These finely wrought songs introduce a fascinating and confidently subversive artist and offers a glimpse of the road she’s traveling.

What’s remarkable is how wide a net Holley and Lee cast. Maybe it’s a sign of his broad appeal or the importance of the work he’s creating, but there’s something like fellowship in these songs, a sense of remembering together.

While few really stand out on their own, together they lean on one another to impressive effect. As a result, it has the feeling of an album that really holds together. Now that's an anachronism.

While its ingredients are undeniably basic--all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it--what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds.

There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel.

Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth.

It is the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music in their discography, albeit at the cost of their unique intimacy and warmth.

Still, sparse as it may be, her music offers its own richness, and these songs often reach full-band conclusions that feel warm and inviting.

This exercise in excess makes the ambitious You Forgot It in People seem positively understated by comparison.

What binds the album is slowthai’s soul: his meticulously drawn characters, his affinity for left-behind outsiders like the glue sniffers sampled on “Doorman,” and his impatience with a profit-motivated world where, as he once put it, “You’re competing constantly without wanting to.”

Ultimately, Chasmata is slightly inferior to its predecessor due to a sequencing issue near the record's end.

ith “Sober Motel” especially, Dilly Dally subtly chip back at the ways music is exploited under capitalism. Its greatest element, as ever, is Monks’ rare voice--jagged, on fire, intoxicating itself.

“Gold Feet” feels as if it could have been pulled off a hard drive that had been neglected since 2018, all the way down to its JID feature. But more often, the album pushes through that illusory ease to deliver heavier tracks and a more animated Gibbs than we’ve seen for some time.

Its focus on the verities of songcraft suggests an artist confident enough to lean harder into tropes, formulas, and covers (including a spicy take on Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye”). It may feel like fiddling while Rome burns, but artistically it pays off.

In a couple of decades, when you're looking for an instant hit of what electronic pop felt like in 2011, you'll be able to throw on Glass Swords and get a dose of that feeling in its purest form.

Imikuzushi feels like the work of artists looking down from a mountain rather than laboring to climb it.

Though Live at Montreux is an inviting survey for newcomers, it's also worth hearing if you’re already familiar with the source material. Some songs, like “Pomperipossa,” are reworked for maximum force, but the greatest rewards are subtler.

Written and recorded during an extended stay on Ireland’s windswept west coast, the follow-up to Land of No Junction reaps lucidity from family bonding and fleeing the city in search of peace. With it, Frances’ psych-folk soliloquies arrive like postcards from a friend who’s just beginning to open up.

Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt.

An album that pushes Minus’ musical vision outward while burrowing deeper inward lyrically.

Woman King will provide eager Iron & Wine fans a welcome holdover between proper albums, but the EP also serves a larger developmental purpose, marking one more evolutionary hop for Sam Beam, and christening a new genre-- post-basement.

At Weddings remains remarkable for its grace, candor, and composure. For now, with or without religion, Tomberlin seems equipped to keep her demons at bay.

It's no slight to say the record's distinguishing quality is the one Elbow has had since the beginning, an honest humanity that's imperfect but can be appreciated if you live with it.

Here, when everything's as clear as it is on Les Voyages de l'Âme, he feels almost too exposed, and the big climaxes he's reaching for don't arrive. There's no denying the beauty, but it feels weirdly muted-- or perhaps just unsurprising.

The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain.

It’s a slightly deflating end to an album that succeeds through its unnerving, unflinching personality. By now, the most interesting characters in Bridgers’ story are the ones she puts on the page herself.

Each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness.

Garden feels like a refinement of the same sound [on 2019’s Weeping Choir], pulling them to greater, if somewhat less accessible, heights.