Barring the occasional mid-song bridge that might have you checking your watch, most of it works, too: Even when Desire Lines slows, it's because it's wandering or straggling, not because it's hamming out same-y minutes in some ill-forged notion of filling up a 12".

46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out.

Broken Hearts Club doesn’t stray far from that warm atmosphere, but Syd still makes time for the occasional detour.

While Imperial Wax Solvent has all the buzzy, crunchy sonic hallmarks of great Fall, it also doesn't quite rank with their highest highs, an admittedly tall order when that includes albums recorded twenty-five years ago by a completely different set of musicians.

The cloudier nature of Ishibashi’s score leaves it feeling less like a standalone piece than the soft, jazzy pop of her Drive My Car soundtrack. But as a mirror to Hamaguchi’s tale of creeping environmental anxiety, Ishibashi’s ghostly music makes a rich companion.

These feel less like songs than experiments in pushing Stott’s habitual techniques to the breaking point.

Windows extends the filmic dynamism and orchestral spark that carried "Recording a Tape," but instead of remaining in the background, the narrative--impressionistic and imperfect--comes to a often-unpredictable present.

Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world.

He manages to satiate his obsession for thousand-detail soundscaping while creating pieces that walk the line of sensory overload, never overwhelming but always blurring the edges.

As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia.

The world might be an unrelentingly bleak place right now, but Amnesia Scanner find new strengths under pressure on Another Life. In more ways than one, they’re only just finding their voice.

Though Live at Montreux is an inviting survey for newcomers, it's also worth hearing if you’re already familiar with the source material. Some songs, like “Pomperipossa,” are reworked for maximum force, but the greatest rewards are subtler.

Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.

Even if they don't quite hit the heights of the A-Trak-name-checked influence of Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique (how could they, let alone anyone?), they've created a hedonistic, piston-pumping album that bears as much relation to the urban hustle-and-bustle as it does to festival crowds' surging, ecstatic mindsets, a love letter to NYC that sounds good just about anywhere you're likely to hear it.

Look Up Sharp, dal Forno’s second album and her first on her own Kallista Records, doesn’t depart from her past work so much as coalesce the haze into more of a shape.

Snaith's fascination shines, taking him places that po-faced peers are blind to.

Savage sends each line out to the back of the club every time, all underneath sugary post-punk revival guitar lines courtesy of Savage and his longtime associate Austin Brown.

There's something almost voyeuristic in listening to such an intimate musical relationship built on exchanging confidential messages to one another, but it's this warmth that gives the record its spirit.

It doesn’t shy away from sorrow, but as far as heartbreak albums go, Volume 3 is surprisingly resilient.

You can sense the band proudly embracing its transitional nature, rarely attempting to push beyond its self-imposed boundaries—a triumph by existence alone, an itch they had to scratch. And if it’s not necessarily the music that Blood Incantation will be remembered for, it is precisely the kind of risk that shows why they’ll be remembered.

By refining their reality, and allowing themselves to be a little more seen, they feel more reachable than ever.

ATAXIA has moments of all three, running the gamut across funk, feverish entertainment, and frustratingly dry-eyed experiments. Throughout, however, it remains startlingly original—a powerful piece of work from a sonic adventurer of rare intellectual clarity.

Mazes is an exercise in accessibility and concision, using familiar, melodic pop templates to support their drone and krautrock tendencies.

Slow Pulp excel in this pared-back country-folk mode, with a sigh of pedal steel or a hug of harmonica, and vocals that feel like a secure embrace rather than a distant cry. When the pressure of life threatens to pop you like a tire, their clear-eyed sincerity keeps on rolling.

Field Songs is Whitmore's seventh full length (not counting a collection of demos in 1999), and stylistically, it's right in step with his previous albums.

Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present.

It speaks to Baird’s ever-expanding ethos that, after 20 years of eager, in-depth collaboration, she’s managed to sound more like herself than ever.