Whether asking for reconciliation ("Clearest Blue", "Empty Threat") or demanding closure ("Never Ending Circles", "Leave a Trace"), Mayberry is judge, jury, and executioner, making convincing, carefully worded closing arguments set to casually devastate.

The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.

Zango is rooted in classic Zamrock, and it builds on the inherent malleability of the genre’s sound.

DEACON could use a few more awe-inspiring moments, but by celebrating simplicity, it enshrines the Black, queer love at its center as something blessedly uncomplicated and precious. Love doesn’t need tragedy to be great, and neither does serpentwithfeet. On DEACON, Wise proves his musicianship can stand on its own—no melodrama required.

Such an ambitious sophomore outing is a lot to take in, but with its blend of live drumming, textural guitars, skittering electronics, and wistful harmonies, it's worth braving Jojo's, uh, storm.

Produced by John Agnello, Here With Me features a small roster of musicians, including her regular backing trio, who do a fine job of complementing O'Connor's melodies without intruding on her personal space.

The songs on Internal Logic are like triple-exposed photographs, their nebulous, hazy qualities occasionally belying the acute skill with which they've been composed.

Scott already has his songwriting tools in place; once he finds his voice, look out.

Belladonna removes the buttress of Amaryllis’s horns and rhythm section. At times, the guitar and string quartet move like a single amorphous organism, untethered from any particular pulse. At others, one voice will offer a steady ostinato as a home base for the others to wander away from and return to at will.

Think of Glimmer as a little symphony, just with singles, and made by a musician who can't decide between the roles of producer or composer. Really, he shouldn't anytime soon.

[An] entertaining, varied rock record.

In these songs, that ravenous, sinuous jumble of muscle and gristle swells within Tagaq’s body. It is a fearful presence, but a righteous one. It speaks with a strength that the young girl at that long-ago house party did not yet know how to wield. The violence this being threatens is the protective kind. But there is room, too, for tenderness.

Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.

Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs.

Everything rolls along like it’s actually going somewhere—not a flatulent dubstep waddle, but an aerodynamic gallop that brings to mind a deeper lineage of loud and obnoxious dance music, from the technical end of drum’n’bass to “proper” dubstep, Northern bassline, and Chicago juke.

Sus Dog is warm and immediately gratifying, offering the musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate and sometimes breakneck production.

Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced.

On Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing.

These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite.

Snocaps is a return to form, its sound landing closer to the ramshackle pop-punk of P.S. Eliot than Saint Cloud’s twilit majesty.

It's this sense of fearless overreach that unites This Ain't Chicago's best moments, with producers capitalizing on house's additive structure by piling on every trick they can think of to create top-heavy epics of bristling sonics and contradictory moods.

You will find no comfort here. But it’s the job of an artist to capture something of the tenor of the age they live in, and Pastoral fits the bill: a mad jig along a cliff edge.

Even if Cease to Begin is a little creaky and uneven and even if it never finds the resting spot the album title promises, Band of Horses do guitar-based indie very well--well enough, at least, that the next generation of American indie bands may bear comparisons to them.

You have to have the grit to handle some vulgarity to even begin the job of really remembering. In Jazz Codes’ promiscuity, Moor Mother plots an escape from the oppressive confines of institutional memory.

The Hanged Man continues to project a bold, subversive spirit even after that introductory blast of static clears.

TID might be Bejar's most pompous, profane, and pastoral record, but it's also his least "intelligent," rational, or linearly clever.

II Trill is a solid and occasionally great record, an album more directed toward car-stereo utility than bedroom contemplation.

When it's all said and done, the 15-track set runs almost an hour long, causing one to think that the Keys might have done the best material here a disservice by shoving so much onto one album when they could've easily saved some up for their next release.