Her musical ideas and lyrics have caught up with the ability of her voice. The songs are well varied, and transition smoothly from one to the other.

As with Psychopomp, the album’s most powerful moments come when Zauner examines seeming contradictions that actually aren’t or shouldn’t be.

With his careful needlework, Mazurek stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music, setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of how each of these components is necessary to the whole. It rises up to gesture toward the cosmos, then returns us to life on Earth, tracing a single great parabolic arc.

Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward, an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

Feathers may not have the heft of Dead Meadow's other albums, but it's easily its most listenable and satisfying from end to end.

A Sailor's Guide to Earth is such a rearrangement of Simpson's sonic universe that any previous categorization now seems out of date.

To Whom This May Concern might feel scattered to those wanting her more characteristic, sensuous R&B. But the album does a good job of flaring in different directions while keeping close to Scott’s artistic core.

White Roses, My God won’t be for all Low fans, and though—perhaps as with the strangely comparable posthumous SOPHIE album—its reception will certainly be softened by goodwill, it stands alone. Sparhawk releasing a record this immediate and inchoate feels like a gesture of faith, in both listeners’ patience and the musical futures it might yet bloom.

Overgrown is not as wall-to-wall great as his debut, but fans of the first LP will still find much to admire.

The sharply differentiated genre experiments become less well-defined in the home stretch, but the sound design stays immersive, with pleasant little things to listen to festooned in every niche.

Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight.

Words are sparse on caroline, but that indomitable, communal spirit courses throughout, accomplishing something nearly impossible for a largely instrumental post-rock album: to project urgency and timelessness simultaneously.

Gives the impression of an overwhelming fullness, a life force captured in a riot of barely controlled waveforms.

The tape is a short, sweet, and potent mix of what Curren$y, Freddie Gibbs, and producer Alchemist do best. It is also an example of the good that can happen when seasoned vets link up and operate under the radar and outside of the major label system.

The album zeroes in on what the band did best (and what sounds best today), its non-chronological sequence making songs recorded several years apart sound as if they sprung from the same session.

Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring.

With Fright, both have found new sides to themselves: Greenberg tapped into his inner metal kid, but Berdan has taken the self-apocalyptic energy of his past and turned it into a weapon for redemption and moving forward, much like Negative Approach did in the ’80s.

Cleaner and more elegant [than previous album, Does You Inspire You], buffing their crisp electronic pop to an immaculate sheen.... Truly great.

It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.

You can quibble with the inclusion of familiar material in a Bootleg Series package, but you can't argue--not yet, at least--with the unreleased depths of the Davis vault.

The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at.

Listen to all of The Aberrant Years, and you'll probably get too caught up in feedtime's bracing songs to think much about bands that came after them.

The first dozen times through, I had trouble making sense of the overloaded midrange and upper register: the horns, guitars, call-and-response vocals, and insistent shakers and maracas. But eventually, it all settles into place, yielding both a rich diversity of complementary styles.

While its peaks fall just a whit short of those on its predecessor, Decoration Day's inward journeys nicely balance out Southern Rock Opera's bombastic expansiveness, and further confirm the Drive-By Truckers' status as the most poetic and insightful Southern rockers in existence today.

If any Screaming Females record has suggested they may someday become a group worthy of cataloging in a book like Azerrad's, Ugly is it, igniting a classic punk sound with a friction that falls somewhere between SST and PJ Harvey's Rid of Me.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever stand out for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note.

Of course, in due time--maybe it'll take years--8 Diagrams will sink in as a compelling, well-regarded album.