Damon and Naomi and Kurihara have made art out of what was in front of them, and it’s a gorgeous, emotionally resonant reminder of the times.

Perhaps the most obvious way that this album reflects the COVID lockdown, however, is in its weirder, more idiosyncratic second half, which is, incidentally, the best part of the record.

Every sound fits, without sounding in the least bit fussed over or premeditated. It’s more like a living organism than a band, bringing all systems together to sing its song, once again.

The players never lose touch with the paradox of these songs, which have long endured through their strength and frequent expressions of anger, but which also have much still to tell us about human weakness and vulnerability. By tuning into that paradox, the players have made a terrific, surprising and emotionally dramatic record.

There’s a lot to enjoy on Year of the Horse.

HEY WHAT is equally thrilling for the way they now sound impressively eloquent using it. If last time was learning and pushing towards a necessary change, HEY WHAT simply is living a different way, channeling the disarray of their noises and our world into something beautiful and moving, all the stronger for any fractures, cracks and fuzz.

While Antiphonals can’t help but seem like a comparatively minor release next to Cantus, Descant’s 80 minutes, it shares many qualities with previous Davachi highlight, 2018’s Let Night Come On Bells End The Day: refined, reflective, and uniquely moving.

Little Eden pulls off one of Saloman’s best tricks: the record is unerringly faithful to the Bevis Frond aesthetic, a stable sonic construct for some 35 years, and it’s also cleverly responsive to our collective cultural moment.

You get a very empowered, very confident album. Super fun, too.

The Witness is definitely a grower, an elusive listen whose understated charms define its mystique — and also its flaws.

It’s a nice rest, listening to Other You. It’s hard to remember what you heard, but very, very pleasant while it’s happening.

Clara demonstrates Morgan’s ability to make practically whatever he gets his hands on into loscil music. But when loscil music is this deeply immersive, richly textured, carefully calibrated, and ultimately viscerally satisfying (however one feels about the process), you just hope he keeps on doing it.

With Harmonizer, Segall moves further out into his own personal weirdness, without compromising the red meat appeal of his rock aesthetic. It’s a neat trick, using different tools to make different sounds that, nonetheless, fit very squarely into his catalogue so far.

Their joint compositions are undeniably atmospheric, evoking south of the border drama on “Pray For Rain” and surging apprehension on “Something Will Come.” But they’re also as rigorously structured as any popular entry in a hymnal or hit parade. If you like for your tunes to tell you what they’re going to say, say it, and then tell you what they said, the soothing “Life And Casualty” and the white-knuckled “Hurricane Light” are equally at your service, and they’re not alone.

What’s more effective is that the band have become more skilled at writing for chord changes rather than just riffs. They don’t exactly back down from the effect of the latter when they go there, but the attention to harmony gives the whole much more heft than it otherwise might have. The heft is certainly in the physicality the music achieves in its peak moments. But it’s also in the fractured beauty of this music, its emotional catharsis, the beauty of something lost perhaps.

Whether it’s the soaring psychedelia of “Paper Fog” and “Pigs,” the more straightforwardly folky “Bird of Paradise” and “Vegas Knights,” or even the delayed fuzz-guitar squall of “Another Story From the Center of the Earth,” the pedal steel is there, and so is a songwriting sensibility that does feel very personal and emotionally powerful even though there’s not a lot of comprehensible narrative.

Hayter’s voice admirably performs that complexity on Sinner Get Ready; it’s a beautiful instrument that will fill you with terrible woe, and then terrible wonder.

Refuge clocks in at over an hour, an hour in which, as stated earlier, not a whole lot of stuff happens. And yet maybe it takes that long to clear out the buzz and chatter, to slow down, to focus on one sound at a time and to find a stillness. It’s too long, it’s too slow, it’s too eventless until it’s not, and then you’re there.

The momentum picks up a notch on “Whitewaterside,” in which O’Connell recounts standing in cold water, watching the ripples and admiring the quiet stillness of night. The stage is immediately set for a stark, reflective listening experience, with nature as a focus, rendered with zen-like clarity.

Overall, this new chapter in Liars’ fascinating story is perhaps their most easily digestible for years, synthesizing many laudable qualities of different chapters of the band’s career.

This is a memory album that is touched with love but almost entirely free of cheap nostalgia. It comes from a long way away, using everything Dacus has learned since to capture her experiences clearly, with art but without too much ornamentation.

One of the most beguiling and rewarding Six Organ of Admittance albums — 39-minutes of synth ballads, cracked space-glam and 1980s-glossed guitar overload.

Frustratingly uneven album: hang in there, ride out the bumpy passages, and something lovely is likely to happen; until those moments pop up, expect to have your patience tested.

At 44 minutes, Life, and Another is lengthy compared to many new albums, but its 16 diverse tracks all earn their inclusion, each piece of the tapestry finely crafted and lovingly stitched into place. Few albums released so far this year have felt quite so magical and transportive, carried along by a mischievous dream-like narrative.

I Know I’m Funny Haha is not so very different from this last album from Webster, but it feels more assured and confident, and the subject matter is more upbeat.

Like Endless Boogie, Birds of Maya knows how to wring every sweaty drop out of a heavy groove. The basic foundation, thunderous drums, a gut-checking oscillation of bass notes, picks up various other elements as it goes on — mumbled spoken word, eruptive guitar solos, flailing drum fills. It is always the same but always changing, and you can get lost in it.

Mirror II finds The Goon Sax deep in the lovely, perplexing mess of life, embracing the pain and pleasure, savoring the taste of change, finding inner strength and the consolations of a collective that allows individuality to flourish and supports it with an empathy which seems so sorely lacking in our world.

The album is beautifully sequenced overall. Sometimes the transitions purposefully jar and provoke—elsewhere they’re seamless, prolonging, elongating a motif.