If Double Negative was a thrilling and uncertain expedition, bringing an alien landscape into focus for the first time, HEY WHAT demonstrates Low’s newfound mastery of the terrain.

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.

It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons.

Their latest is their most consistent yet, and it stands among their best.

The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention.

Time and time again, Premonitions delivers on that promise as Folick shares her inspiring vision of an ennobled world.

It is easily the most solitary record Simon has made since his early solo work. The restraint is the point; just as he’s found inspiration in wide-ranging rhythms and textures from around the world, he now seems thrilled by just how much quiet he can conjure.

Pretty Toney far surpasses 2001's Bulletproof Wallets, finally finding the missing link between street cred and commercial respect.

The more anthemic crowd-pleasing numbers littered throughout The Beginning Stages of the Polyphonic Spree boast such endlessly repeated refrains as "Hey/ It's the Sun/ And it makes me Shine," which lose a lot of their appeal when taken out of their natural habitat (the live setting) and placed between your headphones.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy.

Thundering, itchy, pneumatic new record.

Slippery and cryptic, Negro Swan blurs boundaries between the finished and the unfinished; between focused deliberation and thrown-together spontaneity; between fly-on-the-wall conversations and self-contained songs; between indie experimentalism and overground pop; between insider and outsider, black and white, straight and gay, trans and cis; between taxing depletion and invigorating replenishment.

Despite the occasional nod to rock formalism, All Time Present achieves a scope only hinted at on Forsyth’s previous full-lengths.

Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.

What it reveals is someone of talent, ambition, and enough wit and self-awareness to keep that ambition grounded in reality. It’s an excellent debut from an artist on the cusp.

Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

For the first time, Kozelek has put out an album whose meticulous sequencing yields more than just a random scattershot collection of great songs, but rather a complete cohesive musical statement.

The results are as free-wheeling and inspired as the group has sounded in years-- Super-er and Furrier.

She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars.

So much of Daylight Daylight feels this way: majestic enough to fill a theater but contained and domestic.

A deliriously ambitious record packed with neo-psych lullabies and swooning choruses.

Earthless are incredibly indulgent, sometimes to a fault, but they’re much too excitable to be called selfish or masturbatory. The dudes are once again just riffing here. It’s a trip worth taking, at least a few times.

It’s both solipsistic and psychedelic, urging listeners to travel into their own depths and welcome the joy and despair they might find there.

If these Goats Heads Soup rarities betray the album’s indecisive, scatterbrained origins, the reissue’s third disc—an oft-bootlegged but greatly enhanced recording of a Brussels show from October ’73—finds the Stones still very much at the top of their game as a live act. ... Ultimately, Goats Head Soup remains fascinating for how it makes the Stones seem a little less mythical and a lot more real.

Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive.

Not every great album hits on the first listen, but Freeman’s second record, Burnover, somehow feels like it’s always existed.

For all the sonic risks and boundary-pushing distortions of previous records, SABLE, fABLE is the more daring album in Bon Iver’s catalog.