The band subvert the expectation by leaning heavier into their complexities to make Endure a triumph. It’s not so much a left turn as it is an evolution in sound, one that manages to cover more territory than their last album – and deliver their message in a way that is both more urgent and more approachable.

She has found a way to go beyond merely soothing; she nourishes her soul with each word uttered, building herself up into the titular Protector. This is the sound of her new day dawning, and it’s a wonder to behold.

It remains a frustrating record, though, since it does show Tegan and Sara attempting to pull away, ever so slightly, from the sickeningly shiny days of “Closer”, but they get in their own way in their efforts to be edgy or forward-thinking.

They’re churning away in a place that sounds comfortable to them, and not outdoing themselves or any expectations of them at this point in their career. In other words, no big changes – but you would never expect that of them.

Junior Boys’ track record shows that change is good, but here it feels like the tiptoe before a more significant step.

Dirt Femme is a pop record and the compositions can be a little too close to something you’ve heard before. ... When she finds the right direction though, Tove Lo earns her place in the canon of the great Swedish pop song craftsmen.

It’s a shame there are a couple of tracks here that don’t quite meet the quality of the rest. ... Where The Loneliest Time works best is in its ability to provide sheer, plain honest fun.

It’s a new Loaf album, with varied rock gems that will fit snugly into live setlists and even get those old fans to sing along. It’s one of those rare reunion albums that satisfies a need, even if it doesn’t land as hard as some may have hoped.

For an outsider, it is best approached without expectations, as Ambarchi has no intention to conform to them. Long-time followers of his work, however, will find the label of ‘workout’ very appropriate, as he flexes the creative muscles which have allowed him to create so many long-winded symphonies in the past.

If The Car is any automobile in particular, it’s a Ferrari or Lamborghini; you might watch it pass for a moment, admiring its sleek curves, shimmering façade and purring engine, but you won’t care much about the driver – and once it’s out of view, it probably won’t be long before it fades from memory.

It’s clear that every listener will read Midnights in their own way – the record is simply too rich to function as background soundtrack. It’s a blistering experience that demands commitment, concentration and deep engagement – it’s an artist banishing their demons.

It would be easy to say the album is carried by the collabs or FaltyDL, but that would be a lie. Mykki’s imprint is just as strong and powerful. Lyrics about spirituality or black queer politics add to the depth and joy of the record.

While New Long Leg basked in a chic trendiness, Stumpwork more soberly conjures the spectrum of 21st century life: our endless search for identity, our egoic highs and crashes, the ineluctable tedium.

ILYSM captures its maker’s emotional state urgently and obtusely. Though sonically more subdued than other recent Wild Pink material (like the celestial alt-country stunner “Florida”), the transitions between the songs are often brisk and quite abrasive. They manifest like cracks formed inside a glass sculpture right before collapse.

As fleeting an experience as this is, it’s still emotionally moving and deeply affecting. Within its ambition, and for those who are open to its fainting beauty, it contains entire worlds.

It’s a tender, chaotic, and messy experience that feels all the more natural because of Open Mike Eagle’s transparency with his audience. This is Eagle at his most directionless, and for the time being that’s exactly what we needed to hear from him, because that’s how many of us are feeling too.

These are warm, lived-in songs, the sort that feel instantly classic, becoming canon without ever feeling like they’re trying all that hard to.

YTILAER finds Callahan at his most personally enigmatic, taking inspiration from his own life and filtering those experiences through a prism of modern folktales. He offers us all the most enticing details but manages to keep it wonderfully vague at the same time, a treasure trove of musical obscurantism.

Rolling Golden Holy exudes a communal, back-to-basics charm. The threesome operate within an eternal country-folk formula of less-is-more that fosters a sense of instant familiarity.

Fossora is an incredible and vulnerable project that refuses any easy categorisation. Björk’s dives into sonic obfuscation have never once eclipsed her refusal to be anything except open-hearted and honest. Her power is in how she allows herself to feel and let these emotions guide her artistic expression.

At times, the measured approach he takes on some songs falls short of supplying the momentum needed for each part to hit in the exact way he wanted, but for the most part, Sheff creates a landscape of gentle dynamics that grow until they release their stored energy through unexpected eruptions of kinetic movement.

With Nymph, Shygirl brings another original voice in the mix; good luck hearing a record that portrays sex in similarly tactile, authentic and effortlessly cool fashion.

Produced by Sam Evian, Loose Future is brighter and more buoyant than Andrews’ prior output, the Arizona-born artist displaying her well-honed songwriting and impressive vocal skills while adopting a pop-adherent sound.

A honed songwriting approach from Rankin seems to fuel Blue Rev, with only a few songs inching beyond three minutes. This excess-trimming approach makes Blue Rev the leanest the band has sounded, but also makes it their tightest work to date.

She’s a painter of sound, of mood. And one feels after listening to this document of searching textures, yearning melodies, and newfound sonic intimacy, that she’s only getting started.

One of their boldest statements yet — Cool It Down has everything one would need in a rock record in this day and age, and it’s the most complete version of the band we’ve ever received.

The Bible is undoubtably one of Lambchop’s most mature records, but it is also one of their most honest, most unguarded in its emotional and historical perspectives.

With bops and tearjerkers aplenty, Rina’s sincerity in how she confronts her past demons cannot help but warm even the iciest heart.

Exister succeeds at painting a portrait of his despair in charcoal. Unfortunately, as a piece of music to consume it’s just too choppy and incoherent to elicit a feeling. In the end it’s a risky exploitation of his frail psyche, a destination already travelled to and not worth revisiting all that often.

God Save the Animals’ production approaches are understated compared to those employed in previous work yet still precisely rendered. What stand out – prominently and unabashedly – are Alex’s impeccably crafted and irresistibly delivered songs.

In an era that occasionally feels oversaturated with hyper-pop, demon time is never too frenetic for its own good. It’s short, but these songs groove.

This is a record that feels whole and woven with direction and intent. It may disappoint some who desire the disjointed immediacy of Pain Olympics, but don’t discount Tough Baby just because of its lack of single-worthy material. Give it time to allow its message of hope and empathy amidst disarray to take hold.

It won’t draw new fans in likely, but anyone who’s been following No Age this far are bound to find something worthwhile here, and that’s precisely who the band made this record for.

This album is not served to us on a platter as a radio-ready hit record, and it is not made ‘for us’, but it gives us something better — the feeling of being a part of this music and not a mere recipient.

Overall, Asphalt Meadows is a fine record from a band so deep into their career they really have nothing left to prove — except, it seems, to themselves.

Although sonically the production can feel repetitive – especially towards the album’s middle – what ultimately anchors this project is the lyricism. He manages to explore his experience as a gay man and all its accompanying troubles and triumphs, yet also frame them in the universal understandings of heartbreak and alienation.

As it stands, it’s a solid and often a fun listen, with some real highlights and crystalline production, but for such a lofty eponymous allusion, the album winds up shortchanging itself a bit, rarely languishing long enough in its own ideas to land the dizzying punch Santigold has revealed herself to be capable of time and again.

Arrangements shows the band as a whole accessing a new sense of purpose and creative liberation, planting another flag in the crowded postpunk landscape.

They round out the subtle complexities in the seemingly simple story of longing; a tip-toeing toybox melody reflecting the delicacy of the situation, digital glitches suggesting the distance between them, sighs that relay the inner conflict. This precision features throughout Jennifer B, and it’s thanks to these careful touches that each song connects on a deeper level, despite their structurelessness and unpredictability.

Parks has made her most undeniable statement yet, an album full of uplifting and mesmerizing neo-classics that will fit right in the hearts and minds of the thousands it will touch.

What remains is a record that feels all too groomed, all polished execution and often not well thought out. Music to nod and tap your foot along to, then turn it off and move on.

For the first time in awhile, however, the energies he has expended have converged into a proper piece of art.

Though her debut album told us there’s virtue to having some miles on the soul, PRE PLEASURE kind of does the inverse: a more seasoned, matured artist letting the kid in herself win and giving herself permission to swing away at life.

Songs Without Jokes is a perfectly satisfactory addition to McKenzie’s musical career. He’s garnered enough clout behind his credentials to be able to release an album like this: inoffensive, perfectly likable in passing, but a few steps from his best work.

It feels akin to waking up, still groggy, and taking in the world before you. It’s surely a different world, now, with them gone. They’ve left us with all they had to offer.

With Care, CLAMM continue to reconfigure their sources and refine their methods, offering their take on the current age, fractured as it is by pandemics, climate change, acute financial instabilities, and the rise of the autocratic impulse. They bemoan the human tragedy, but in so doing, experience a fleeting high.

More than anything, the album allows the trio to not only appeal to the variety within their followers, it also shows they’ve still got plenty of ground ahead of them.

As the music fades in and out on the eight-minute closing title track, one can only imagine that boat in the water, the burning hot summer sun melting you down, and those slow but powerful waves washing you away. This is what it feels like to listen to Cass McCombs, especially nowadays.

The first Mall Grab album is decidedly too busy and scattered to be much of anything but a letdown for most fans.

While A Foul Form honors the history of hardcore, it also occurs as smartly topical, the band’s turbid rage and anti-aesthetic stance conjuring a post-capitalistic malaise and the decay of global culture. And though this set marks a pivot from previous work, spotlighting the band as they navigate a fresh battery of sonics, it’s unmistakably them.

Panda Bear has enough talent to make one of his less-than-monumental works worth a listen. And although Sonic Boom sometimes overstuffs the record with unnecessary sounds, his chemistry with Panda Bear is natural. Perhaps next time they’ll leave the toy in the box, though.

Cheat Codes captures the glory of rap’s classic era and brings it to the present through thick mesmerizing samples and the rapper’s incredible vernacular.

Detractors have long said that Harris’ music is tailor made for background summer playlists you can ignore – listening to this project, it’s hard to disagree.

Florist’s latest project stands as the culmination of previous collaborative and solo work, featuring the band as a whole at their most minimally precise; and Sprague, in terms of songwriting, vocal performances, and composition, at her most versatile and visionary.

Sun’s Signature is a wonderful record whose core themes of hope, splendour and faith in nature are something we could all do with right about now.

God’s Country is a truly wonderful, twisted record. About halfway through you start thinking it’s maybe the best debut album of the year, and by the end of the first play you start thinking it’s possibly the album of the year. It’s intimate, expansive, political and deeply personal, unsettling, upsetting and life affirming.

A noisy, (erratically) bouncy, drone-y, vaguely Strawberry Jam-y set of tracks, which handily establish Vladislav Delay as operating at the top of his game, and still sounding, really, like very little else out there.

It’s an album expressing the joys of love – physical, verbal, musical, familial and all the other kinds. While she’s the one in the spotlight throughout the album, this isn’t a record about her – instead she’s honouring all those people who find themselves through the release provided by these communal spaces. And damn, it’s a hell of a good time.

Barbarism is much further from the sound of a Priests record than expected, and it’s further proof that the Greer isn’t interested in repeating the past over and over again.

Every song sounds like a bunch of musicians taking things in stride, enjoying the process of creating over all else. Obviously by loosening the reins a bit, the pitfalls of sometimes recycling melodic and lyrical ideas aren’t completely dodged, and by effect, some tracks end up stranded in limbo around the two-and-a-half minute mark.

The album may be a little homogenous for some listeners, but this is a narratively and emotionally precise set of songs, set to sneakily indelible melodies. Nastasia has never written with such vivid truthfulness, such earthen brutality.

It plays to their strengths in most places and often challenges them to retain the will to be original and innovative in their established modus.

Beatopia lacks the edge and drive of its predecessor, yet several inspired moments are enough to maintain Kristi’s reputation as one of the nation’s most exciting young artists.

Both fun and grounded, the charm of Nayeon is irresistible and whether you enjoy K-Pop or not, this is worth checking out if you are a poptimist in general.

Sheer breath of freshness and youth.

This is a mini-album that does exactly what it’s meant to, in exactly the time that it takes to do so.

As a whole, Arkhon is a distinct statement. Even Danilova’s uneven work manages to be intriguing.

Her eighth studio album may be her most ambitious yet, but that added weight can lead some songs to run too long or feel overstuffed. She may still be trying to find the right balance between her larger soundscape and storytelling, but Home, before and after is an exciting evolution that feels both old and new.

It’s music to laugh about our former selves at, just as much as it’s perfect to get drunk and eat ice cream to – and in that, it could define a whole new generation. But for now, it will totally define this summer.

MUNA is the best soundtrack one can find for the next few months. Seemingly destined to join the canon of pop’s great cult-classics (Carly Rae Jepsen’s Emotion, Robyn’s Body Talk, among them), it’s an album whose legacy should last much longer.

Some of it drags (looking at you, “You’ve Won This War”), and the lyrics, melodies, and sounds don’t always land. At times you can practically feel him straining for it all to Mean Something, but Butler remains a powerful and important voice in music, even when a particular album doesn’t fully succeed.

It manages to take inspiration from a grab bag of styles and still create an unified, singular end-product. Earnest and unburdened, Time Bend is a staggeringly bold statement for a debut album. It would, indeed, seem as though we have not seen anything yet.

It’s a decent follow-up, but one that unfortunately comes off less Bartees Strange and more Bartees Safe.

This is undoubtedly going to be a divisive one for long-term fans, with some holding it up as just as vital as anything else, while others will simply overlook it or just take a couple of highlights to add to their ‘Best of PG’ playlists. Whichever the case, whether you devour it or dismiss it, there’s no denying that it expands the mythos and majesty of Perfume Genius.

Like a lot of Andrew Bird albums of late, Inside Problems needs some time to reveal itself. Its frustrations and lidless graspings at the world are part of the game here, so that it doesn’t nestle quickly into a box on first listen feels appropriate.

Not since Everything’s Fine has Quelle Chris sounded so surefire and determined. He wears beats with flair now, and lyrically he’s in top form, moving like a chameleon behind the mic and in front. Deathfame is easily the best solo outing for Chris so far.

Balancing stately pop ornamentation with more bombastically orchestrated moments, the album allows Meiburg to both indulge and scale back his dramaturgical impulses.

It is arguably his most sonically interesting and personal project so far, but its inconsistency punches a few pot-holes in the listening journey. The experimentation here doesn’t always work, but when it does, it shows that Post is heading in some exciting directions for future albums.

While her last proper album, 2019’s orchestrally-imbued All Mirrors, was something of a coming out party for her grand artistic ambition and scope, Big Time is the coming out party for her true personality. In order to do this, she’s stripped away the grandiosity and reverted back to the country and Americana sounds that she calls home.

Overall, the album occurs as less incendiary than previous work (with the exception of the opening track), DBT at least temporarily setting aside their polemical blowtorches, instead mindfully venturing into vivid inventories of their own lives, choices, and karmic trajectories.

Each track on Nothing To Declare feels like a condensed, expertly-aimed Hadoken of fun, furious energy.

It’s fun, it’s furious, and just about anyone should be able to appreciate that.

They’ve delivered a certain-to-be-beloved debut – one that separates itself from its peers.

The wicked atmosphere that they’ve crafted across Heart Under is worthy of celebration alone.

At heart, it’s all too modest, too fatigued, too lacking in ambition and attitude.

Post-punk bands tend to veer dark and brooding, but Dehd avoid that here, putting all of their energy into sunny anthems filled with dizzying coos, lighthearted hooks and charming rhythms. It all helps them bounce across the record and into our hearts for good.

These are pretty songs, but largely forgettable when amassed together, and though EYEYE is an honorable attempt at switching lanes yet again after a divisive fourth album, it mostly comes up short as a finished product.

Rentals is uniformly great, and each track boasts its share of both gorgeous instrumentation and lines that are alternately poetic and prosaic.

It’s all put together under one roof in a neat, unassuming way, made refreshing and palatable by his persona.

It preserves the trio’s history while serving us a matured Moderat. MORE D4TA is their cathartic work of loneliness and intoxication, indulging in a museum of sounds.

They’ve made the brave decision to remember what it’s like to feel and to breathe again, and it can all be heard in the stirring vibrations of Margolin’s words and voice.

With more questions raised than answered, Cain’s unusually ambitious and fully-realised debut somehow leaves listeners craving more in spite of its wonderful, exhausting, 75 minute runtime.

Even in his lost moments, like “A Random Act of Kindness” where he repeats “Out of time, out of money”, he searches out the hope while faced with setbacks and sorrow. It’s in these moments that Morby shines as that everyman – a role he has been crafted into through those various influences he holds up so high.

He’s willing to stumble, befuddle, and outright offend – it’s all part of its creator’s flawed self, which is all but stripped starkly naked in front of us. It’s far too complex, far too searching to be wrangled in a simple review. I know this much: we’ll be talking about this one for a long, long time.

As moving as those songs are, The Smile are more intriguing when they shift slightly further away from Yorke and Greenwood’s established palette.

After 11 tracks, this return feels well-earned, but it’s equally refreshing to know the next song we hear from Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever might not be so predictable.

Yeah, that’s a decent album. Flags towards the end, sure. Some rippers on there, though. Glad I stuck with it.

Van Etten gives us what is, quite possibly, her strongest album yet. And that sense of breakthrough, of sheer lift, is prevalent right from the start. ... There’s a powerful sincerity and confidence to her vocals throughout the record, as she weaves and bobs around her deceptively simple and emotive melodies, often hitting notes that sounds for a millisecond like they won’t quite work, and then suddenly, they do, as on the final heavenly note of “Darkness Fades”.