While the palette of sounds Boy Harsher plays with on Careful can seem limited--brisk drum machine loops, oscillating synths, and Matthews’ haunting incantations--the group finds ways to make each song sound distinct.

Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise--sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.

Spielbergs don’t deal in complex subjects, and they sing plainly enough that any hook heard on the first chorus can be joined on the second.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

These 11 songs have the overstuffed quality of roomy indie pop that can easily play in the background of an iPad commercial or happy hour at a hip bar. But peek inside: Beneath all the niceties, there’s an orb of heartbreak deep enough to pump blood into your blues.

Condon’s constant obsession with anachronism occasionally yields lovely, even compelling results. Other times, listening to his music feels like talking to friends from high school you’ve lost touch with. There’s good stuff here, but ultimately, it’s hard to be excited about something that feels so seriously entrenched in the past.

It exists in a cloud of gloom that consumes the album. And yet, there’s something endearing about Boogie’s honesty, his commitment to the established mood, and his charming vocals to go along with his rap abilities.

Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, the record takes up more space than any of Girlpool’s previous music.

They’ve made a record that captures the tumult of feeling displaced, without abandoning the hyped-up spirit that made them such a spectacle during their party-animal days.

Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.

Oliver Appropriate, with its clap-along drumming patterns and stripped-back production, sounds like an elder statesman of emo gathering his fellow washed up frontmen around a campfire for a story or two. It’s a fitting ending for a band that always stood a step or two outside the scene, pointing and laughing.

Goes West feels less conceptually united than any of his work—more inspired by the contemplation of history than history itself--but this searching quality adds to its honest, meditative power. Many of the songs feel like visions left intentionally ambiguous, and the record is bound by a pensive, permeating calmness.

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

As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.

The Unseen in Between may be his most stationary album, with as many songs about being somewhere as getting somewhere.

Better Oblivion is a collection of quiet, wandering thoughts: the sound of twin souls burrowing deeper into their common ground.

Lynch can be heard loud and (sometimes) clear here, floating among ideas that he finally allows to breathe. Despite the traces of anxiety written into the lines he sings, it’s a welcome respite when so much else has turned to smog.

At 33 minutes, Power Chords is about twice as long as the typical Mike Krol record, but it’s also his tightest and most frenzied work yet.

The production is muted, minor-key, and consistently beautiful, conjuring the familiar Future Moods: rain-streaked neon signs, drug-induced stupors inside of clubs at 3 a.m. If you are content to live inside this lonely little world Future has made, he is still keeping it nice for you. What you won’t find on The WIZRD is the sound of Future stretching or surprising himself.

A deep, abiding melancholy runs beneath the record’s house-party vibe. Bear’s cool sigh frequently sounds like the aural approximation of bedhead, his vowels tousled, his consonants shying away from the light.

Bazan sings better than he ever has on Phoenix, his voice round and worn with intricacy from years of use, like a hiking stick toted in the same hand for a thousand miles.

Despite the album’s dark, damp, sepulchral title, light manifests numerous times on Tomb. In the dizzying chime of his careful fingerpicking and high-pitched howls, De Augustine captures love’s bright blaze.

With its 34-minute runtime, its cartoon cover art, and the pervading levity of Tobacco’s beats, Malibu Ken may seem at first like a minor work. But there’s nothing diminutive about a record this sharply written. It’s a side project every bit as substantial as Aesop Rock’s proper albums. That it also happens to be more fun than most of them is a bonus.

At its best, Love Hates What You Become rattles with perfect intensity. Roberts’ sawtooth snarl is commanding, while John Congleton’s production is hyper-attentive to shifting moods, pulling back to sparse piano or pushing into total distortion as needed.

While often precious, it’s never bad or incompetent, but there’s a frustrating sense of bets being hedged, particularly once the more ambitious production gives way to mildly anguished stadium boom towards the end.

Assume Form is aggressively pastel and suffocatingly serious. He has lost the playful sense of surprise that guided his falsetto’s agile twists and turns on his debut.

The production here snaps with the clarity and force of stadium-sized headbangers while maintaining the intimacy of Buke and Gase’s earlier work.