D.R.A.M. doesn’t really have new ideas to pitch into this ball pit, but on his full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M., he reminds us that new ideas aren’t the whole game.

Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.

With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity.

On ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST, Osees begin their return flight to the garage-rock headbanging of their mid-2010s material. There’s too much synth and wooden drumming to sound like a full throwback to their Thee Oh Sees days, but you wouldn’t be misguided if you said the album’s title and art mirror Mutilator Defeated at Last from a decade ago.

In a sense, these thirty-six minutes show that the duo has basically been stuck in neutral since 1995.

Rarely has a genre sounded so tried and tired, so forced, formulaic and reliant on its own mythology as country music is made to sound on Regard the End.

It's just straight rock and roll, really, and I mean really straight rock and roll.

One could hardly expect a three-disc set of Low's castoffs, demos and flipsides to dazzle.

Though Interpol couldn't be expected to surpass their previous heights, it's difficult to imagine a savvier or more satisfying second step.

This meandering quality might put off some listeners, but to my ears, Azeda Booth have figured out how to reconcile pop music's infectiousness with ambient music's nebulous aura, and have produced one of 2008's most unique and immediately pleasurable albums.

A disappointing pattern begins to take shape in each of these long chapters, as the band begins on a promising note during the first three minutes, but exhausts itself over the last nine.

Even if their whole style is essentially a throwback, there's plenty of room out there for throwback done right. But on too much of Youth and Lightness, they're not the machine they could be.

Electronic Dream is pretty, but it's pretty like the morning sun twinkling off of a dangling machete blade--you don't want to fuck with it.

A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless.

As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force.

There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.

Ellery and Skye are in their fourth year of music school—and they are still finding their way. But when they nail it, as on “The City,” their first-thought-best-thought creative bursts sound not just thrilling but genuinely new. For a group so steeped in retro modes, that’s no small thing.

There are other records like this one, but they’re few and far between.

It is a mark of Altin Gün’s ingeniousness that Yol never feels forced. The album glides along like a particularly elegant swan, musical dexterity and audacious spirit paddling away frantically below the surface.

Ballentine’s strengths are most apparent in the feel of this album, which is consistently rich and gauzy. Even the clearest acoustic guitar licks are somehow buried beneath a persistent field of sustain and mild distortion.

Even on an album steeped in melancholy, Berrin finds plenty of moments to be cheeky and theatrical, just like fellow teen queen Olivia Rodrigo and new pop star on the block Chappell Roan.

What's remarkable is that instead of sounding autumnal and frigid, the bulk of this album has a warmth, an emotional weight, and a sense of underlying motion that competes damn well against the occasional fireworks. Some of these pleasures may be subtle or take time to grasp, but the sinking-in is gorgeous and worth the wait.

LaVette is a proud interpreter, and even back in her earlier days she was covering David Bowie and Neil Young, but on Scene of the Crime her choices are a little less NPR-friendly than they were on the all-female critics darling roster of "Hell to Raise."

Trilogy's triumph is in how it makes its three hours feel necessary to fully embrace it all, to acknowledge its existence inside ourselves and to vicariously live through it as art.

[The minor differences between the early and official takes] are rare, illuminating displays of imperfection from a band that, for the subsequent 15 years, made no false moves.

It's his most focused album, with every song's tone easily flowing into the next, and it's also one of his best.

All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting.

Free All the Monsters simply consists of a set of plaintive songs that draw on all the stylistic cues this band has worked hard to establish in the past (a Byrds-ian jangle, a touch of Velvets-style dissonance) and tightens everything up a touch.