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.

The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew.

Since their inception in 2016, Magdalena Bay have made aqueous internet pop and low-voltage funk full of pinwheeling arpeggios and inside jokes. Imaginal Disk sounds like that, but bigger and punchier—more keyboards! More percussion tracks! Add a string section!! Synth harp!!! The total effect brings to mind ’90s Madchester, the progression of Tame Impala after Lonerism, and peak CD sonics.

As often as the band has pushed in new directions, it’s never abandoned the core dynamics of its songwriting, a fact that Lonely People With Power underlines. Fifteen years into their career, having long transcended any given genre, set of influences, or fan expectations, Deafheaven sound, more than ever, like nothing other than themselves.

This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going.

What we’re left with is Boards of Canada’s moodiest record, a full-length tinted with atmosphere that unfolds slowly and is happy to allow you to come to it.

Iyer and Ismaily’s hypnotic interplay leaves the listener unmoored in time and space. The grand sweep of Aftab’s voice is a galactic super-wind capable of carrying you off to wondrous new worlds. The force of their collaboration is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts that it borders on the mystical.

While the jagged edges of “This Is Why” establish a jittery energy to match Williams’ punctuated belting on the chorus, songs like “C’est Comme Ça” draw too closely from their inspirations. ... Once they shake off their millennial discontents, Paramore find their groove in the record’s second half.

A collection of laid-back grooves and sultry meditations on love, loss, and the human experience.

Here, Clark's role-playing is grounded in emotions that are as cryptic as they are genuine and affecting. And when her voice can't bear it, her guitar does the screaming.