Nun finds Teengirl brightening familiar color pallettes in more noticeably energetic ways and heading in an even more dance-oriented direction with a look not dissimilar to the aesthetic developed by the UK label Night Slugs.

Milosh’s crisp electronic soundscapes work mainly as contrast, immaculate bedding designed to melt away as his warm voice slithers in. At his best on Jetlag, Milosh builds up his tracks in the simple interest of pulling them back to let the vocal take over.

Yours to Discover never feels like a dishonest record, just one where it’s incredibly hard to grasp the intentions or ambitions of its creator.

Vile has mostly left his interest in extreme tape manipulation and soggy lo-fi charm behind him, but the Jamaica Plain EP offers a brief and fitfully pretty glance backwards.

Five Spanish Songs never feels like an vanity-project indulgence, but rather a clear, concerted effort on Bejar’s part to communicate why Luque’s songs are so special to him.

If there's a criticism here it's in the way these songs don't stray far from the original pieces, instead working as tasteful updates that add a dab of cohesion that was never needed in the first place. It's a treat for fans, which is really all a project like this is ever going to be. But it also highlights a continuity in their work.

These songs are also song-focused—the artists assembled here may all have deep experimental streaks, but they never ignore pop’s pleasure principle, and there are hooks all over the place on this near-flawlessly sequenced compilation.

You don't get anything that great [as "1777"] on the rest of the album; that said, it's an emotional peak you only need to reach once on a collection like this, and the restraint on the following tracks helps with the overall thematic.

Direct Hits proves the Killers have fewer actual hits, let alone great ones, than you thought and makes you wonder if they made their Greatest Hits album too early or whether they can ever legitimately put one together at all.

Earthless are incredibly indulgent, sometimes to a fault, but they’re much too excitable to be called selfish or masturbatory. The dudes are once again just riffing here. It’s a trip worth taking, at least a few times.

The tracks, and the arid stare their grooves perpetuate, are like crop circles drawn into the UK hardcore continuum: functionally new, eerily primeval.

They manage to cut down some of the weight of the sung pieces, casting them in a more unique light, while giving San Fermin much needed tension and even a bit of violence.

Otherwise, all these nested layers of samples and beats and propaganda wrap infinitely around a hollow core, making for excitable music that eventually collapses into boredom.

Calvi’s synthesized enough musical styles for at least three artists, and she’s clearly got ample chops to pull any of them off. She’s born to make a grand concept album one day. What she needs now is that grand concept.

More than any Markers record before it, the trio seem to be communicating deep within the subconscious, tapping into soul that's been hiding behind the noise for years.

Sister is shorter than its predecessor The World. The Flesh. The Devil, but suffers from the same fate: the disappointing, overlong ending.

Kirby's fondness for disorder is a perfect fit for this type of material. Dream states rarely make sense until you plunge deep into them, and Dead Empires throws up thousands of different routes to get tangled up in on the way down there.

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.

An unhurried, casual nature is part of what makes Get There’s softer material pretty, but it could also be the thing holding Minor Alps back from writing truly great, uptempo rock songs.

It's nasty and explosive and full of bile, a hard rockin' bare-knuckle blow to the temple that'll lay you flat out. In other words, How to Stop Your Brain in an Accident is just the thing for the modern man, those confused and angrily impotent brutes.

There is less to dig into on it's a big world. To be fair, there are two bona-fide new Kurt Vile songs on it's a big world out there.

John Talabot's DJ-Kicks entry isn't the flashiest mix you'll encounter this year, and there's plenty of room for debate as to whether it ranks in the upper echelon of the series' many installments.

Shulamith, in this way, demonstrates again Poliça’s greatest strength: making music that’s both an easy and a torturous listen.

They worked on about 20 demos there, but none made the record. Shields: Expanded collects the best of these previously unheard Marfa tracks, which amount to captivating sketches, rather than scraps.

Purgatory/Paradise really is unlike anything I’ve heard this year.

Most of Mug Museum is bare and direct, quaint and unassuming, but Le Bon makes a rather grand occasion out of it--she's a master curator and consummate immortalizer.

Whether this breakthrough portends a change in course remains to be seen, but, at this point in their consistent-to-a-fault career, it's encouraging to hear Wooden Shjips draw the emotion out of their motion.

If there’s a way in which UZU falls short of the band’s debut, it’s in the recording itself, which is a bit hazier this time out and consequently robs the music of some of the direct, visceral power it had on Yamantaka // Sonic Titan. That said, the songs and performances are good enough that it nearly doesn’t matter.