On In Amber, Butler may have found a handful more peaks and his share of valleys, but few can emerge from the shadow of what came before.

The collision between acoustic instrumentation and crackerjack production makes for a lush and widescreen experience.

While he’s rarely shied away from humor, on his new album DEATHFAME, he balances broad comedy with pointed satire, providing direct political address with a looseness that keeps it all from sounding like mere cant.

Halvorson is an inventive and generous arranger, organizing Amaryllis in such a way that it never feels like a mere vehicle for dazzling solos, though there are plenty of those. She has a painterly approach to sonority, attuned to all the rich colors at the ensemble’s disposal.

Belladonna removes the buttress of Amaryllis’s horns and rhythm section. At times, the guitar and string quartet move like a single amorphous organism, untethered from any particular pulse. At others, one voice will offer a steady ostinato as a home base for the others to wander away from and return to at will.

True to its title, Magic Pony Ride embraces Paradinas’ sugary side. Synths froth and squeak. Kitschy piano riffs ascend to euphoric heights. ... The lower end of these mixes feels less inspired.

Full of baloney The Versions isn’t. But its muted—and sometimes rather predictable—approach only occasionally gets close to capturing the erratic wonder of Neneh Cherry in full flight.

While tracks like “Credence (Ash in the Winds of Reason)” and “Syndicate II” fit snugly into the band’s previous guitar-driven repertoire (not to mention this current era of peak post-punk), Deliluh are the rare band that can summon the menacing propulsion and imagistic density of the Fall without resorting to Mark E. Smith pantomime-uh.

Two years after WOMB, the graves EP is firmly rooted in the same subtle reconfiguration that comes with each new Purity Ring release. Some songs even sound outright regressive, which isn’t always bad.

The run of “Milkweed,” “Detritivore,” and “Aqaba” is quintessential Shearwater in both their titles and the tendency to let the middle of their albums coast by like a warm, welcome breeze.

This is the Joyce Manor album for Joyce Manor fans—a loving, uncynical refinement of the band’s best.

You Can’t Kill Me is at its best when it offers surprising, welcome wrinkles to Shake’s sound.

These 11 songs may be meant to chronicle a pointedly personal inner voyage, yet he’s wound up with a warm, collaborative record that feels like a balm for fear and loneliness.

Twelve Carat Toothache, is accordingly slick, streamlined, and a little less vulgar and ostentatious than his earlier work—a sign that Malone is taking himself more seriously, for better or worse.

Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.

Like Scott-Heron’s last classic, This Is Brian Jackson is a salient reminder that great artists, no matter where they are on their journey, can rediscover themselves.

On Nothing to Declare, DJ Haram challenges Moor Mother with more biting beats, and the rapper responds with a looseness that’s new to her music. Her prophetic delivery retains all its spoken-word eloquence, and she peppers her lyrics with incisive history lessons that highlight America and Europe’s historical pillaging of Black culture. The music is anchored by a mix of frenetic goblet drums and machine percussion, swollen bass, and gristly streaks of noise.

Poliça now appear in search of a middle ground that combines their visceral songwriting with Madness’ inventive textures. At their best, these songs offer hints of that forward trajectory.

For now, Horsegirl aren’t so much carrying the torch as they are keeping the pilot light lit, low and steady.

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.

Not particularly easy work. But with Big Time—her clearest and most radiant music—Olsen set out to more deliberately foreground the virtue of ease.

Apart from some missteps—like the excruciating Finneas-produced “i still say goodnight”—i used to think i could fly soars with confidence, a record that remains absolutely sure of itself even as McRae’s emotions vacillate between bravado and self-immolation.

Raw Data Feel might be the most confident album Everything Everything have ever released, but in a way that feels deeply hubristic. If this album were a person, it’d be that pompous, motormouthed philosophy undergraduate who treats seminars like extended soliloquies.

Though Say Sue Me have narrowed their focus, their reverence for the indie-rock lexicon remains broad. ... Some of the styles they play with highlight their strengths more effectively than others.

What we’re left with is a great-sounding Matmos album constructed from bits of Schaeffer’s work. You probably won’t come away knowing much more about either the duo or the composer than you did before, but if it gets stoners curious enough to hit up their local electroacoustic festival, it’s a win all around.

On Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing.

Vocals play a prominent role in roughly half of the album’s songs, and while they sometimes work—UK trans activist Kai-Isaiah Jamal’s spoken-word poetry cuts powerfully through the moody “Human Sound”—they sometimes feel like Throssell is straining slightly for gravitas, pasting emotion on top of tracks that communicate plenty of it on their own.

As lovely as they often are, the songs seem to drift and float, and Cruel Country plays less like a sculpted double album than a vividly detailed snapshot of a particular moment in time.