For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music.

The music is abrasive, but in its most shocking moments, the band allows beauty to shine through the grime and static.

At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.

You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here.

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.

Nocturne is a richer, comparatively luxurious listening experience, but it doesn't sound flashy or ostentatious.

Lilitri’s dedication to concision and coherence doesn’t come at the expense of subtle, sharp songwriting.

The Witching Hour is the most urgent and immediate of their career. The earlier records were sort of toylike and plastic; this not only has a pulse, it has chilled blood in its veins.

Dragonslayer is a lither, more athletic Sunset record--easier to like, easier to understand.

Through the Wall makes its case without grandstanding, proof that command can be quiet.

This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like.

On Ratchet, an honest, earnest pop record, Shamir elaborates on the gutsy melodies of those early demos and singles and makes good on the hype.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

This is terminally catchy music played with punk's enthusiasm and velocity, and maybe it's the fact that there's only two dudes in this band that makes you feel like joining in to bash along.

The songs here are airy, and often provisional-feeling, while Thundercat's lyrics reliably invoke death, mourning, and vulnerability.

On Any Shape You Take, De Souza commits herself to being undone, to experiencing the terrible feelings and the beautiful ones. Even when she’s fucked-up, there is something ecstatic in her attempts at loving, her hunger to absorb all she can from life.

Waiting for the Moon is just what I needed from Tindersticks: an album that doesn't abandon their recent direction, but breathes new life into it by drawing breath from their noisier past.

Monomania is certainly a strong effort on its own merits, and more importantly, they’ve avoided making their deflating “diminishing returns” record.

Pairing the risk-taking instinct of her best music with the swaggering confidence she projects as a kind of cyborg diva, it is the best of all five albums in the set, and one of her strongest full-lengths to date.

No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude.

Working mostly chronologically, this set flows so that you feel you’re riding alongside him.

The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

Crush offers proof that Shepherd has quickly learned to harness its noise and power. In a live setting, this material might have the potential to blossom into something unruly, but on the LP it comes across as more mischievous than deranged.

Burn Your Fire for No Witness conjures the past without ever imitating it, swirling its influences into something intimate, impressionistic and new.

F&M's coy pose comes off as somehow original.

The album's chilling resonance is due in part to Godrich's anagogical recording of minimal instrumentation and digitally etiolated detail.

Ultimately, this is the type of record this band is suited to making, and it richly rewards repeat listening--details and melodies that seem buried or understated eventually come to fore, slowly revealed in a mixture of organic warmth, welcome variety, and subtle complexity.

Though actual percussion remains sparse, Night Reign grooves harder than its predecessor, which featured almost no drums. Even when the rhythm instruments sit back, there’s almost always a sense of an insistent pulse.