The consistency of Wilderness' eleven songs is almost overwhelming.

The result is oddly refreshing: an artsy, accomplished band turning their second album of the year into a pulpy slasher flick.

His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory.

She has prepared her whole life for the opportunity to challenge the coastal elites for a seat at rap’s table, and Fever is her folding chair.

Let It All In feels lived-in and newly cut from his core.

Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim.

When it really hits, as it often does here, the music of Grouper creates a feeling that can only be defined as awe, an uncanny mixture of wonder and dread that nobody does better.

This album sounds best in the context of the Hiss Golden Messenger catalog--as a comment on and a celebration of the spiritual and creative toil on the previous albums.

Though they'd likely be the first to tell you how much they still have to learn, Cervantine's ravishing exploration of sound is another step towards mastery.

Music Sounds Better With You is a mash note to a wide range of indie-pop-- alternately buzzy, peppy, shy, melodramatic, and grandly sweeping.

Appropriately named, Movement feels like a progression and challenge from one of the year's most exciting new voices, producers, and composers.

Louder, faster, fiercer than their 2019 LP Itekoma Hits, the 20-minute, 18-track Super Champon goes down like a tart smattering of face-scrunching, neon candy.

For the most part, Protect Your Light takes a more patient and self-reflective approach, vibrating on a different frequency. It’s the act of refilling one’s vessel in song form.

Her sophomore effort, I Speak Because I Can, finds Marling, still only 20, shrugging off virtually all traces of girlishness and wide-eyed charm, instead delving into darkly elemental, frequently morbid folk. And yet, astonishingly, the expected growing pains never come.

As a solo record, it's no declaration of independence, but by sticking to what he does best, Staples makes it ring with sadness and sophistication.

Overall Still in a Dream is a job well done: an accurate portrait of an era that, while it can’t really be described as a lost golden age for rock, nonetheless provided sorely needed radiance and refuge during a particularly grim period.

It’s the kind of record that would be called “triumphant” if Boucher was in a position to enjoy any of it.

Although Moms is the result of its two creators' putting themselves through the wringer, it never feels overshadowed by dread.

Hinton has an ability, not unlike the Books when they first hit the scene 14 years ago, of making shopworn techniques in sound manipulations seem strangely fresh, and Potential is the kind of music that makes you think about what your own part in a seemingly passive musical transaction of music might mean.

Strange Keys is generally relentless and tremendous, burying its themes in kaleidoscopic distortion. It's as if the comparisons that Bower has earned in the last seven years--Merzbow, Wagner, second wave black metal--finally took magnificent hold.

i am > i was shatters the notion of 21 Savage as a specialist with a narrow purview and audience, and recasts him as a star in waiting, all without forcing him into unflattering contortions. It also cements him as a far more original stylist than other hopefuls from Atlanta.

Humble Quest lives up to its name: 11 lithe songs about love, work, and family, some great, some good, with a coherence and clarity that make it feel matter-of-factly masterful.

In his raps, Jay Rock can come off as a reclusive hard-liner with a remarkable storyteller’s acumen and an internal logic that always feels sound. Few gangsta rappers are better at illustrating just how limited their options were and how undaunted they had to be to overcome them.

Scott fully inhabits her loudest moments by inching towards post-rock and synth-rock.

Campbell's vocals sound breathless on the radio show, as she displays little vocal control, gasping for air between words and syllables. Despite that, it's still a worthy artifact.

Monomania is certainly a strong effort on its own merits, and more importantly, they’ve avoided making their deflating “diminishing returns” record.

Make no mistake, the record is extremely endearing and flawlessly constructed-- it's just hard to love an album that has a dazzling surface and not much underneath.

The Private Press is more solid an album than anyone dared expect from an older, wiser DJ Shadow, and though it won't be televising another revolution, I'd be lying if I said its celebratory pleasure centers didn't communicate directly with my own.