Restraint, patience, trust: time and again they make GOLD sound like an incredibly wise record.

The album’s final stretch encapsulates its elaborate brilliance.

For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.

For the most part, Congleton doesn’t push Mogwai anywhere they weren’t already heading, but in its home stretch, The Bad Fire proves this band of steely veterans can still disarm you by opening up surprising new dimensions to their sound.

Shygirl’s ability to cook cutesy, juvenile references into grown and sexy club candy shines on “Wifey Riddim.” Its vintage lunchroom table production, evoking Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” or Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” gets a refreshing update with the addition of hip-rocking Jersey club breakdowns.

While not as pristine as the self-titled, their debut record for Epitaph is much denser, often overwhelming.

This dense, claustrophobic album is discomfitingly of the moment: Sudan’s characters sprint through these songs as though movement is a survival tactic, a way to push forward as the world presses down harder than ever.

Not only does it uphold the myths of baby boomer greats like the Byrds, Neil Young, and Simon and Garfunkel with a staid type of reverence, but it also piggybacks on the legacy of one of Beck's best records. It's the sound of a rule-breaker dutifully coloring inside the lines.

Redd Kross sound tighter and more energetic, even though their guitar tones have mellowed a little.

Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus.

It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.

While Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.

You can't recapture lightning in a bottle, or age backwards, but you can settle gracefully into strengths. Nas isn't back; he's just here.

The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.

In developing into such a formidable flock, the Decemberists not only have far outstripped those ridiculous comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel that dogged Her Majesty, but have also allowed Meloy to widen his lyrical scope and hone his ambitious narratives.

Some of its songs are so intimate that their meanings seem all but impossible for an outsider to parse. But in the moments when he decides to push his music out into the light, Thorpe's self-searching takes on a shape we can all recognize.

Despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

Overall, Psychic Chasms is something like a dream collaboration between the Tough Alliance and Atlas Sound, the latter of whose Internet-only Weekend EP shares a delinquent theme with one of Psychic Chasms' best songs.

It’s more of a slow burn and a slight step backward from Liquid Spirit’s dynamic nature. The results are nice, but with too few standouts, Alley breezes by.

These songs rip and burst and go.

Getting forcibly pinned down in her personal cycle of attack and retreat is a dark, visceral, utterly compelling thrill.

What keeps many listeners coming back to Hauschildt’s records is precisely the promise that each album will sound practically interchangeable with the one that came before--just, perhaps, marginally better. On both of those counts, Strands succeeds, yet it also marks a shift in tone: At just eight tracks and 43 minutes long, it is noticeably more restrained.

Deep Politics, their latest, is among their richest, most expansive offerings to date.

At first listen, Public Strain is impenetrably cold. But deep down, beneath the blizzard of noise and hiss, something's burning.

For all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close.

A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream--darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled--is a fine monument to the nation’s despair.

In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn.