So perhaps it's about time that we stop calling Cex a wunderkind: He may be barely 25 but with the introspective yet exuberant Maryland Mansions, he's officially grown up, establishing himself as a performer to be taken-- yikes!-- seriously.

YOB’s latest record stands as one of their densest, so it's good that the band's greatest asset, their impeccable pacing, remains intact.

Love Letter is mostly poised, polished, and lush beyond belief.

One of its most charged and inspired records in years.

Consistently excellent and deserves to be heard by fans of 70's glam and shoegazer alike.

A pristine dream magic seems to inform Apologues--the fluid serenity of the music projects a lulling, murmured unreality that suggests that the album is a figment of the listener’s imagination even while it is in play.

Dead Deer is druggy and sexy and arty and pretty, but never pretentious.

What Press Color does is distill our collective excitement and unceasing wonder at a scene that’s almost four decades old.

In a year where the likes of Kanye and Trent Reznor have reached deep into the dark circuitry of the Wax Trax back catalog to revive the corpse of industrial music, Factory Floor’s relentlessness suits the present moment.

Home, Like NoPlace Is There is emotionally relentless, but a relentlessly catchy record as well.

Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop.

The new album trades in queasy atmospherics for a more robust rhythmic attack, with Tagaq feeding off the band’s energy as much as vice versa.

It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store.

Scuba's music has always sounded wonderful--warm, rich, enveloping, ultra-vivid--but Claustrophobia feels like a major step up; the sonics are simply dazzling.

This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics.

Born Again Revisited is a deeply rewarding record and a worthy entry in a pretty stellar catalog.

This cerebral/visceral friction is one of the most satisfying elements of Black Hippy, and Ab-Soul arguably carries it the furthest of the group.

Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond.

A Morrissey record you can dig into without caring much about the man's lyrics.

The Yeah Yeah Yeahs still create great, compelling pop-rock, largely because of the way the songs themselves are organized, with conventional verse-chorus structures repeatedly eschewed in favor of detours, miniature grooves, and lengthy asides that produce the sensation of a band and a singer impulsively following their own emotional whims.

The tracks, and the arid stare their grooves perpetuate, are like crop circles drawn into the UK hardcore continuum: functionally new, eerily primeval.

Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure.

It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.

More than simply an expression of her music, Time (The Revelator) is a glimpse into the artist's personality.

I doubt Low fans who've held on this long will rebel against these new textures, more the way they're employed-- the band has added an almost disconcerting levity, and subtracted the gentleness.

Manners is deceptively consistent even beyond its singles--if you like one Passion Pit song, you'll probably like them all.

One of the year’s best and most urgent metal records, Head Cage is a fitting counterpart to another essential bit of 2018 heaviness, Thou’s Magus.

There are times where DIIV threaten to become too in love with their own sound, particularly toward the middle. But beyond lending Is the Is Are a necessary heft to back Smith’s claims, these songs are convincing portrayals of checked-out living.