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.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

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.

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.

While do it afraid doesn’t have the snap and verve of the more structured Ten Fold, there’s a charming coziness to its loose sound. These open-aired songs evoke backyards and block parties, the rhythms gentle as breezes.

As impressive and uniformly gorgeous a record as Rook is, the band's best work is likely still to come.

Weather Alive is a testament to her conviction, an eerily physical experience with the power to make believers of the rest of us.

This sense of tragedy seeps through nearly every song. It’s what unites the vast material and makes Workin’ on a World feel pivotal in her catalog. These high points also help recontextualize DeMent’s continuing evolution as an observer of American life.

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

Musically, it’s his most adventurous album since Graceland, filed with strange rhythmic kinks and a junkyard’s worth of barely identifiable sounds.

Party Music is an effort both entertaining and politically motivating, a feat which many have attempted but few have successfully pulled off.

The best executed Harvey Milk album to date, and one of the most accomplished metal records you'll hear this year.

Morbid Stuff is 37 minutes inside a sweaty venue process your worst feelings when a half-assed meltdown just won’t cut it.