It’s exciting to hear the freedom of Jóhannsson’s compositions in autonomous music, and with Orphée he’s reasserted himself as not a just an elegiac film score guy.

The Pinkprint’s singles underwhelm.... But they’re redeemed by the bonus tracks—a thrilling, confounding six-song set that elevates The Pinkprint from an occasionally transcendent, if unbalanced, break-up album to something far more intriguing.

Far from a downer, the album is breathlessly chic, less chaos-for-chaos’-sake than their previous work but kookier where it counts.

Musically, Nicolay's in his comfort zone, making the sort of album he'd been more or less heading towards since "Connected," an album that, while certainly rooted in hip-hop, knocked like a pillow fight.

Auer may have the lower profile of the two lead Posies, but he's every bit the artisan his bandmate is-- and his solo debut is ultimately a satisfying listen.

Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish.

The album is not as wholly satisfying as either "Clandestino" or "Esperanza," mostly due to a handful of truncated, underdeveloped tracks toward the end, but it's still full of excellent songs and inspired collisions.

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.

Like Wonder, Guilty has its share of up-tempo tracks, yet its real pleasures are idiosyncratic, revealing themselves the more attentively and often you listen.

Even before “Drugged Vinegar” breaks down into a round of rapturous applause, How Ill has already succumbed to and recovered from its own cleverness many times. But the album is never just clever.

Even though you know just what you should be getting from an album like this, Lee Fields & the Expressions play like the stakes have never been higher: they lay it all out there, put it on the line, and make damn well sure you feel it.

The record is fluid, but front-loaded.

It’s clear Molina has grand ambitions here. But by confining them to a flyer-sized canvas, Kill the Lights becomes his first record that will have you not just marveling at everything Molina can pack into a 60-second song, but also lamenting what he might be leaving out.

Intra-I is the soundtrack for a new generation of music lovers to grow with. Cross hasn’t just connected his instrument with the soundsystem culture that informs his music, he’s made it an integral component of that tradition.

On One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years.

A charming enough document that fans will almost certainly find worthwhile.

It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful.

The most satisfying moments come when the orchestra stops playing, allowing the quartet to settle into its own groove, as it does often for those London sets.

It's a really solid record, unassuming yet memorable, subtle: It's mildly melancholy, modestly dark, and discreetly brooding.

It's a good album, and without the pressure of making it under the Roxy Music name, Ferry has made a confident and remarkably fresh-sounding record simply by doing what he's done best for over three decades.

It all amounts to a constructed world that sounds outré at first but winds up being a startlingly astute reflection of our own as you settle into it.

This is the best way to approach the album—as an impressionistic work that rewards the questions and ideas it stirs, rather than a puzzle demanding a solution. Its knotted discussions of agency and morality take a backseat to how alive its characters feel in this illicitly exciting world.

So much of Daylight Daylight feels this way: majestic enough to fill a theater but contained and domestic.

It is a tease, an intriguing suggestion of possible next steps in the motion of one of this year’s most promising new singer-songwriters.

With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album.

Even while Quaristice is in some ways the most listenable album they've created in a decade, it's ultimately no easier to parse, and can be very rough going indeed if you're not in the mood for their peculiar world.

The new musicians forgo the gauzy, playful dilettantism of Euphemystic in favor of expansive pop marathons.