Cold Spring is miles from epic or strained, and it's comfortable with its imbalance.

Holiday Destination is compellingly bleak, but Shah’s defiance and willingness connect the dots to make it hopeful.

Fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

It’s a raw performance and a gleaming example of the album’s ethos: There’s no element Shamir isn’t willing to try on. By collapsing genre boundaries and molding them into his own homespun image, he’s made an unconventional pop album entirely on his own terms.

Nursing wounds while simultaneously trying to put her problems to scale, Tudzin writes unpretentious songs that aim straight for the heart (“I Would Like, Still Love You,” “You Are Not Who You Were”) like the enduring hits of So Jealous.

As referential as Free To Eat can be on its own, there are times when a band notes an influence that completely changes your perception of it.

Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.

Fenced in by the demands of the film, Fussell and Elkington make modesty both a virtue and shortcoming.

n its refusal to adhere to a particular theme or sound, Paris in the Spring comes across as a little diffuse, but when everything locks in, the results are transcendent.

These songs are bright and bold, and although they essentially iterate on the misty dream pop of her previous album, 2023’s & the Charm, the difference feels stark when you return to that album; it sounds positively miniscule in comparison.

Even if you don’t track all the references, Sleaford Mods’ sense of fatigued resignation resonates. UK GRIM is their most varied album to date, but they don’t want to dull the shitstorm’s stench—they’re just here to blow off the steam.

There's power in pauses, silence, and empty space, these songs affirm, and small doesn't have to mean slight.

Screaming Females’ entire existence has been a rare testament to consistency and, despite being five years in the making and inspired by a devastating breakup, Desire Pathway can’t help but be their most consistent album yet.

They’re always the butt of their own jokes, which makes them good company for a late night but also makes these songs hit a little harder the next morning.

Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Liars and Prayers' success is owed as much to the band as its leader, but in the end, there's still no doubt about who's working on whose watch.

I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.

What LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit.

Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way.

None of the tracks are more noteworthy than anything on Sing "Other People", Angels' latest and straightest LP, and the foreshortened format disables development. But Gira's fatherly measuredness is a nice foil to Akron's hyperkinetic mini-opera.

Civilian opens with the sound of ambient chatter, a room full of voices quickly washed away by steeled guitar and electronics. It's a shift at odds with the polar dynamics this Baltimore-based duo has sworn by in its half-decade career.

Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.

Amelia flits briskly from scene to scene, with just enough musical backing to flesh out the atmosphere: shimmering oceanic drones; subtly driving pulses; dissonant whorls abruptly smoothed into reassuring consonance.

Herbert has outdone himself when it comes to his usual conceptual three-ring circus. But, crucially, this time he's put all that theoretical effort into his most memorable songs.

Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one.

Too many shards of ideas are shoved into the long songs, and Fickeisen’s flash sometimes borders on showmanship, a glaring incongruity for a spartan outfit like Trap Them.

If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful.