Boeckner's melodies are precise and the choruses show moments of bright clarity cutting through the foggy verses: not unlike fleeing a bleak reality to find asylum in a dream. He hasn't sounded this committed and angry since leading Atlas Strategic a decade and a half ago.

It isn’t the strongest work from either artist, but the white EDM DJ turned rap producer and the face-tatted trap rapper from Watts make a good odd couple. ... The vibe is more couch potato than cinephile, and the tape works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades.

Animaru has no duds but also no true stand-outs, shining most when Semones takes on the unexpected—suggesting a more idiosyncratic artist underneath all the virtuosity and polish.

It's a record so enjoyable and expertly sequenced that it demands repeat listens before it's even over.

More deeply satisfying than extraordinary, it seems unlikely to displace anyone's favorite Camera Obscura record, but neither is it a negligible entry in one of the smartest and most loveable discographies in contemporary indie-pop.

When A Weekend in the City comes bursting out at you with a gaggle of second-album upgrades-- new tricks, new scope, new arrangements-- the bulk of them sound like good ideas: They've been executed by hard-working professionals.

Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom.

As leftovers, Close Cover Before Striking is more akin to day-old pizza than three-week-old pasta.

I do miss the grit, heavy-lifting, and larger excavations of their earlier work--nothing merits tossing around the word "epic" here--but what they do, and what they've become, is fascinating.

Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career.

Weirdon doesn’t attempt to alter the course or conviction of Polizze’s faith in six strings, a volume knob, and the truth, but it does make it more compelling than ever.

The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude.

Here, the Feelies simply dig up The Good Earth's pastoral, post-Velvets power-pop -- a sound that ruled college radio airwaves in the mid-80s but which boasts few notable contemporary adherents -- and blissfully strum away as if they were performing in hammocks.

Still Woman Enough is a pleasant, nostalgic, occasionally brilliant collection that fits neatly into the country legend’s catalog and introduces her to younger fans who love Margo Price and Kacey Musgraves but haven’t yet found their way back to Lynn and Kitty Wells.

Nursing wounds while simultaneously trying to put her problems to scale, Tudzin writes unpretentious songs that aim straight for the heart (“I Would Like, Still Love You,” “You Are Not Who You Were”) like the enduring hits of So Jealous.

Tender New Signs makes the listener work a little harder within Tamaryn's framework, but it rewards as much, if not more, than the walls of noise threatening to hem them in just a few years ago.

Despite radiating a gentle, unassuming tranquility, Weft rarely bores.

Even as the band sticks to the path of least resistance, it skirts the MOR sandtrap that sinks so many indie rock acts that manage to last a quarter century.

Despite the band name, the album is a guitar-driven record, relying primarily on Stillman's dexterous fretwork to lead the quintet in and out of geometric jams that sound vaguely prog-metal in origin.

Beats-first, lyrics-second people have enough here to return to, and lyric freaks know there's plenty here to unpack.

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.

A major leap musically and an unflinching reflection on the courage of rejecting easy comforts.

Metal Bird feels blissfully unmoored from any sense of time and space, its astral Americana hymns hovering somewhere between the dirt and the stars, between a bygone golden age and our tense present, between raw intimacy and dreamlike splendor.

Sons & Daughters are far from perfect, but The Repulsion Box is an energetic, sometimes thrilling record by a band slowly but surely carving out a unique niche for themselves.

It’s taut but it’s also a shambles; cramped and ready to rupture with the despair of five unruly lads.

Macro’s swooning arrangements bloom and bend, revealing a band comfortable with experimenting within the boundaries of a certain sound.

Difficult, unapproachable, and gleefully abrasive, Verdonkermaan will be an addictive but acquired taste for those who seek out the horrendous, the inhumane, and the fucking brutal.