Gas Lit’s intent is so immediate, it communicates its significance regardless. Its statement is not just one you can hear or read about. More importantly, it’s one you can feel.

The line between progression and self-indulgence in music is largely a flimsy one. However, The Phoenix Foundation walk it beautifully.

This is yet another different side we’re seeing, but it’s no less special.

6LACK isn't doing anything new. But he is doing it better than everyone else. With East Atlanta Love Letter, the artist has trumped his opponents and influences with a fragile grace and solid talent for songwriting, echoing that of our most decorated balladeers.

It tells more of a story than rolling news coverage ever could, and for that The End of Silence is as close as I’d ever want to get to real conflict.

KIN is the uncommon soundtrack that doesn’t require any context other than its own to command more than passive attention.

A Fistful Of Peaches is a refreshingly honest offering from the indie rock scene, and Black Honey make for the perfect couriers.

early twenties presents Burns as a talented singer with a distinct lyrical focus.

A Corpse Wired for Sound is still distinctively a Merchandise album, even though it’s a relative departure from their previous work. It definitely sounds a lot lonelier than its predecessors, though, as if Merchandise have become isolated by their own intelligence.

Songs For You is triumphant; those unexpected pivots more often than not being pulled off with an addictive energy. For those that had given up hope, Songs For You is a sign that you should never count Tinashe out just yet. Now fully back in control, her only way is up.

There's no hidden agenda here, the intention is to make as much noise as quickly as possible, and it sure does that, there's no deviation, no clever studio trickery, just in your face ear affrontery. It's a shattering, but ultimately thrilling listen.

Dancefloor-friendly pop music, but of a variety that remains intoxicatingly unmoored to the conventions and codes of the earthly realm.

Wye Oak’s forward-thinking approach proves they’re miles ahead of their peers in more ways than one, and if they can keep on moving, things are likely to stay that way for some time.

The result is a collection of songs that can speak to and through anyone who hears them.

It is flawed--a few too many diversions and distractions, and one or two experiments that don’t really work--but the best thing about Monkey Mind In The Devil’s Mind is the simple way it frequently reminds you how good a songwriter Mason is.

Though very few of the songs themselves outstay their welcome, Tomorrow’s Harvest as a whole can feel overly long, and it’s the short songs that are the problem--they feel like unnecessary padding in a record whose triumphs should have been allowed to stand tall and proud by themselves.

Opening with “I lie awake at night cos I listened to a guy theorise about the rise of the Reich” and closing in sweeping falsetto "They don't believe, I can't breathe / All they see, is the skin I'm in / If All Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter,” this and everything in between is passionately despairing, explicitly delivered with emotional rawness.

Shaw ultimately takes comfort in the idea that Joe is both an inspiration and a guiding presence for this new music resulting in the band's most creative-sounding and personal release to date.

It’s a record that showcases professionalism and musicianship, a sonic rhizome of musical references and genealogies.

Many bands would be overjoyed to have accomplished an album as solidly satisfying as this collection of offcuts. Where the vault-clearing exercise of Cutouts leaves The Smile is unclear, however.

Choruses are plentiful, tactile songwriting makes for a spectacularly fun listen.

Whether conjuring aurora borealis through music, “Sound & Light", or crafting pop bangers from vulnerability, she proves that reinvention, when it’s honest, doesn’t need spectacle to dazzle. Think of Flux as an elegant evolution. She’s still dancing, but this time with her heart closer to the surface.

Ocean to Ocean ends up being Amos’s best album in recent memory for the way it manages to combine the strengths of her early music while incorporating newfound restraint and perspective.

While it may not be as charmingly naïve as he claims, L’Aventura is an unexpected transformation of the classic Tellier formula: pure electro-madness and bearded sex-appeal.

Happily, this new start feels fresh. HEAVY JELLY could be the ravishing debut from some doe-eyed newcomers with the visceral energy they’re touting this time around, except therein lies a hardened exterior.

Brief as it may be, Frozen Letter covers a lot of ground for Spider Bags--it has them gleefully offering us tasty kibbles of what they’ve always excelled at while also boldly paving themselves a new path forward.

Crimes of Passion is a stellar fourth effort and may prove to be the defining record in what surely will be a long career ahead for the Crocodiles.

Similar to Charli xcx, Smerz’ downtempo songs might be more revealing than their anthems. T