking their spots.

Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking.

Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.

Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific.