Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality.

Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods.

Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.

However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself.

He skillfully synthesizes his influences, hitting sweet spots that feel purely of his own creation.

The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record.

Fading feints from Hannah Peel’s empathy and refuses to devastate (or stunt) like the Caretaker. Yet it’s full of Betke’s own version of love. If older Pole was a weighted blanket, these are throws to toss and turn under, offering temporary comfort but no escape.

Love Goes, Smith’s third album, unfortunately fails to deliver on the promise of “How Do You Sleep?” The album is clumsily split in two, with no regard to sequencing; it begins with a collection of bubbling, at times electric songs spanning melodic funk, pulsing deep-house, and mid-tempo pop, before abruptly veering to five messy ballads that would be better delivered via Hallmark card.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

The selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either.

The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.

Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album.

The album has all the hallmarks of the era that Frusciante apes, but offers thoughtful, intriguing embellishments at every turn.

Positions doesn’t broaden Grande’s sound the way her past few albums have, and it isn’t buoyed by a heroic anthem, like “no tears left to cry,” or guided by a specific mission, like how “thank u, next” honored her relationship history. The record resonates partly because it doesn’t weld grand statements out of living with trauma; it narrows in on the wobbly path of pleading with yourself, the begging and bargaining of healing.

The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.

These eight songs grapple candidly with [family loss], but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.”

Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath.

It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.

While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

Even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle.

All of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it.

The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.

clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological.