Lynch can be heard loud and (sometimes) clear here, floating among ideas that he finally allows to breathe. Despite the traces of anxiety written into the lines he sings, it’s a welcome respite when so much else has turned to smog.

Hawk is very much Campbell's album. She made all the big artistic decisions, her face is front and center on the cover, and Lanegan shows up on only eight of the album's 13 tracks.

On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.

That sudden stop is the only moment on Something Dirty that could be called a gimmick, but it feels oddly right. A fade-out would be too easy--better to bluntly suggest that there's more music beyond that final frame, and encourage the rumor that this version of Faust is far from finished.

A staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.

It is the sound of Iron & Wine returning home, ending one chapter and beginning another.

For all their reverence toward the past, Bitchin Bajas know how to live in the present--there’s no knowing distance here--so at its best, Bitchin Bajas doesn’t give you ideas about sounds, but the sounds themselves.

Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.

The album's use of analogue synths isn't a regression, but an attempt to find a new way forward.

Like the Betas' Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold isn't a flashy record.... But unlike Heroes to Zeros, Black Gold sounds agreeably homespun.

With Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater achieve not only their grandest statement to date, but their most grounded as well.

If "Title TK" was a tentative first step back into the public eye, Mountain Battles finds Kim and Kelley proudly venerating the Breeders' battle-scarred history and bull-headed perseverance.

Their debut album, Embrace, dispenses its earth-quaking riffage in such carefully measured, perfectly spaced-out rations, it tricks you into thinking the band is much heavier than it actually is.

Across these 10 uncommonly beautiful songs, she finds the spiritual in the everyday.

Ruminations is Oberst’s most emotionally legible work since Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, also defined by its similarly cloistered worldview and sonic cohesion.

There is no guiding conceit to Easy Come Easy Go, no criteria that connects all of Faithfull's sources, which frees her up considerably to find the hidden passages between these disparate songs.

With the closing “You Make Your Own Luck,” Watson effectively distills GUM’s whole essence into a two-part mini-suite: one half nocturnal cosmic ballad, one half sunrise-summoning soul-jazz groove, the song reaffirms Watson’s ongoing mission to find the elation in isolation.

Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook.

That the least interesting material falls to the back is unfortunate, because most of the album is engaging.

While The Turning Wheel was originally planned for release in September of last year, its whimsical presentation and urgent, socially conscious lyrics give it a timeless feeling.

On Simian Angel, we get a glimpse of something new: something sensitive, probing, and even whimsical.

It ["Heat Sink"] feels both longer and shorter than its 14 minutes, a trick that Palladino and Mills pull off on every track on the album; each lyrical passage is an instruction manual for experiencing nonlinear time. That Wasn’t a Dream is music as quantum theory, using the expanse between speakers to pass through dimensions.

Mae’s Jack White-produced 2017 album Forever and Then Some had a hard-rocking veneer, but Other Girls (still under White’s label Third Man Records, this time produced by Dave Cobb) invites more natural light into the mix.

Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive.

He’s remarkably consistent as a songwriter; the weakest point over 10 songs is “Soon Az I Get Home (Interlude),” mostly because of its brevity. On “Let Me Know” he shows off his sweet (and under-used) falsetto, adding a coating of earnest gloom.

With the oddball charisma toned down and the lens zooming in on Kelis' melisma-adverse vocals, one is left with the sense that all of these songs could be bigger and more distinct, but it's hard to pinpoint how exactly. This drawback is also ultimately the album's draw: Given time to settle in, many of these songs are among Kelis's most charming, ingratiating themselves with surprising ease.

Every track is memorable, though rarely on a musical level.

Their preferred form of power does occasionally blur into its own monolith. But it does add force and pacing, tweaks that help these 11 songs stand independently of the need to see them played live.