This is a darker, more direct take from a band that sees in pop music a place to distill their ideas.

If a person asks how to get into Slowdive, the correct answer is still to start with Souvlaki but Slowdive wouldn’t be a bad second choice.

Compton is an exceptional, big-budget rap album up-and-down.... Although fat definitely needed to be trimmed from this animal, it’s humbling to know Dre hasn’t let his ego get the best of him musically.

Every song has key x-factors that transform already solid works into longer-lasting excitement.

The result is a record that’s concerned about faith, death, and the metaphysical. It’s heady stuff but grounded with vignettes of everyday activities--a beautiful, comforting second work from the singer.

By challenging their audience in such starkly interpersonal terms, Savages have pulled off an even more impressive trick. On Silence Yourself, they were shouting a rallying cry from the rooftops; on Adore Life, they’re shouting a foot away from your face.

Only when you dive in does the beauty reveal itself. Grizzly Bear have never been afraid to expect something of the listener. That’s never been truer than on Painted Ruins.

It’s as good an album by a Rostam-less Vampire Weekend in 2019 as we could have possibly gotten, and the sound is a return to Vampire Weekend and Contra except arguably better with the ‘upgraded’ production and thoughtful textures. The change from indie to mainstream in the tiniest of microcosms: a Vampire Weekend album.

The about-faces make for an engaging, challenging listen, but by the end it all seems a bit vague.

Overgrown is not the enigma that was his debut, but rather it is a first-rate album from a musician that isn’t all that interested in being enigmatic.

Savages’ smart reorganization and shuffling of punk, post-punk, krautrock, and noise music into something brutal, jarringly confrontational, and completely singular is a breath of fresh air and an unignorable statement of power and resistance.

This is rhythmically agile music, thankfully. The songwriting is sturdy, too, even if it can sometimes feel like Bradford & friends are running on an autopilot setting set to David Bowie’s Low.

With Wakin On A Pretty Daze, Vile has added another seemingly effortless 70 minutes’ worth of straightforward, easygoing golden tones to his consistent discography.

Hot Thoughts is another top tier indie rock record from the most consistent band in the game.

For anyone who can appreciate emotional breadth that music is capable of conveying, make Wild Light a part of your life. It may be the best instrumental album you hear this year.

As it turns out, the Philly collective clean up quite nicely, and Sea When Absent is an involving, wonderfully creative mess.

Blank Project never aims for luxuriance. Neneh Cherry instead undertakes-- and nails--a riskier feat: a reflection on midlife that sounds both wise and inventive.

Deerhunter have returned to tasteful pop-shoegaze mode and made their mellowest, most lyric-driven, most calculated... and, err, most cheesiest album. Best Beach House record of 2015!

The vast majority of The Next Day is vibrant, even delirious, roaring with Bowie’s heaviest rockers and teeming with guitar hooks that just beg to be lovingly re-appropriated by James Murphy.

The inventive production and songwriting transform result in monolithic, almost sculptural works that rarely make more than half-hearted gestures to anything specific outside themselves.

They’ve evolved certain factors of their sound and ventured into new territory, but AM is not so much a change of direction as it is an affirmation of all the musical elements that made the band exhilarating to begin with--inspired lyrics, screeching riffs and great melodies.

Fanned by an intelligent approach to production, Disclosure’s fire has started to burn, and is destined to whip itself into an inferno this year.

There’s an unforeseen clarity in his compositions and vocals.

To fully enjoy Bonito Graduation, view it through its own inquisitive outlook, and to not be daunted by the fact some of it won’t be understandable to you.

Morning Phase never sounds anything less than opulent.

RR7349 proves that Stranger Things was no fluke. Survive are clearly still in the process of perfecting their “analog equipment meets digital-age songwriting” sound, but for the first time in their career, I think they’ve come close to achieving that perfect harmony.

They Want My Soul is the sort of mid-career album promising young bands should aspire to, and long-established acts will come to resent.

AZD is a slim, sparse electronica record. For all its high and low frequencies, it leaves much of the human audible range empty, space to imagine.