Its hypnotic, steady pulse distracted you from the fact that they sang about wanting to die. That overactive death drive persists on yeule’s second album, Glitch Princess, elevating relationship troubles into Shakespearean psycho-dramas backed by soundscapes massive enough to contain them.

Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships.

Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.

At its best, the music of Romantic Piano approaches the promise of that sentiment, speaking the feelings that words cannot.

SABLE, distills the familiar pleasures of Vernon’s extraordinary oeuvre while providing a singular magic all its own—one of refinement and maturation, of clarity and confidence.

After that opening suite--“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”--the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips.

Not surprisingly, Art Department are at their lachrymose best not when trying to uncover house's absences, but when redrawing ever more finely what was always already there.

Many of the tracks on his last album felt like sketches—the kernel of an idea, abandoned quickly. The same sensibility holds here, but even the simplest idea is stretched across a much bigger frame, to six or seven or even eight minutes. That’s important; you need the time to sink into these things. After a spell, you can’t say whether you've been listening to a given piece for two or 20 minutes.

The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.

The riveting intensity of the musical exchange throughout Uneasy shows how productive that intermediary space can be when everyone involved embraces it as a challenge.

For Your Consideration thrives on the elasticity of the human voice, while its lyrics turn from underhanded lovers to the flush of new affairs.

The people who hear this record will split into two crowds: The ones who think it's silly and precious, and the ones who, once they hear it, won't be able to live without it.

White's gift on Big Inner is taking sounds created by actual southerners and turning them into figments of his musical imagination, which he bends and shapes into bottomless columns of ethereal soul.

Certainly, some--even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work--will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.

This is no garden-variety chill. It’s lush and heady, and shot through with an undercurrent of wistful contemplation, but none of it sounds like an exercise in presets, whether musical or emotional.

Home Video is a bold statement, a powerful post-adolescent text in its own right.

With her 10th album, Fossora, she is grounded back on earth, searching for hope in death, mushrooms, and matriarchy, and finding it in bass clarinet and gabber beats.

The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy.

Some of the most propulsive, ferocious music of the year as well as some of the most poignant.

Remarkably intricate and razor sharp compositions... more accessible than anything he's done before, yet it surpasses them insofar has he has shown the beginnings of a total sonic mastery of each subtle aspect of a work.

June tends to write in easy, sly rhyme schemes reminiscent of the late John Prine, whom she eulogized last April with a solo cover of “In Spite of Ourselves,” the famous duet that they performed while touring together in 2018. For every moment when this style borders on hokey, there are others when it feels complete in its Prine-like knack for waiting until the very last word to earn the listener’s smirk.

“Auster” remains, despite the pauses, a minimalist study of harmony and tone color, and the gorgeous “Third Hour” is languid and drifting. But there’s also more motion here than we’ve heard in her work before.

Like a lot of great country music, the songs here are staked not on novelty but on convention, on familiar stereotypes captured in unfamiliar depth. ... As always, the premium remains on real talk, which the band dispenses with the unsparing resolve of someone who’s been listening the whole time but has not been paid attention to until now.

With their dirty mouths and pretty faces, pop perspicacity and knack for making a bloody racket, there's no question the Vaselines were worth rescuing from obscurity.

The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.

Their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb.

Whereas the distorted tones smeared over 2017’s Pleasure could make it seem as if she were squaring off against her guitar and microphone, Multitudes mostly sounds as cozy as a winter sweater that’s three sizes too big.

He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple.