For a dirty, grungy rock’n’roll band, there’s no better place to hold communion than the local pub, where the separation between artist and audience can be so thin, it may as well be nonexistent. Maybe that’s why Way Down in the Rust Bucket feels transcendent: It captures the world’s greatest bar band in their spiritual home.

Rarely does an album this understated say so much.

What once again prevents Case from delivering a front-to-back classic is a perfectionist streak that accounts for Flood's mannered meticulousness.

By presenting a more rounded portrait of Guthrie in which politics is only one subject among so many, The Complete Mermaid Avenue Sessions shows just what Guthrie was fighting for and provides a persuasive rebuke to anyone who might whittle the man down to just one dimension.

Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.

I'm Wide Awake weaves the personal and the political more fluidly than most singers even care to try, and the consummate tunefulness just strengthens those moments where he pinches a nerve.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece.

Tough, impressive, astonishingly good debut.

All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.

This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming.

A Victim of Stars doesn't offer much to anyone already immersed in that world. For everyone else this is an engaging scratch at the surface of a wide-open mind.

Ratboys bring their best, most compositionally advanced songs, moving from tightly wound indie pop to the serene hammock sway of country rock to territories far dreamier and uncertain. Their performances are varied and versatile without feeling like a different band has taken over each song.

These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here.

Here, Richard and Zahn have captured grief like a carved piece of obsidian—glossy, beautiful, and sharp.

Locks lets the past speak by keeping the grit and the grain in his samples, conjuring the dust of the archives. Like Madlib, another jazz-influenced samplerist, he leaves the seams in his loops and builds meta-rhythms from the clicks of his edit points.

Despite all its aggrieved poses and statements, the often astonishing rapping, the fastidious attention to detail, and its theme of self-affirmation, Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers ironically never settles on a portrait of Kendrick.

That deliberate smallness, that inner focus, is the source of much of this understated record’s outsized power. For all its overdubbed layers, “Space 8,” like the album itself, feels as simple and as steadying as breathing.

Released today, it instead feels like a staggering transformation and a return to form that was never lost, an ideal adaptation by a group that many people didn't know they needed to hear again.

In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.

Holopaw's cover art and Depression-era script logo might be indie-folk standard issue, but the music contained within is a refreshing, effective new use of the boundaries: a wood-paneled Powerbook.

Just as Mandy strikes a nerve with nihilistic noise, he sweeps back to a gorgeous, heart-rending theme, like “Death and Ashes.”

Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.

Squid’s most wide-ranging album yet, and somehow still the one that hits closest to home.

Greatest-hits compilations in general are something of an endangered species, given that streaming-service playlists can now generate them for you, but there's still something to be said for getting a band's own take on what they deem essential.

It is her most personal record to date, telling the story of her father’s incarceration and her own fear of parenthood. It is delivered entirely in costume. The best and truest moments on Daddy’s Home are when Clark refuses to play wife or mother.

It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle.