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.

Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.

There are no sour notes here; it’s a lovely listen from beginning to end. But you may sometimes get a sense of déjà vu, either because so many of the songs draw from a similar set of sounds, or because you’ve actually heard them before—six of the album’s 14 tracks came out on other records in the past few years.

Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience.

As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.

Musically and lyrically, Mutiny plays like he’s expanded 2016’s “Call to Arms” to album length. .... The best songs here are lean and sinewy showcases for his backing band, the Dark Clouds.

Bigger, stranger, and just plain heavier than any Circles disc before it, the first 35 minutes of Empros' empyrean, oblong alien-prog finds the band once again wrestling their grand ambitions into impossible shapes.

On Poison Season, you can occasionally detect the dismaying sound of indie rock's greatest intellect second-guessing itself.

Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

The Mysterious Production of Eggs might wrestle with unsavory topics, but it does so with a shrug of the shoulders, a wry smile, and a heart full of awe-inspiring song.

It is the Knife's most political, ambitious, accomplished album, but in a strange way it also feels like its most personal.

The album may not shock the singer’s die-hard fans, but Broken Gargoyles is a moving, painful listen and an ideal access point for the uninitiated.

Beautiful, strange, and stoned, Hitchhiker lets us in on one of those nights.

Determined to give fans a jolly time after a five-year absence, Lucifer on the Sofa doesn’t let up and won’t change minds.

While it lacks the iconic significance of his debut, BLACKsummers'night is a record more than worthy of Maxwell's talents, because it trades the physical sensuality of his earlier work for a deep emotional resonance, the performance of an artist whose focus and attention to detail gives his expression a singular veracity.

Whether bellowed by Philip Cope or sung with witchy intensity by Laura Pleasants, just about every song has a chorus that immediately stamps itself on your brain. In that sense, Spiral Shadow is damn near a pop album.

If you come to Girl in the Half Pearl looking to find a soothing voice in the wilderness, you will instead find a complex maze of battered beats and warped shouts. The gripping soundscape doesn’t allow you to watch its protagonist’s transformation from the safety of the back row—it shoves you through the screen.

Her lyrics often read like prose on the page, but she finds ways to bend them into melodic shapes it’s difficult to imagine anyone else finding.

If Right was about the evil that men do, Intellect goes one bigger and asks why they do it. The answer, again and again, is rooted in hurt, pain, neglect, and disappointment. Intellect draws its energy from the panic of mortality.

If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.

It’s 46 songs of verbose, intricately delivered raps, spun from a story with enough character to have already made it a New York Times best-seller. There’s a lot of ground to cover regardless of medium.

Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music. Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album.

Blue Morpho’s transportive ambitions are ultimately a vessel for O’Brien’s innerspace explorations.

This is a slow, steady album; if you thought MJ Lenderman was uncompromising in his lolling tempos, this album might make you feel like time is flowing backward after a few tracks.