Dense, beautiful, intricate, haunting, explosive, and dangerous, this is everything rock music aspires to be: intense, incredible songs arranged perfectly and performed with skill and passion.

While the record fails at living up to the hyperbolic critical proclamations of London Calling's second coming, it does make for a pretty decent, if somewhat unexpected, sweat-soaked finale for The Clash's legendary golden boy.

This album's predictability isn't the same thing as complacency, and if this music catches you unawares, it'll strike you right where you're vulnerable.

Silences, the second LP from Nashville’s Adia Victoria, scans like a biting, lush indie rock record, but it’s a blues album in this pure sense.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

Where Semper Femina might have sketched a feminist utopia, Marling instead uses her broad study of femininity to explore flawed, sometimes devastating relationships between women.

This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics.

It's not a casual purchase, but the band's most dedicated fans and soundtrack heads will be thankful for its creation.

As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion--kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.

Despite its clear seriousness, Brigid Mae Power runs on that sense of newfound freedom. Power and Broderick find glimmers of light even in the darkest moments, and she learns to trust the kind of love that enables independence, after some period of coercion.

Old LP works because its growth doesn’t pander to modern notions of “cool.” But the way the band re-balances the grime-vs.-grandiosity equation with each song demonstrates that when it comes to musical math, the proof matters as much as the outcome.

The album oscillates between emotional registers, balancing profound quiet with strummy, emphatic pleas about how we might better comport ourselves in the world; there’s a sense that even at their most gentle, these songs are transmitting something deeply earnest and hard-won. This is as true of Read’s lyrics as of her arrangements, which are newly rich and rewarding.

Careful listening reveals that the album’s welcoming facade is an invitation into a tantalizingly complex world, like a perfectly manicured hedge maze guiding you through concentric pathways.

His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.

Wild Beasts have remained an act with no intention of blending in. Smother, their third full-length, is just as the above quote promises: completely uncompromising. And that's why it succeeds.

You can feel roots going down and an edifice being built. Her voice has gained depth and she sings with more force and clarity, so that's part of it. And the arrangements are more judicious and draw less attention to themselves (some tracks are just harp, others add horns, strings, and percussion, but with a lighter touch). But the bigger difference seems to be the overall mood, which is expansive and welcoming.

They've found a way to be ambitious while also elemental, a difficult trick that Sleep pulled off on Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker, and one that High on Fire have nailed here.

It's deeply satisfying, constantly rewarding, and I'm not entirely sure what I was doing before it came into my life.

Stuart Duncan’s fiddle reinforces the small-town details of “Matthew,” about simply trying to make ends meet while enjoying a little bit of joy in between the trials. That’s a theme common to country and folk music, yet on Country Squire Childers invests it with enough insight and immediacy to make those hardships sound perfectly present tense.

It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.

This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.

Recorded in live sessions with the group Rhys assembled for the Babelsberg tour, the album feels like a solo record in name only. It pops with the collaborative energy of Rhys’ supporting cast.

On Melt My Eyez See Your Future, Curry again retools his sound, trading livewire energy for introspection and vulnerability. The album lacks the vividness of his past releases, but its concept offers a glimpse into Curry’s roving mind.

Sunn O))) is a behemoth, a leviathan, a statement of purpose worthy of the late-career self-titling gamble. Despite that, maybe because of it, I can’t imagine wanting to listen to it more than once every few years.

Yet as awkward as they sometimes sound, the Go-Betweens are still writing consistently gorgeous pop songs, and Oceans Apart proves they aren't content simply pleasing their most die-hard fans; they're back to making albums that, in a better world, appeal to everyone.

Really, in a world far too concerned with backstories and far too lacking in good old dedication to craft, Grizzly Bear's just about as boring as they come: four guys who very quietly set out to make a fantastic record. And so they did.

I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018.

This is the first album where Yanya has worked with only one producer, and having a steady collaborator gives the album a cohesion you may not have noticed the previous two didn’t have. The sound is unhurried and lush, with Yanya’s voice confidently tender.