A lot of these songs didn't have hooks, per se, to start with. They expanded and contracted with a kind of cosmic swarm, the percussion providing a delicate skeleton. Loose as it was, without that punctuation, Vulnicura Strings can feel a little formless.

One of the best things about the AMY documentary is that its pacing feels so natural--invisibly punishing, just like life. The effect of this soundtrack is exactly the opposite. The power of her voice is undercut by the regular intrusion of the film score, which doesn't reference her musically in palette or instrumentation. As a result, the album feels like a powerful hand clasping a limp one.

The Albatross darted fitfully and stretched out in all directions, while Dealer pulls all of Foxing's influences inward. Inverting his typical role of making burly post-rock bands sound delicate, producer Matt Bayles (Isis, Caspian) boosts Foxing's fragility.

It’s the most passionate batch of love songs you’re liable to hear in 2015, and they’re all about a specifically anthemic form of punk rock.

While these songs can sometimes evoke other major players in her genre, she makes Max Martin’s signatures feel personal, making a mature pop record that feels like a natural progression.

The Cutting Edge is music of the present, but not the '60s present, an eternal present; the songs are about observation and they exist in a place where it's always now, in sound and word.

Each track of Under the Same Sky will undoubtedly find a home in a record bag or set list somewhere, and rightly so, as there's really nothing fundamentally wrong with any of them. As an album, though, Under the Same Sky leaves you wanting more of a moody, immersive experience, and less of its clean surfaces and precise negative spaces.

Even considering all the high points and raw power, II falters under the weight of the band's ambition.

Bad Neighbor whizzes by in a blunted haze, which might be an insult to another project, but it works well here, when the stakes are low and the mood is most important.

You have to sit still a while and let the trio’s sonic images wash over you before their musical zombies rise from the dead to terrorize the stereo space. But give this album a fraction of the patience and attention that Wolf Eyes have put into it--effort on a par with their excellent previous effort, No Answer: Lower Floors--and you’ll be glad you stayed up late enough to see how it ends.

It's a record best heard loud, because the quiet parts can be very quiet, and its spirit lies less in melodies or even moods than in tiny details.

While there's nothing here that suggests Berninger and Knopf are truly incompatible, there's equally little evidence that Knopf's spirited arrangements are suited to Berninger's spotlight-gargling word soup.

It’s Great to be Alive! is the sound of a veteran band in complete command of its back-catalog.

Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in.

The Evermore journey is an engaging one, but it would have slid into a new age torpor if not for the spate of ugliness near the album’s end.

The new recordings retain their rough edge, but there's luminescence in the production--the percussion is crisper, the guitars are brighter, and Toledo's singing is a lot more pronounced.

Communion plays out like a kind of fever dream, a delirium of cold sweat and disturbing visions in which there are only brief moments of daylight before you're plunged back into the maelstrom once more.

The album is best when it’s at its broadest.

Angels & Ghosts isn't a bad record, but it's frustratingly tepid.

Liberman is excellent on its own. Carlton's voice is the key attraction on songs that register between low-key pop, rock, and folk.

Many Moons works as a remarkably cohesive album, meandering its way across themes of past and present to a state of aching clarity that's modest, but no less genuine for

Strip the clever vocal snippets away from Vibert's productions and you're left with those choice drums and goofy melodies, but there's little beyond that to mind.

Leave it to VHÖL to find another dimension to the ever-bountiful combination of hardcore and metal, where the cerebral and the primal stomp heads next to one another.

The soundscapes he's constructed on his third LP, Howl, are spiky and imposing, too solid to sink into. The music is always shifting, so it's impossible to lose track of time while listening.

It’s as unhinged as it is straightforward; as it acquires mass in the choruses it seems to list off the ground into some new, uncertain gravity. For all the blur and motion of their music, this hint of deeper chaos might be the album's most exciting moment.

At a relatively brief nine tracks, the record is a perfectly paced blast of dark pop that deftly reflects Fortune’s growing prowess as a songwriter.

As If leans a little too heavily on the groove in the middle, with moments like "Funk (I Got This)" fading into the background, but it's reinvigorated towards the end by the riveting "Lucy Mongoosey", which uses another singalong chorus as an anchor, an introspective pause among all the dancing.

Give Life some time and you might find it infecting your synapses, too.