New Moon is an exciting, challenging and rewarding listen.

Open Door Policy is the album longtime fans have been waiting for. The lyrics are there and the music is there.

The big takeaways from the equally big Semicircle are 1) the Go! Team are back and better than ever and 2) the Go! Team never really left.

This is the Hold Steady's guitar album, in a discography full of guitar albums. Crank it.

This album is much more interesting and engaging than Diaper, but just like with that album, the dancey, synth-heavy songs like Airplane's "TMNT Mask" are absent.

While this album isn’t what most people would consider rock, it definitely challenges the listener and succeeds at creating a world for the characters that occupy these songs and making the listener feel like they’re there for the experience themselves.

An infectious album of either punk influenced pop or pop influenced punk. Whatever the appropriate term for the music here is, it gets stuck in your head.

This time, they're much more versed and diversified, expanding their borders in terms of storytelling as well. Chris Loporto's vocals drive the record home, especially on slow melodic burns like "Quitting" and "Molly's Desk", which all pop with a loud bang at the end, signifying what Can't Swim are about.

All of this adds up to another winning album in a near-flawless discography.

Turn Out The Lights is a powerful listen, teaching you to live with your failures and fears, and to move from coping with them to actually loving them.

There’s an intelligence wrapped in the machinery here. This is cyborg music driven by metal fingers, but the human heart is still intact.

By combining the ragged, sloppy riffs of garage rock with the minor scales of death rock and darker music, the band create a haunting sound that also rocks the hell out.

Overall, Our Pleasure feels musically intricate on a new level--thicker basslines, much more pronounced drums and priding itself with a lot of guitar-driven character. It's them at their most distinct and honestly, most assertively powerful stance.

While the sound overall could be described as 80s jangle-pop, we’ve got hints of everything from early 70s Bowie and T Rex, to early-80s XTC to early-90s Vaselines and Beat Happening.

The record is an incredible release start to finish.

Intersections is colorful but not full of drivel or loquacious exposition. It isn't pretentious. It's just raw and fucking heartwarming. Grab it.

These are the songs that cut deep and cut slowly.

Seriously, these songs feel like Smashing Pumpkins demos--grainy, rough, atmospheric--like if they were made in a garage, and I think that's exactly what CN wanted to achieve. Rough, raw and rugged, but still jangly, catchy and head-poppy enough to leave you wanting more.

What matters though is that their catchy magic never dies down, rearranging all your emotions on the way and relating to you with the heartfelt comfort of a truly kindred spirit. III delivers just that, starting slowly but eventually snowballing into your soul with an indescribable fire.

IV is a worthy return that shows the Bronx still have those chops.

Over twenty-one years later the band has released Going Down in History that shows even if the band’s tongue in cheek send up of David Koesh and his followers isn’t culturally relevant, this band certainly still can be.

Die Knowing is not the record that tries to re-capture the past, but rather combine the best of everything Comeback Kid has previously done. Boy did they deliver.

While there are unmistakable comparisons to bands like PUP and The Dirty Nil abound, Precious Art rolls on to mesh together a lot of influences while still standing on its own, carving out an identity that's as distinct as it is loud and catchy.

It has enough experimentation in it to throw off fans of old, but Every Country's Sun is a Mogwai album at heart. It's just marching to a different drum. It jars you like the Beasts of No Nation soundtrack but leaves you, as the title implies and wants, much more hopeful.

There’s something to be said about the immediacy and the vitality of something as messy and as real as an album like White Stuff. Nothing about what this band is has diminished over time, and White Stuff is a roaring return to right where Royal Trux left off 19 years ago.

At 10 tracks, Savage Gold is lean enough not to wander, diverse enough not bore, and certainly heavy enough to smash skulls and pillage minds.

Science Fiction is one of their most real and most effective pieces of art. Mike Sapone's production was spot on again and the cover of those girls jumping from a balcony more or less sums up what you need to do with this. Close your eyes and jump right in.

She’s self aware and independent. She proves pop doesn’t have to be drab and, instead, can be thoughtful and boundary pushing. Art Angels exists for those who love pop but even more so for those who actively avoid it.