There are ways to hear this album as both damning or redemptive, depending on the perspective. But it is never sanctimonious, and it is constantly breathtaking.

With its quaking rhythms, twisted riffage, and jet-black wit, Major Arcana is a redemptive ode to the broken bones that grew back together a little crooked--the ones that taught Dupuis how to walk in her own weird way.

The group's size makes the white-robed hordes of Polyphonic Spree an obvious comparison, but I'm From Barcelona's taut songwriting renders their numbers largely incidental-- these songs were meant to be shared by many voices.

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.

Even where Certified doesn't entirely congeal, Banner gets by on personality and an ever-sharpening focus.

Rips mostly finds the band walking away from Timony's established voice and pushing toward something more direct and energetic--embracing the past, but also blowing things up and starting again.

Purely in sensory terms, it’s difficult to imagine many richer-sounding rock records being released this year. Tumor treats sounds so lovingly they sometimes resemble a director framing and lighting a beloved actor, and every sound on Praise enters the mix with near-visible entrance and exit cues.

The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal.

Una Rosa, isn’t a neat bookend to the period in between, nor is it a balm or salve. It’s better, truer to the joy and pain of the past that flicker into the present like unwelcome thoughts.

So yeah, this record is a downer. But there's rare beauty in such darkness, too-- just look at forebears like Leonard Cohen, Elliott Smith, and Nick Drake. Or even Edgar Allan Poe. Because, along with its mopiness, WIT'S END is creepy as hell.

Thug’s rapping itself, known for its unpredictability, is sharper than ever; his voice feels clarified, strengthened.

On Paradise, Barber-Way steps outside of her own body and the assaults it sustains, and creates a searing portrait of what it can look like to love without fear, even when that love doesn't resemble the fantasy we've been sold.

20/20 is akin to another recent album that successfully teased-out excitement from satisfaction, Beyoncé's 4.

Using words and noise to create mantras and blow them up, Every Bad is the inspired result of a rock band finding itself in 2020, inhabiting many ways of being.

By the Throat demands those kinds of complex distinctions, though. Its radiance is a dark one, and its most sinister moments lead to deliberate calm.

More so than Forgiveness Rock Record, Hug of Thunder presents Broken Social Scene as a rock band making rock songs, a coherent montage rather than a patched-together highlight reel.

It's a fittingly strong ending for a band that did almost everything right.

While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music--especially here--is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific.

On Funeral for Justice, it’s impossible to miss—from the blood dripping off of the crows on its album cover to the screeching guitars that open its first song, it’s the proud sound of rebellion, transposed from Tamasheq into a language that refuses to be misinterpreted.

There isn't much in here that could be considered hip, or that shows technical skill. But there's a total gut-level joy, as if these were tracks made by an ecstatic, well-meaning kid who hadn't yet encountered the complicated concerns of the places people might actually dance to them.

The end product, neatly compartmentalized into three style-segregated discs, is about as perfect a summary of Waits' appeal as can be found on the open market, a shadow greatest hits that offers testimony to his unique and diverse talents without recycling any of his album material.

Yes, it sounds quite a bit like The Books' debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.

As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains.

With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects.

The first set boasts slightly better clarity, the second set coming across more muffled. But the wider canvas of these two sets offers him a freedom he didn’t always have on that tour. Rather than frontload the hits, the trio gets to take their time, folding in a dozen new songs that had yet to appear on any album.

It is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper.

If anything, the album now sounds more like the masterpiece it felt just short of at the time, a work nearly on par with its more universally regarded, nocturnal sequel Automatic for the People.

At 72 minutes, this is the longest studio album of her career. Björk doesn’t find love with three chords and the truth, she finds love through an endless interrogation of every note there is.