There are no great musical innovations here, but that’s not to say the songs aren’t affecting: Anaïs Mitchell is a compelling, earnest rumination on the desires and possibilities that arise when you start looking for significance in small moments.

On A Danger to Ourselves she turns the camera on herself and the lens becomes a mirror, revealing an artist even less inhibited than before.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

Heavy Ghost is, in Stith's words, "more like life:" sometimes challenging, sometimes confusing, but, in the end, rewarding.

Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.

With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance.

An innate sense of contrast amplifies the music’s force. Showing utmost respect for empty space, they know precisely when to pull back—to emphasize the cracked edge of Busch’s voice, or leave room for a silvery tendril of guitar—and when to flood the zone with pure, cleansing fire.

Pre Pleasure takes its time unwinding and occasionally leaves too much unsaid. Some songs drift away, setting a mood rather than communicating an idea. But when Jacklin allows the two to work in tandem, she excels.

Ultimately, it’s not the hazy discontent that makes Everyone’s Crushed indelible but its livewire sound.

ny footholds you might find in the record’s craggy surface are slippery by design. But as a result, the pleasures of Space as an Instrument feel hard won, each moment of melody and peace an epiphany amid a backdrop of stormy uncertainty.

Even though many of the characters are heartbroken or wracked with anxiety, Williamson navigates modern life using timeless tropes that lend Time Ain’t Accidental an immense, gratifying confidence.

While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.

Do Make Say Think have presented us with their best work yet, a varied and unpredictable album capable of imparting the chill of the winter and the warmth of celebratory joy to you without ever presenting you with a human voice.

Everything is intricately wrought and calculated, perhaps in an overly accommodating response to fears of linearity. This fashionable awareness lends an almost palpable weight to the sound. It succeeds in adding depth and texture to the album, but sometimes overshoots the mark.

With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one.

It’s not just the guest roster that sets Pop 2 so apart from the mainstream pop landscape, it’s the way these voices are integrated, making its 10 tracks feel less like a cool-kid curation project and more like a popping afterparty you’ve stumbled into.

2017 - 2019 has been rendered more purposefully than its predecessor, each track flowing into the next. It presents an identity for Against All Logic that transcends the previous mid-tempo crowd-pleasers, one that’s unafraid to draw from various club subgenres while injecting Jaar’s customary washed-out tape atmospheres.

It’s a joyful noise. This is one of the more uplifting records of experimental music in recent memory. There’s something about how Orcutt and Corsano push each other that leads to work that pulses with the life force—these pieces bring to mind sunlight hitting a maple leaf, cells dividing under a microscope, a deep thirst quenched.

It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts.

Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums.

Though Settings’ music sprawls, it feels minimalistic in practice, exploring just a couple of chords like Philip Glass and encouraging deeper listening like Pauline Oliveros.

Sling may be an album concerned with time, fears of obsolescence instilled by a vampiric music industry. But it also finds exuberance in stillness, a kind of gentle unburdening.

There’s a freewheeling spirit to the music they created together, a punchy camaraderie that connects these disparate songs from the agitpolka of “Guns Are for Cowards” to the Celtic dreamfolk of “Downstream,” and from the rambunctious ramble of “Turned to Dust (Rolling On)” to the despairing chorus of “Boise, Idaho” (which contains one of Oldham’s loveliest and most forlorn melodies).

The Shepherd's Dog is Iron & Wine's most diverse and progressive album yet, a deft transition to a very different sound that explores new territory while preserving the best aspects of Beam's earlier recordings.

Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey.

What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing.

If Frank represents a culminating moment for Fly Anakin, instead of just another brick in his discography, he finds subtle ways to show us.

Unfathomable sorrow and controlled fury give the album its shape.