Whole New Mess has a singular power. The songs are spare but still feel electric, and despite their lower volume compared to All Mirrors, you couldn’t necessarily call them quiet. Their slow-strummed chords and finger-picked patterns are at times deliberately brittle and blown-out. Whole New Mess amplifies a different source of loudness.

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.

The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss.

It's got some of his best pure songwriting yet, but no earth-cracking riffs. Still, as a treatise on loss and its schizophrenic aftermath, Blunderbuss is a purposeful success.

Listeners who have struggled to appreciate previous releases will hear more of the same in Comradely Objects. Those who are attuned, who find that the band’s smallest pivots can induce a feeling approaching euphoria, will encounter the album as a carnival of delights.

On paper this all could sound average, but Wolf Parade's true talent is transforming the everyday into the unprecedented.

Whitney might not reinvent anything, but they sound perfect right now, and it’s hard to argue with being in the right place at the right time.

Love is turning everyone into an audiophile, then, which means it's making younger people a little older. And it's also a mashup remix, which means it's making older people a little younger. They were just a pop band, yes, but if anyone can bring all these music fans together under one tent, it's the Beatles. Which is what Love is ultimately all about.

The surface is a gorgeous invitation to return and see if you can figure out what it all means.

Its visionary ambition recalls the fertile sprawl of Villalobos’ 2003 debut Alcachofa; baroque techno blessed with the carefree spirit of lounge music and Quiet Storm, dressed up in tie-dye, the music on Amygdala glows with an easy confidence.

Taken as a suite of music on its own merits, Volume One flows rather seamlessly—no small achievement. The canvas they paint on is remarkably spare and restrained.

Even sharing a track with current it-man Ty Dolla $ign on the mellow celebration of “Hey Up There,” he’s able to hold his own. Conversely, when he leans into rapping, he achieves an emotive style of delivery that injects his words with extra resonance. Still, Buddy is at his best when he lets himself be carefree.

Remembering the Rockets is everything one might expect from an ambitious, reverent band moving to the epicenter of American indie rock: It’s sharper and more purposeful, forged by the pressure of real expectations. The best album of their deep and underappreciated catalog, it also imagines a life after indie rock.

On Universal Credit, he proffers downbeat tales that invite empathy, and they deserve, more than anything, to be heard.

Perspective is the sound of an artist stretching herself and succeeding—not because of any embrace of the Western classical tradition, but because she challenges its norms so effectively.

As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.

Open Your Heart is smartly sequenced to metabolize genre and morph like a masterful DJ mix, subtly rationing out its true peaks even while seemingly going full-throttle throughout.

As an accidental concept album affirming the enduring power and purity of early emo (as defined by Dischord, Deep Elm, and especially Jade Tree), Attack on Memory feels above all necessary, a corrective for indie rock making allowances for everything except music that actually rocks.

What’s fascinating about SORCS 80 is that it feels vaguely rootless—some sounds are familiar but the form is not. That isn’t to say Dwyer has chucked out hooks or melodies the way he did his guitar. SORCS 80 contains some of his sharpest recent songwriting—the tunes just happen to get transformed by the Osees’ execution.

The Violent Sleep of Reason galvanizes most when Meshuggah rise to the challenge of writing music that matches the urgency and global scope of its subjects. All too often, though, even as they’re captured playing together in a room for the first time in ages, Meshuggah sound a tad more comfortable than agitated.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

Nothing on Words and Music redefines or amplifies Reed’s legend. Instead, what we get is a photograph, stark and charming. For an artist known for cool and cruel observations, for cutting remarks and misdirections, these recordings show him completely free from guile. Lewis Reed, unguarded.

Chapter I, the stronger of the two releases, features one of Crockett’s most personal and well-executed ballads to date, “Good at Losing,” a solemn ride-along through the years he spent traveling aimlessly. The title track, “$10 Cowboy,” is another highlight.

Dan’s Boogie is not a facsimile of its predecessors. It is funnier, wiser, though the stakes are perhaps a little lower. .... It all feels effortless, like he’s been doing this for his whole life, which he basically has.

Unlike those records [Lemonade and 30], Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust.

Skeleton's flaws are few and often obscured by the album's mixing: Vidal's vocal adds an additional rhythmic layer, but his lyrical work is interesting enough to be more pronounced and less muddied.

All Hell is a subtly clever record that pits one type of music that strongly evokes one era--here, country music--against another, namely this decade's sample-heavy culture.

Värähtelijä is a weird, grotesque record, where genres are superimposed on one another and where eccentric choices are the rule and not the exception. Yes, Oranssi Pazuzu is out of the old black metal box and lost--wonderfully, strangely--somewhere between heaven and hell.