While these melodies often feel familiar, Toral puts a mysterious spin on them, warping them enough to make them feel otherworldly. His instrument wavers; his drones have a sparkling, celestial sheen. In the process, the poignant songs start to feel less like themselves and more like a dream.

Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song.

Wild Beasts certainly aren't the first rock band to stand up society's dregs and outcasts, but few others immortalize them on such a wondrous, mythic scale.

On HEAL, it’s not just the lyrics that are memoiristic, but the music as well.

Memories Are Now, perhaps more than anything she has done in the past, is closely engaged with the present moment, yet so lyrically and musically idiosyncratic that it never sounds overtly political.

Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that’s part of the pleasure of Small Changes. It’s a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he’s made.

Turnstile experiment more freely than ever on Never Enough.

Short blasts of distortion leave their mark throughout the album, guitar tones evoking the image of exploding paint cans in a mid-size room, adding to the unruly spirit of the band's albums and live sets.

Endlessness is more than a crafty marvel, or even than the sum of its vaunted parts. It feels like a feat of physics.

It is an accomplished album full of puckish invention, singular production twists, and ambient murk that offers scintillating hints at where Jlin might go on her third album proper.

Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious [than 2018's Parts], and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song.

Though the strength of Petals for Armor is derived from the complexities inherent in self-actualization, it is, at times, weakened by its musical and lyrical scope.

It's one thing to be heavy, and it's another thing to be hooky, but Slaughterhouse is the rare garage-rock album to do both so well simultaneously.

As with Psychopomp, the album’s most powerful moments come when Zauner examines seeming contradictions that actually aren’t or shouldn’t be.

She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing.

The album is full of familiar moves—but comfortingly so.

It updates the IDIB sound without losing its buzzy neon charm, which remains a hugely attractive mode.

With his first officially licensed mix CD, for the 51st entry in the DJ-Kicks series, one might expect a set of dusty disco and deep house, but Dixon confounds expectations throughout, detouring at peak moments, going left where he might build momentum, all of it leading to luminous results.

At this stage, they sound both comfortable and ambitious, settling into their familiar chemistry while adding new chapters to a story only they can write.

Bright Ideas is more pleasant than kick-ass or inspired. But for an album this deep into his career, at a time when he could start growing aesthetically antsy, McCaughan sticks to a blueprint that works best.

Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.

What’s transcendent about both the music and the lyrics of Magus is the way it lives in the build-up to a war that is only just beginning.

As on her debut, Roxanne’s cool, clear soprano provides the centerpiece of most of these songs.

With Nattesferd Kvelertak exploit an opportunity to create a sense of mystery. More importantly, they back it up with a group of songs that's virtually filler-free and loses little steam towards the end.

This is a band that absolutely revels in the possibilities suggested by its obsidian thrills, no matter the potential changes in the audience’s size and scope. Down Below is about death and hell, sure, but it’s proudly, defiantly not meant for an underground anymore.

An album that feels like the most fully realized record Tears for Fears have ever made, a culmination of the musical and emotional themes they’ve held dear since their inception.

You could take issue with Spiritualized for sticking so closely to the blueprint they inaugurated more than 30 years ago. But the band always felt built for repetition and refinement, a cosmic home for Jason Pierce to grow comfortably old, away from an ever-changing musical world.

Alex G is playing with new toys that make records sound both more organic and expensive—banjo, accordion, mandolin, actual string sections. This puts Headlights right where it should be, in conversation with major-label debuts from the likes of R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse.