Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it--a little like the ambient revival itself.

Shilonosova’s corner of Moscow is bubbly and fantastical--a place where you want to live and explore every nook and cranny.

While Ovlov are still as wonderfully wooly ever, they’re unleashing the noise in more purposeful, sculpted spurts and displaying a greater willingness to let their melodies sparkle through the clouds of distortion.

This egalitarian spirit and anti-hierarchical approach to song-making fuel the sleekest, most robust music of their career.

The album yielded a substantial return on whatever that audience invested. But Wild Pink ultimately came across like a conversation Ross preferred to keep to himself. Yolk in the Fur can’t wait to share it.

Forever requires sieving through plates of glinting sediment before discovering treasure. The album is best when luxuriating in its own divine intensity, when an earnest Popcaan reconciles the hunger of his past with the feasting of his present, hands clasped in grace.

Sure, fans who swear by Skeletonwitch’s early work might take a while to warm up to anthems like “Temple of the Sun,” a tightly constructed barnstormer in which the band dares to toss clean-sung vocal harmonies into the mix, or “The Vault,” a Pallbearer-esque doom experiment that grows more blackened with each wailing note until its entire soundscape is torched to a crisp. And yet, even when their creative lodestar shifts its orbit, the Ohioans’ cornerstones remain intact: their virtuosic riffs, their robust production (once again courtesy of Converge guitarist and board wizard Kurt Ballou), their endearingly adversarial presence on-record--and, most of all, their diabolical joie de vivre.

Joy is an album to be combed through and prodded. It’s a testament to their shorthand with each other, which somehow ties all the fraying, crusty, silken, wiener dog, kitty cat threads so seamlessly together.

How Many Times is an intriguing glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a skillfully carved path--even if it leaves you wondering what it was that made her cry in public in the first place, what makes her tears dry.

The real feat of Cloud Corner is how well Anderson has learned to fuse the musical traditions she favors without drawing attention to the juxtaposition itself.

Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance.

Raw Silk Uncut Wood marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic compositions, but as her most ambient record to date, it also boasts some of her most unabashedly beautiful music.

It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018--an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way.

JP3 might sacrifice some of Junglepussy’s previously hedonistic splendor for poppier hooks and mellower vibes, but it also introduces us to a happier, more mature woman.

The result is a thoroughly dazed album that conjures a daydream so immersive (if not always so idyllic), it precludes any intrusive thoughts. The instrumentation on Sundays feels sun-baked and toasty in its fuzzy beach towel of distortion.

On paper, the decision to mix the raw invention their early work with the melodic catharsis of jazz and gospel sounds fascinating, while Closer Apart’s weirdly gorgeous companion video makes a case for Okzharp & Manthe Ribane as an enthralling visual act. But the album itself feels frustratingly limp, making you wish Okzharp & Ribane had stayed true to the kinetic force that lit up their EPs.

The beauty of Death Lust lies in how Williams makes them all sound like part of the same continuum of disaffection, and how he approaches each mode with a pop songwriter’s ear for concision. Chastity's debut full-length is a brief album, with 10 songs clocking in at 31 minutes total, but the terrain it covers is vast.

On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them.

While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list.

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

If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.

You can start to see trajectory to Container’s LPs after this fourth edition, though the changes are deceptively subtle considering how unruly any specific release is. What’s never changed (and likely the reason the series remains so consistent) is simply how much fun Schofield makes all this mayhem sound.

Gordon’s most impassioned singing on the album helps here, too, but it’s the pair’s frame accuracy that makes the track so dramatic. The results are far from predictable, but they serve as further proof that Body/Head are fully in control.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

Ultimately, while this crowdedness [from guest appearances] prevents Supreme Blientele from feeling like a definitive statement from Gunn as a rapper, the album can still function as a fine entry point to the fast-growing catalog of an ascendant rap cult hero.

Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.

If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.

Uniform Distortion abounds with displays of James’ fiery fretwork, but he rarely wields his other signature weapon--that angelic croon that trembles with vulnerability yet can soar high enough to rattle satellites. In the fleeting moments when it does surface, the effect is doubly stunning.