It’s that vital connection between Lorde’s present-day ruminations and the uncanny way her music hits on such a fundamental level with all that dirty, romanticized nostalgia that makes Pure Heroine such a success beyond "Royals'" ostensible aim of looking down its nose at the Miley Cyruses and Taylor Swifts of the world.

So once more, the Dodos feel fresh, a little bit more thoughtful, and every bit as happy to get us tangled up in ourselves. Of course there's color to No Color. It's just this time there's black and white and grey as well- colors they've never used before.

Mainstream baiting notwithstanding, With Light & With Love is the best Woods record yet, a tinkering of the charmingly sincere folksiness of Bend Beyond into something even more muscular and full-bodied.

The Most Lamentable Tragedy is the product of one of the best punk bands of our time making music in their prime, and when you factor in the level of ambition present, you’re left with a rock opera for the ages.

It’s a consistently, gorgeously understated record.

AFI’s latest offering is a good one, but also one that seems to hint at a promise that it never quite fulfills.

All in all, An Imaginary Country is probably Tim Hecker's most accessible album. In a way, the record bridges together the elements heard on previous albums, only without regurgitating old ideas.

What a pleasure to have a songwriter and singer of this calibre making albums like this, with seemingly limitless texture to dig into and infinite potential meaning for every listener. Just so long as they give it the time.

Accelerate’s songs are generally well-constructed, almost to the point of being formulaic- eleven alternative pop songs with no excess fat around the edges.

I’m sure, at a certain time (or high), these songs work more than they let on; they’re risks that seek rewards. Credit No Age for making Nouns still pretty great.

is is (yikes) a low-stakes and contented release, quite enjoyable for what it is and wholly inessential.

Astro Coast sounds like an honest representation of four gifted songwriters writing what they know and how they know it. What they know is a refreshing change of pace for the indie rock narrative.

For anyone interested in the world of contemporary analog synthesizer music, Ishi should be a welcome addition to any collection.

There’s a lot to unwrap lyrically and thematically on Show Pony. It offers a layer of depth that simply doesn’t exist in certain pockets of country music, and brings all of this to the table while stretching the genre’s sonic boundaries.

This is an album for coffee and rainy Sunday mornings. For driving your kids to the park on an unseasonably warm February afternoon. For unwinding at the end of the night with a glass of red wine. The older I’ve gotten, the more I’ve found beauty within rare moments of calm. Hen’s Teeth is an album that matches that mood, and perhaps you can chalk it up to a personal aligning of the stars, but right now it’s everything I need.

This album's initial impact and discog-relative quality may be nothing short of a wonder, but it only takes a few songs for all-too-familiar snags to make themselves felt. Though the mix places him appropriately low, Corgan is still one of the worst singers in all rock music.

Grandaddy’s latest feels slightly remote but wholeheartedly nostalgic, the synthesis of deeply personal loneliness and some kind of cosmic greater meaning, and all three of my theories seem perfectly suitable. Weary but still imbued with plenty of heart, Blu Wav is all you can ask for as the return of Jason Lytle’s long-running indie project.

It’s not the worst approach they could have taken, but again, there’s nothing super about adhering to the virtues of pop – and in turn, Bonny Light Horseman is a marginally decent record; nothing more.

2011’s Prologue was a high water mark that The Milk Carton Kids struggled to match throughout their discography – a classic case of peaking early. However, fifteen years later, I can safely say that they’ve finally eclipsed it.

In reinventing and giving a modern twist to timeless but overlooked folk gems, Sam Amidon has concocted something entirely unique that nobody else could, or arguably ever would, have done...in itself, a form of inspired creation. There’s an undeniable magic to this thing. I highly encourage you to check your reservations at the door and dive in.

Take Care is equal parts dick-waving egoism, emotional wreckage, and mature understanding.

What it lacks in punch it makes up for in being a more focused effort than its occasionally mixtape-esque brother, and thus, Oxymoron isn’t so much a backpedal for Q and TDE as it is a solid side-step.

Wasting Light isn't a masterpiece, nor does it see Grohl really reinventing the wheel as far as the band's sound goes, but it's clearly painted from a broader pallette of colours and it's clearly their first consistently good set of songs.

Synthetic synapses spark and crackle via the Boston 5-piece’s revered fusion of nu-metal revivalism and modern mathcore shenanigans, each track adding another glorious jerking movement to their macabre, digital death rattle.

A Kiss For the Whole World remains eminently-listenable low-calorie fun despite its intermittent slip ups.

To Drink From the Night Itself returns to the peak of At The Gates’ creative side by delving into a more moody, nuanced and diverse set of songs that shares more in common with their first few releases than the one everybody seems to remember. In the process, they very well may have released the best album in their history.

This record does nothing to convince Kurt Vile skeptics to jump on the bandwagon, but for the already-converted it will also do nothing to drive them away. Indeed, this is certainly one of the singer-songwriter’s stronger efforts, even coming eight LPs into his solo career.

The bloat of Transcendence seems to be a problem inherent to post-2011 DTP, and appears to be symptomatic of a group trying to deviate around a winning formula of the past rather than one keen on developing the innovation they were built to achieve.