There's plenty of Minutemen twitch, Dog Faced Herman tick, Bikini Kill bossiness, and a cleverly wrapped polemic that even recalls the Desperate Bicycles' delicious DIY rhetoric.

Taking the long view, the fact that WAND feels a bit overstuffed is more exciting than it is disappointing.

Call of the Void are no exception, and they're proving that Denver is a hotbed of serious vitrol and passion.

Despite some murky production by Josh Kaufman of the Fruit Bats and Bonny Light Horseman, the Hold Steady turn these songs into weird, vivid snapshots.

Listening to Complete Surrender, you get the sense that Taylor and Watson would be just as happy making music for, and with, each other in their spare time, revelling in their companionship.

It points to an artistic flexibility that will pay dividends down the road. The room to grow is there, should he decide to pursue the colors Wave[s] has opened up for him.

Thanks to smart sequencing that balances bangers with pensive interludes, it feels less like a collection of club tracks than a suite broken into 10 interlocking movements.

The most striking element of Long Time Coming is the one that made Ferrell go viral in the first place—her voice.

Playing for the first time with Higgs--who's spent the last seven years on spoken word, jew's harp improvisations, and other unclassifiables--they've delivered their strongest work so far.

If new album The Maginot Line... is decidedly less sentimental or cohesive in tone than its predecessors, it's all the braver for it.

The two reunite on Dying Is the Internet, striking an even more idiosyncratic fusion of their respective talents while their music remains as heavy as ever.

The Loves of Your Life feels like a neighborhood that’s deeply familiar, yet so packed with life that new details emerge on each stroll.

With a penchant for sloppy dance beats and an ear for sonic minutiae, Tom Vek unites skill sets as antipodal as Rapture and Elvrum.

Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.

If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.

In reaching out to others, Georgopoulos is discovering his own voice for the first time.

Fans of Sublime Frequencies and their exhaustive look at Southeast Asian bands taken by surf music will find kinship in “Mirza” and the skronking sax lines of Sudanese track “El Bomba.” And just when it seems the comp is firmly entrenched in an exploration of how ’60s rock and R&B infiltrated the region, the tumbling disco beat and needling reeds make Mallek Mohamed’s “Rouhi Ya Hafida” refreshing.

Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music.

The album is about a quarter filler, but the songs that hit on Too Late to Die Young make the tedium worth sitting out.

You have to let your guard down, and Godspeed have to transform feelings into compelling records. They're still on track.

For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty.

The project’s raw immediacy initially suggested it might be throwaway, a palette cleanser before White resumed his usual studio tinkering, but its triple-octane riffage and seething, sticky hooks pointed to something more lasting and substantial.

There's something more deliberately approachable about the melodies he uses here. He meditates in the spaces in between phrasings, allowing the more volatile segments to linger like light trails in your vision.

That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap.

A whole album of these sort of showy gestures would likely prove exhausting, but the Strips are careful not to overdo it, and Girls and Weather is stacked with singles that condense the band's energy and enthusiasm into more compact bursts of joy.

The back half is the water that tames the front’s fire, and together, Morgan’s warm embraces and cooler thoughts attest to her full emotional breadth.

A Thing Called Divine Fits might seem the Platonic ideal of indie rock collaboration, but the most memorable moments have Boeckner's signature.