It's one of her most captivating and immediate front-to-back statements of purpose as a singer.

On IRÉ, Combo Chimbita don’t just herald the coming of this future; they usher it into existence, note by electrifying note.

[Jarmusch] brings a rich history to the proceedings, experimenting with passerelle bridges, cigar box guitars, and radio static. Just as in his films, he spins strange yet strangely familiar stories from everyday stuff.

The warmth emanating from the lyrics flows throughout Nothing Lasts Forever. Teenage Fanclub never quickens the pace or belabors the melodies, choosing to luxuriate in their twilight grooves.

Most so-called "cinematic" records earn that distinction due to some quirk of reverb or their use of space, but the Long Blondes only have modern England's typically confined, 17-year-old-from-Doncaster guitar-dudish sound. Instead, it's the songs themselves, their narratives, and their characters that speak to the band's widescreen ambitions.

For all their reverence toward the past, Bitchin Bajas know how to live in the present--there’s no knowing distance here--so at its best, Bitchin Bajas doesn’t give you ideas about sounds, but the sounds themselves.

Occulting Disk is somehow mesmerizing and terrifying—motivational for those who need it, a nuisance to those who don’t want it.

With a more cohesive sound, some of the rhythmic quirks and time signature hops from their past output are smoothed out. On occasion, the music is so pristine that it’s easy to miss the evocative lyrics buried in the tightly wound grooves.

Magnificent City is lazy and inept, devoid of force and inspiration and chemistry.

Songs build and build and build and then die, gazing longingly at exhilarating emotional peaks just outside their reach.

It is slow, winding, and meditative, composed almost entirely of piano, bass, and drums, and builds outwards from minimal meanderings to overgrown thickets of instrumentation.

AWVFTS adapts, making ATOMOS louder and more mobile than its impeccably tentative predecessor—more volatile and disjointed, with basses you can feel in your body because this is for the body.

[Anderson and O'Malley] find a middle ground of compromise that steers safely away from the frisson of conflict. At least they sound good doing it.

The Internet’s songs have always felt like scenes of salaciousness happening just out of earshot. Ego Death finally pulls us into the maelstrom.

Layered and smeared and cut up into melodies, the vocals chant and enchant, and at times it’s difficult to tell what’s what. ... For a little over an hour, the past and future spin, dissolving in fields full of chatterboxes. It’s a world not unlike the present one.

On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.

With its accomplished fusion of debris and warmth in a place somewhere between b-boy head-nod and laptopper experimentalism, Los Angeles is a big step forward for a still-young career, an album well worth revisiting years from now--preferably on vinyl, where the pops and clicks can only multiply.

Every strength this record holds draws off the symbiotic relationship between Martin's beats and Robinson's voice, which adapt to each other in a way that the last two people in a barren environment might.

In both songs, and throughout Paradise, Slow Club display remarkable skill in tugging at heartstrings, but they do it without being particularly manipulative or overly saccharine.

Death Grips appeals to the knuckle-dragging troglodyte and the smirking smart kid in us: thick-headed goonery and bookish, viscera-free nerdiness, making beautifully misanthropic music together.

The works are raw and technically poor, but the bitterness and hatred they express is overwhelming, illustrating how base feeling, when expressed with such belief, can overcome any window dressing put up around it.

It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music.

He effortlessly squeezes so many ideas into its barely-there, four-minute frame, it's easy to wish he'd settle in and record an entire album of such quietly masterful pastoral mood-setting.

Over time, the album’s subtle ambition becomes impossible to miss.

On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

Not every intuition bears fruit, but more and more it is becoming clear that the iconoclastic rapper’s impulses are to be trusted.

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

At its best moments, the debut sounds like an A.V. club president's wet dream, unabashedly nerdy and technically proficient. Sadly though, the record is peppered with aesthetically dubious nu-rave moments, making LOTP sound less like sympathetic revenging nerds and more like party-crazed dude-bros who just happen to own synths.