As a first step, both Teenage Hate and Fuck Elvis Here's the Reatards are astonishing. All the energy one could hear in Reatard's better-known work is here in it's rawest, most volatile form.

Nothing is off limits, yet everything works within the context of the album, as rousay unearths modes of expression that make it hard to remember a time when ambient music sounded any differently. Through it all, rousay somehow makes this progression feel completely natural.

“Well Rested,” like the rest of Civilisation II, meditates not on human decline as much as the fables and myths we create in order to adjust to it. KKB are as inquiring and self-aware as ever—only now, their eyes are trained on the future.

Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades.

Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward.

Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.

If Favourite Worst Nightmare is notably lacking something, it's another song like the debut's standout, "A Certain Romance".

Although Floating Coffin does quite well with its searing powerhouses, the quieter moments add a much-needed sonic diversity.

Oh No is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects.

Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus.

By turning the rock knob down a notch, DFA79 have kept You're a Woman loud and nasty and ensured a cohesion and unusual degree of listenability.

It’s not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It’s rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but Rostam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past.

Don’t Lose This sounds like an excellent entry point for newcomers and casual fans, a gateway to exploring the Staples’ vast catalog.

It all adds up to a remarkably visceral, sensual, confident electronic record that stays absorbing from beginning to end, and should finally catapult Hopkins to stardom in his own story.

A Love Surreal is short on big, arcing-rainbow melodies as a result, but one of its joys is watching Bilal warp his voice into improbable shapes.

She expresses no hesitation here, and for that, her band has never sounded better. Sure, you can come for the twin guitars and the loaded rhythm section, but at last, Cottrell has made it clear you’re staying for her.

For all its internal contradictions, Salad Days is no more or less than a great album in a tradition of no-big-deal great albums.

The lyrics’ pastiche of observations and fleeting memories isn’t always clear enough to be emotionally resonant, to cause you to ponder their meaning after the song stops playing. Instead, the appeal is in the temporary pleasure of listening. There is an unhurried joy in these arrangements.

Radical Romantics is essentially a collection of notes on love. Love—whether sexy, overwhelming, or vengeful—links together the recurring motivations of the Fever Ray catalog: curiosity and exploration, family born and chosen, sexual freedom and pleasure.

Catharsis is Stickles' fuel, and The Monitor is a 65-minute endorsement of angst and opposition as the best way to present that combustible sorrow.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Craig’s music is not concerned merely with his gadgets or the way he wants his voice to be. Thresholder is, instead, a summary of the way his voice might be heard or ignored or interpreted in a universe where activity and entropy only increase without bound.

Without a lead melody to hone in on, the album’s ever-shifting arrangements can sometimes feel uncertain, like carrying on with a scavenger hunt after forgetting the hiding places. But heard in full, Notes With Attachments’ restlessness sounds more like determination: an insistence on fitting as many ideas into as short a time as possible.

<COPINGMECHANISM> asks us to accept a grungier and more mature Willow, but this maturity feels formulaic and the intimacy feels manufactured, relying on universal tropes of angst instead of her own. Even if the album is generic at times, Willow’s limber vocals surely enchant as she trapezes across pop, punk, metal, and screamo never fully landing on a signature sound.

Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts.

God Said No stands apart from Apollo’s previous releases not only because of its genre experimentation and its stickier choruses, but for its willingness to get ugly.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

Who is William Onyeabor? doesn't provide any answers its own posited question, but the mystery and wonder of the man’s music remains intact.