Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.

Although the album is the band’s biggest yet, with a cast of dozens including 13 violinists alone, it rarely feels bulky. Only the too-Arcade-Fire-for-comfort “Where Is Her Head” succumbs to grandiosity, prioritizing spectacle over purpose.

Born Again in the Voltage as an essential document of contemporary modular-synth music from one of the instrument’s great new explorers.

Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.

It’s sentimental, wry, curious, and highly synergistic: Even if the dialogue has its lulls, the silences never feel awkward.

The whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.

No matter how unambiguous the references, these don’t feel like imitations; they feel like Nathan Fake tracks.

Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.

With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.

Just Like Moby Dick is worthy of an earnest listen.

The free-jazz vibe still makes for a visceral experience, regardless of whether not you can actually follow Quazarz’ path. They continue to eschew standard song structures in favor of free-flowing compositions whose direction is guided by instinct.

Unpredictable, sensuous, and slightly spooky, COSPLAY captures the disquieting sounds of a foregone future.

The most complicated forms of techno and footwork are built simply, from the ground up, and on Nothing, we hear the simplicity of each component and how it all comes together to make the music that we love.

A pleasantly surprising return on My Finest Work Yet, his most plainly and darkly funny album in a long time.

Even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free.

Sons of Kemet are most effective when they transpose concept to instrument this way. But despite the group’s skill for conversing between genres and generations, words are Your Queen’s greatest weakness.

Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded.

They’ve managed to smuggle working-class subject matter into grand, gleaming Britpop without sacrificing their hardcore ethos or the scrappy hope that keeps them in forward motion.

We’re All Alone in This Together isn’t Dave’s magnum opus. But the best thing is, he’s just getting started. We’re barely past the opening credits.

It’s difficult to tell if the emcee is mocking a trend in rap—or simply perpetuating it. The air of poetic abstraction on the album doesn’t clear anything up. But elsewhere, the contrast in styles works more successfully.

Ardor ultimately feels emotionally coherent but tricky to categorize. BIG|BRAVE are the sound of the raw unconscious, turned up loud.

Nux Vomica retains its predecessor's flair for the grandiose, but repositions the Veils as purveyors of a gothic Americana, inhabiting desert-stormy vistas that are just expansive enough to house the band's most valuable asset: Andrews' magnetic, outsize persona.

I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”--but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes.

If you take it as a whole, Uh Huh Her is deeply engrossing: Harvey has never explored the minimal-verging-on-primitive side of her music so thoroughly, or captured so exactly the sound of a mood swing.

Despite the evolution of their sound, Tilly and the Wall haven't forgotten about what made them appealing in the first place: bright co-ed harmonies, rousing choruses, and their overall open-hearted good nature.

Closing track “New Moon,” whose title signals the completion of a cycle and rebirth, might have come off as meandering and repetitive at the beginning of the record. But in its final moments, once you’ve adjusted your ears, Bachman’s delicate gestures sound at once extremely private and cosmically vast.

Where the experimentation often succeeds, the editing fails.

The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting.