Half the cuts here don’t make it to three minutes, but they still drill into your mind with ease.

Unfortunately, In Advance isn't an EP, and things falter a bit past the halfway mark.

With its 34-minute runtime, its cartoon cover art, and the pervading levity of Tobacco’s beats, Malibu Ken may seem at first like a minor work. But there’s nothing diminutive about a record this sharply written. It’s a side project every bit as substantial as Aesop Rock’s proper albums. That it also happens to be more fun than most of them is a bonus.

They continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around.

It's no reflection on him, but Go-Go Boots goes a long way to proving him wrong, suggesting a band that knows where all the bodies are buried.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

These songs are generally not the type to grab you right away, but there's enough mystery and melody there to call you back.

Breakthrough-- which it is and isn't-- feels like the kind of record his adventurous precedent has made into a familiar signature. It's the album that gets at his recent creative mode most definitively, the one people might figure he had in him rather than the one that changed anybody's minds about him.

Whatever the songs on So Long are actually about is up for debate despite their plainspokenness, but suffice to say, they trigger the exact joy buzzers that leave you usually infatuated, perhaps a bit hopefully lovelorn.

Twenty-odd years ago, when Poly-Rythmo last made a studio album, they were at their lowest ebb. Cotonou Club finds them at another high.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

Chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe.

Two Ribbons retains all of the light-hearted surreality that made their first two records so bewitching, but out of necessity, the songwriting is braver.

Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor.

Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age.

Small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary.

Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.

Yaral Sa Doom’s production frames those sessions as a beautiful dream. The gleeful disbelief, the happy hunch that things are not as they usually are, dizzies up the record just a bit, pulling it slightly out of time and space—all while staying close enough to terra firma to not lose sight of where it came from.

My Father is less about the Eno-esque sonic tapestries and more about Gira's love for apocalyptic country blues.

So obviously the biggest difference between the Last Shadow Puppets and Turner's main gig is in the lyrics. Though less immediately noticeable than the majestic production, the change in the scale of Turner's songwriting is ultimately more profound.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

His songs are about joy and hunger and reflection and fun. Not one of them feels as if it’s trying to save hip-hop.

If you can resist getting totally stranded in its opiate-friendly atmospheres, the joys of 936 are easy to pin down.

If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity.

The Charm... is surprisingly great as conciliatory moves go.

If the band’s homespun and deliriously catchy 2014 compilation record Sunchokes captured the kinetic energy of a sweaty college party, The Refrigerator is the sound of a 10-year reunion, subdued and sentimental, reflective and a little restless.

If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer.