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.

The Marriage of True Minds is something of a record built for everyone, a fusion of sounds and ideas built from the thoughts and minds of lots of different people; there will be different moments that deter and attract different people, but there are more than enough of the better ones to keep you hooked for the album’s runtime.

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.

Though he can be likened to a number of classic singers, some of the all-time greats might I add, his work is his own and ultimately original in its identity.

Her second album is an unpretentious thrill, the nature of its creation inextricably linked to its lyrical outlook, made by a woman who’s been through the wringer but has emerged from a period of turmoil daringly and undoubtedly herself.

The new directions that they have managed to find on No Color are certainly interesting to explore for listeners.

Lesser songwriters might stop there, and accept lyrical maturation as the only necessary step toward a sophomore effort, but Crutchfield also uses Cerulean Salt as a way to expand her sonic palette beyond the crackling acoustic guitar ballads that marked her previous work.

Comparing it to where they once were, somewhere middling between post-rock and meandering industrial ambient, the sound of Factory Floor is of a band that is now confident in their own original and entirely dominant sound.

As his name implies, Ghostpoet can be vague, mystifying, and a little bit of a downer--but ultimately the best art is the kind that makes you think and broadens your perspective, which this record does in spades.

The album remains enjoyable throughout, but too much of it feels a bit too been-there-done-that. Luckily, there are three tracks with guests, and this is where the album truly shines.

Mount Wittenberg Orca is uniquely and charmingly straightforward.

Like a bottle of aforementioned white wine, it needs to develop within the container of people’s memory before it can fully blossom into the role of moody summer album that it aspires to be. The nuances are definitely already there.

The songs on Jump Rope Gazers aren’t as immediately addictive as what came before, but The Beths’ natural intuition for emotive and melodic writing is still intact.

It's dark but inspirational, catchy but never kitschy. Most of all though, it's honest.

Instrumentally, every song here is impressive, but the singing is pushed to the fore on the majority in an attempt to instigate a hook, which is only occasionally successful.

At the very least instead of sounding like he was curling up into a melancholic hibernating state as on Exercises, here he sounds like he once again wants to fight the boredom and start actively engaging the listener on all levels.

It's all very well-done, but it's not something that you'll feel much incentive to revisit over and over; an experience worth taking, but not necessarily one worth repeating.

Take Care is a record unsure of itself, certainly more focused and interesting than its predecessor, but still far from the classic Drake had hinted at.

Given their status, it wouldn't have been a surprise if Wasting Light had been a by-numbers affair for Foo Fighters.

Taken as a whole, it’s the sound of a band reinvented, shrouded in autumnal atmosphere and containing depths that reveal themselves on repeat listens – whatever the truth may be, on their long-awaited fourth album, I LIKE TRAINS remain true to themselves.

We have heard many albums about the pandemic and life within it, but this is more about about life after it; how to pick up the pieces of the lives we had before it and transform them into this new life that just relentlessly goes on. Vile’s music is attuned to the unrelenting progression of life.

It's All True still has the most in common with its predecessor: the clean production, the attention to detail, the instrumental experimentation (those Eastern flourishes on the first two tracks are strangely easy to miss like the live instruments on Begone) and careful arrangements are all traits that have been carried forward, but many of those (if not all) are core ingredients in what makes up the music of Junior Boys, and they'll likely feature on their future releases for many years to come.

By accepting the chaotic elements coexisting alongside our stark self-made structures – be it tangible, psychological or virtual – Karma & Desire might be the most honest form of pop music one can make at this moment.

This record definitely ranks up there with Offend Maggie and The Runners Four in regards to its emotional immediacy.

The songs are expensive in their depth of emotion but comforting in their intimacy and alluring appeal.

Hardcourage is an exceedingly worthwhile release from a producer that’s constantly pushing himself toward new things.

These are stories we've already heard told better, and in the same voices.

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.

As a pure entertainment piece, Twelve Reasons To Die appeals directly to the brain’s pleasure center.

Thirty tracks and seventy-five minutes, Fabric 69 is a work of incredibly sturdy sonic architecture; it’s hardly inert or monotonous, yet at the same time it takes techno’s notion of repetition to what might be considered a logical extreme.

Though Moore's lyrics are a bit more obtuse, this could just as easily soundtrack a breakup as Sea Change could.

Gas Lit is an important record from an important band. It doesn’t attempt to make things palatable for you, and nor should it. The record is a provocation to a difficult conversation, one that in all honesty shouldn’t really still have to take place in 2021.

Sympathy for Life‘s strongest moments come in the songs that sound least like the Parquet Courts we’ve known before.

It's not that Beams is a lighter listen than Black City, but it's certainly more honest.

After three albums about the same thing, Hinds haven’t shown any real progression by shedding their lo-fi trappings; instead they’ve just unearthed their shortcomings.

Here she sounds more polished and pop-friendly than ever, largely thanks to some new additions and some smart subtractions.

Toward the Low Sun staggers to get that momentum, though it does achieve atonement through progression.

It manages to feel both too specific and not quite specific enough; while it sounds like her own personal sound world and collection of memories, the album lacks that relatable hook to draw the listener in.

There is a feeling of contrivance in some of the songs here, but genuine joy and abandonment elsewhere.

What works for Lambchop in the case of TRIP is the level of consistency in their sound that they were able to achieve through years of playing music together. However, it does not exactly bring the album together, because the tracks are thematically very different, and the band’s decision to apply the same approach to them contributes to the plainness of TRIP.

TYRON is a move away from the raw production style, too, as the beats and other instrumentals here are much more refined and polished. Lyrically, he turns away from the harsh political themes and statements of his debut to topics of much more personal significance to Ty, while not forgetting the part of him that is ‘the contemporary rapper’. Even with this more personal approach, slowthai truly embodies the idea that punk is not dead.

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

Her well of inspiration has always been deep, with songs about environmentalism, family troubles and small town gossip, but it seems now, when pressed too hard on the idea of maturity, Musgraves appears all too shallow, and no longer the three-dimensional character we loved and craved so much.

Brun has such control of her craft, and that is made brightly plain across these two albums [After The Great Storm & How Beauty Holds The Hand Of Sorrow]. Which one you prefer will likely depend on which genre or style you have deeper inclination for, but taken together, they’re both excellent representations of an artist honing her tested and true style while also venturing out into new waters, easily proving just how capable she is along the way.

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.

Wrecking Ball is an album that will reinforce most everyone's preexisting opinion of The Boss, whether they be good or bad.

On her sophomore effort, Monsters, Kennedy doubles down on the eclectic nature of her music, offering up a lengthy set of songs that range from experimental electronica to a capella ballads.

Tilt is the music they are dragging you onto the dancefloor for, and with most of these songs playing over the speakers, you’ll happily join them.

Berninger’s vocal delivery is largely muted; the mercurial and even passive-aggressive eruptions of the 00s are all but gone; rather, there’s a downcast directness here, which at times is compelling in the way that self-revelation and truth-telling can be; at other times, such singularity seems glaringly reductive, a listener wishing for the metaphors, tortuous narratives, and volatile phrasing of earlier work.

This album finds them going all-out in swashbuckling revelry for the most part, and it suits them better than anyone might have expected.

Despite its flaws, Sun is not a complete failure and does deserve to be mentioned alongside the rest of her work, if only for the comparison of how she once tried something different--a flawed but worthwhile attempt.

Hackney Diamonds is a really great late Stones album, albeit just a pretty good rock album in the canon of history. That’s a compliment.

Double and triple albums naturally sprawl, yet there’s an unexpected compactness to PARANOÏA.

This collection of radiant jangle pop songs, burdened by nostalgic love and depressive yearning for something real, ultimately loses its luster. Everything else blends into one garbled, hazy murmur that ensues without much variance.

Take the strong songwriting, add the excellent production by David Barbe, and the tight and first rate playing, and you've got an album that truly showcases just how skilled and versatile the band is.

It’s not bad music per se, but lacking Weiss’ sharp drumming and the virtuoso guitar work the two are so good at, there’s not much left of what made Sleater-Kinney exciting.

The album struggles to find a particular voice, and make any sort of statement, leaving me more than a couple of steps off using the album's own title to describe my opinion of it.

It's one of the most back-to-front solid and uncompromising Berlin techno full-lengths this year.

3D Country is a fun album, and it gives the band a more definable personality – even if it’s bonkers.

As major label rap debut albums go, Live from the Underground is a relative anomaly in that the artist seems to have escaped with most of his integrity intact.

For the many Heartbreaking Bravery will help rekindle an interest in Krug once more.

It isn’t as impactful as Isolation, but there are plenty of moments on this record where Kali shows great potential that she may yet make that truly fantastic Spanglish R&B album.

On Storm Queen she’s an actor given complete creative freedom with a classic text; the voice of an avenging angel; a ballet dancer performing with a sharpened sabre in hand. Summoning thunderclouds and hurricanes with her inflections and rippling vocal cords, she is the Storm Queen through and through.

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.

It’s one of the young year’s best all-out rock records, the kind of fantastic full-length that some kid in a garage will one day look back to themselves, maybe when plugging that guitar in for the first time.

The album is an alluring, heady mix of skewed folktronica, avant garde noise and opulent orchestral tones which combine to cement Eartheater’s place in every discerning music fan’s end of year lists.

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.

On World’s Most Stressed Out Gardner, Chad VanGaalen indulges his inner experimentalist more than on its more recent predecessors, albeit with the same giddy, goofball disposition we’re used to.

Viagra Boys have successfully captured a side of the working class that demands empathy, and it’s their strongest statement to date.

Anxiety matches the emotional heights and immediacy of the music Ashin was inspired by, but what arrives from his limitations--as a singer, as a DIY-ist--adds to the record a personal foundation and raw authenticity no amount of budget could erect.

Westerman may not have found his footing with his debut record, but there are enough parts to the whole that should keep listeners looking forward to what he does in the future.

The fact that TANGK captures a band boldly going out of their own depth doesn’t take away that IDLES come on a little too strong too often, compelling you to swipe left more often than right.

All of it is minuscule and done in a minor setting, but it’s also meaningful. Tracks appear like brief sketches before dissipating into the air. It’s the low-key nature of this mixtape that makes Still Slipping Vol. 1 a compelling listen.

It’s somehow arguably her most wide-ranging album (stylistically and topically) while also feeling remarkably of a piece; succinct even.

Nothing about the eight tracks on Humor Risk seems spare or accidental, as the record is expertly plotted and paced, never falling in to the samey or undifferentiable trap that his previous effort drowned in.

Local Business isn't a bad album, but it doesn't completely pull itself off either.

When taken as a whole, and as an effervescent thumbing of the nose at the noise establishment, Total Folklore goes by like a breeze, even if the last 11 tracks (three of those ambient interludes) feel a bit overshadowed in the wake of “Ulysses”‘s monolithic, alien bliss.

All of This Will End can be regarded as a riveting bildungsroman, the 25-year-old De Souza reflecting on archetypal initiations and processing essential insights, all the while reveling in diverse instrumentation and a seemingly endless supply of hooks.

This album is like candy; it's not great for you, but it tastes delicious and goes down easy. Plus, it's only 37 minutes long, so it's not like listening to it requires a huge time investment.

Death Dreams' loops of feedback, ghostly monologues and multipronged guitar attacks lash out, often in tandem, making the music feel big.

The dead air that seemed to sometimes crop up previously has been filled or chopped out completely, creating a record with taut and purposeful momentum.

As a whole, Tomboy is a success, but its short runtime and somewhat underdeveloped arrangements leave the impression that Jurado was more concerned with just getting this set of songs released, rather than making sure they expand his extensive catalog in a meaningful way.

For those who regard May Our Chambers Be Full as a contemporary gem, The Helm of Sorrow will occur as one of rock’s anticlimaxes. One shouldn’t ignore the winning elements of this release and how the contributing artists’ gifts are alternately put on center stage, but if Chambers is the benchmark for this combo, then one has to point out that what rendered it near-perfect; namely, the seamless synthesis of styles and energies, is on the whole absent here.

There’s some pleasure to be had here, but for all of those except those of us pawing the floor with anxious, somewhat embarrassed memories – and as the album cover even seems readily to acknowledge – this is perhaps a pill best left unswallowed.

Observatory is ultimately not the Wrens record we all wanted, but it’s what we have and it’s better than it has any right to be given all the turmoil of its conception.

Leftovers may not offer that something she was after, but it’s an undeniably pleasing document of how a surrounding life of family, friends, and personal encounters is perhaps the thing that is real. Only time can turn them into something else.

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.

This album finishes right when it needs to. Any longer and there might be a genuine risk of someone having a hernia from all the physical carousing. As it is, we leave this magical island fully refreshed and filled with self satisfaction.

The trance-like pace of II serves to reinforce the album rather than weaken it.

Their insistence for organic compositions stands out thoughtfully on Open Door Policy, and it reminds us precisely why we fell in love with The Hold Steady in the first place. Despite them being slightly aged rockers, they haven’t forgotten what it means to rock out and to give in to the desire shout at the top of your lungs when you are struggling.

The Rip Tide, though, never bursts at the seams, and never feels too slight. Each number in the collection packs weight, and repeat listenings allow all nine to unfold their unique beauty.

The resulting album is at once a hodgepodge of ideas and a collection that is bound together by vintage synth tones NV and Deradoorian’s desire to explore the possibilities of their collaboration. It’s an entirely unpredictable but indefinably enlivening listening experience.

It seems that with General Dome, Buke and Gase have managed to do just fine, and they’ve created a record that looks forward, as well as backward, to what indie rock has been and what it has the potential to be.

While Major has a good solid handful of inspired moments, none of this material comes close to approaching the plane as that Fang Island were operating on before.

As transformation takes over and her approach to creativity changes, Magic Mirror shines boldly and brightly as the testimony of an adulthood that didn’t come at the cost of losing her spark of child-like enthusiasm. Pearl Charles has taken hold of that raw and bubbly energy, and skillfully turned it into a perfect silver sequin of her very own disco ball.

This tendency that Williams has of interweaving her inner emotional climate with the breathable aura of nature was on magical display through last year’s debut album, I Was Born Swimming, and it’s something she hones further here.

Their debut was filled with promise and, on their third album, Nation Of Language have kept that promise.

The artistic flair of The Center Won’t Hold and the tightness of Path of Wellness are still present, but they find a comfortable position between the two that feels somewhat familiar and certainly natural for Sleater-Kinney.