The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.

Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.

9th Wonder evolves with Rapsody here, perhaps out of necessity, as her raps continue to expand in force and scope. Alongside Eric G, Nottz, and Khrysis, the other in-house producers at his label, Wonder assists her in reaching new places.

Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album.

His style has finally caught up with his intellect, and while his beats are passable but unexceptional, his voice locks onto and scans over them so ferociously they're almost obliterated.

Jay Rock’s concepts are braver and weirder here, his words more arresting and illustrative, but the major reinvention of 90059 is his delivery.

No longer experimenting for experimentation's sake, every beat-breaking decision on Myth Takes serves to reinforce the monumental rhythms.

Living Torch is a fitting and crucial next step, as Malone fulfills and expands the promise of her self-made early works.

Working with material hog-tied to the past and performed with traditional trappings puts Diane at some risk for creative stagnation and worse--the kind of anonymity and irrelevance enjoyed by vast swathes of the contemporary folk universe. To Be Still avoids these traps thanks to Diane's spectacular voice and, well, the little, mostly indescribable things.

Where those newcomers privilege the nostalgic, indefinite, and noncommittal, the vets in SVIIB make a confident gesture towards the future.

Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity.

Soft Landing is his most traditional singer/songwriter-oriented release since 2007’s Tiny Mirrors, but it both embraces the melodic integrity and warmth of ’70s AM-radio standards while stripping away the pop-song packaging to let the contents unspool in unpredictable ways.

Need to Feel Your Love continues to dance along the line separating proto-metal and power pop, but leans more often toward the latter. Bassist Hart Seely’s slightly crisper production lets you better savor the jangly acoustic strums underpinning the power chords, while liberating Halladay’s singing from the payphone fidelity of those earlier recordings.

As a whole, A World Lit Only by Fire represents music converted into motion--kinetic and mechanical, inexorable and inhuman. Godflesh, never a forgiving band, has never sounded so relentless.

If previous Blanck Mass albums were each a step out from the shadow of Fuck Buttons, Animated Violence Mild shows that he’s outgrown the comparison altogether.

This is an album by an artist getting comfortable with his softer side. It's another welcome surprise.

It's the most cohesive-- and, possibly, the out-and-out strongest-- Islands record yet.

Her most experimental album yet, a meditative foray into swirling loops and pure drone. The physical trappings of her primary instrument largely melt away.

Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.

This time around, the edges of the Quazarz universe feel smoother, the ride less jarring. The low end is still intense, but it feels more like a deep tissue massage than a trunk-rattling rumble.

as brittle, volatile and consistently riveting as any band out there, and even though no one could possibly take Smith seriously anymore, it insinuates that there's still enough justification here to warrant following The Fall's devious discography into one more decade.

While it doesn't recapture the magic of the Sprout-era Guided by Voices records, Universal Truths and Cycles marks the return of some of the most sorely missed qualities of early Guided by Voices: strong vocal melodies and refreshingly atypical song structures.

At once cosmically huge and acutely personal, Zauner captures grief for the perversely intimate yet overwhelming pain it is. Long may she keep at this music thing.

Temptation is strong enough to stand with any of Byrne's other solo work, that rare film score that works beautifully as an entirely separate record.

Rather than sounding like an epitaph, though, Angel Tears arrives as a beacon of hope and change. The lightest and most playful of Strom’s recorded work, it signals new vistas ahead, ones that sadly will now have to be explored by others.

Her frank storytelling makes “Coast” the most vivid song on Nobody Loves You More, like the account of a beachside outlaw whose levity is its own triumph. The best moments are when Deal slows her pace and stretches out like a daydream, recalling, more than any of her other bands, her sublime cover of Chris Bell’s “You And Your Sister” with This Mortal Coil in 1991.

There's plenty of zoned-out atmosphere on the tape, but it's a strong, focused, unified piece of work, not just a lava-lamp soundtrack. It stands on its own.

2017 - 2019 has been rendered more purposefully than its predecessor, each track flowing into the next. It presents an identity for Against All Logic that transcends the previous mid-tempo crowd-pleasers, one that’s unafraid to draw from various club subgenres while injecting Jaar’s customary washed-out tape atmospheres.