The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top.

If This Is How You Smile was the complete house tour of Lange’s psyche, Far In is more like an afternoon barbeque in the backyard. It doesn’t tell as complex of a story, but you’re more than happy to hang out in the sun for a while and enjoy his company.

The structure is as expansive and freewheeling as any strange trip.

All the best songs stretch toward seven minutes and beyond. A toast to decadent culture! The evident pleasure in the construction and writing of these songs is strong enough to justify lingering on this side of the veil.

It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.

On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons.

MR COBRA solidifies her as an avant-garde curator—not only of sound, but of broader pop culture and camp touchstones that shape the public imagination of what a woman can be.

David Comes to Life is absolutely worth the commitment, a convincing demonstration of what can happen when a band works without limitations.

While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating.

Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan.

As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus.

It amounts to something tougher and more original than merely the sum of classically cool influences—a sound that activates Shaw’s disparate imagery, making the setting seem more dangerous.

Gojira's best work to date.

Algiers have produced a record that is timely and necessary but also scatterbrained and messy, one that is so over the top it becomes a political melodrama, undercutting the issues it seeks to amplify.

Synthesizers appear sparingly, but contribute to weaving tense and expansive atmospheres, further deepening the emotional breadth of their music.

Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

Modern Jester is Dilloway's War and Peace. It covers practically all of his sonic obsessions, stretching them to lengths at which he can explore every detail and tangent. The result-- seven pieces encompassing four sides of vinyl-- feels like a major statement, even if it's made of wordless, sometimes harsh noise.

Occasionally she steers into blander territory, like the well-written but sleepy “Fun Girl,” but a rotating collection of R&B’s most toxic crooners keeps the energy level high.

Though the songs on Rose Mountain were tighter than ever, the record felt like it was gritting its teeth, waiting for a fever to break. On All at Once, it does. Bayles is back, and so is the band’s storehouse of killer riffs.

Rarely does dark doubt sound quite so inviting.

His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career.

The lucidity and beauty of this music feels hard-won, something to revere and cherish.

Body music for heady dancers, this is a triumph of dance music at its trippiest, and in its controlled weirdness lies real liberation.

With such sparse arrangements, the album’s grandest moments come from Giddens’ vocals. She delivers her originals with the same spirit as more familiar material, like a show-stopping take on “Wayfaring Stranger.”

Better to track down this decade's insane explosion of tangents individually than to be given a brief summary by a hit-or-miss marketing device.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.