To make music this abstract work, pacing is key, and Porter's proves masterful throughout--that's as true of individual tracks, which heave like massive bellows, as of the shape of the album as a whole.

A different kind of hero’s journey through the musical mind, Psychodrama feels less like a platform for clout than a starting point for self-help and paradigmatic change.

This is the culmination of an eight-year second-wind. It’s also the most complete 2 Chainz album to date, and places him where he belongs: in the upper echelon of rappers from this era.

While improving on the sheer sound of Ghost Blonde on nearly every level, No Joy are still more suggestive than declarative.

A shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.

It might be just a mix CD, but Scuba's DJ-Kicks is a landmark both personal and scene-wide.

The rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.

It’s more restrained [than 2022's GOLD] but just as urgent: a pen scratching out a manifesto rather than a rallying cry through a megaphone.

There are enough instrumental interludes and understated melodies here to make the record a grower, and it eases into the sunset for much of its back half.

Central Market is a big album for an age that has acquainted itself with thinking small about the album both as a vessel for sound and as a standard-bearer for new aesthetic vision.

The lucidity and beauty of this music feels hard-won, something to revere and cherish.

Whether it's through casual observation or the to-the-bone identity struggles, Open Mike Eagle's overlap between amusing insights and uncomfortable truths makes for one of the most compelling indie-rap listens of the year so far.

On Multitude, his primary theme is care—and how humans use and abuse one another as they seek comfort and turn a blind eye to inconvenient truths if it means getting what we want. He embodies these fables through a litany of rogues, often told with piercing humor.

None of the tracks are more noteworthy than anything on Sing "Other People", Angels' latest and straightest LP, and the foreshortened format disables development. But Gira's fatherly measuredness is a nice foil to Akron's hyperkinetic mini-opera.

Clouds unfurls its delicate arrangements and startling contrasts across a wider space than Porridge Radio has ever played in before.

Even as its canvas stretches wide enough to accommodate the aggressive and experimental extremities of the Sharp Pins sound, Balloon Balloon Balloon is ultimately a showcase of Slater doing what he does best: filtering Beatles-‘65 joy through Beatles-‘66 drugs to hit the sweet spot between winsome and whimsical.

Lyrical inscrutability peppered with the occasional waft of clarity has always been a Boeckner trademark, and Face Control continues that.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

While Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.

The songs, performed almost entirely on the piano, predicate a world undergoing permanent, devastating changes, but they float with delicate sensitivity. They add more nuance to a body of work that already teems with vivid detail.

As Days Get Dark embraces the old misery-loves-company adage by wrapping Moffat’s wounded words in Arab Strap’s most accessible and near-danceable songs to date.

Lenderman and his band elevate his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.

Even without the heavy emotional resonance of those mixtapes, Str8 Killa works as a showcase for a ridiculously solid rapper. Gibbs knows his craft inside and out.

Whatever actual healing powers she may be channeling probably depends upon the patient; nevertheless, Kelly Lee Owens presents an artist with an unusually focused vision of what music is capable of.

This is smart, well-plotted music, which makes its anger all the more effective.

If you've ever been intrigued by the sound of the sun imploding, this should be your cup of hemlock.

The music—bubbly, nebulous, free—seems to have a mind of its own.