Ffollowers of the band will notice how they sometimes hold onto their older tendencies (see: Microscopie, the title track). Nevertheless, the strides they take show how they're an asset to their new label—and not the other way around.

With each album in Cronin's catalog, he seems to grow in confidence and song-writing ability—and Seeker is no exception.

Our children’s children may not remember baseball umpires and humans that sang their own songs, but Bodega’s Shiny New Model makes for the perfect soundtrack to worry yourself silly about such things.

Best listened to sad and lonely in your bedroom, Pang is the perfect dance album for smart and sensitive boys and girls after their day’s journaling are done.

It’s beautiful, inventive, catchy, heartbreaking, addictive, and bursting at the seams with ideas. It captures a performer truly at the top of their game, throwing everything into a project so that not one second is wasted. It’s a record that makes you fall in love with music again, a record you feel privileged to experience and a record that imparts fundamental human truths.

The transformative qualities of Spring reveal themselves with time and patience. What begins as a search ends with a confirmation of newfound clarity, where every location Cohen visits inspires new questions and new experiences.

It’s still haunting, and it’s still beautiful. It’s like a soundtrack to exploring some abandoned, centuries-old mansion in the middle of a desert, now filled with ghosts, lost memories, and cobwebs weaved around expensive furniture.

The sheer joy behind each song here is what keeps You Deserve Love from the occasion sameness that you could find on The World’s Best American Band.

On In a Bind, she reaches for a more spiritual musical expression—taking a page from the mesmeric rhythms of Ali Farka Touré. She finds herself at ease, picking out an arpeggiated pattern flutter over a meditative choral showpiece. Less impressive, though, is how Tamko derails into the dreamy, meandering synth jams she seemed to be at odds with from the start. ... These mood shifts show Tamko at her more inquisitive, proving how far she can expand her reach while using her own resources. And it'll be intriguing to see where her ever-changing nature takes her next.

It's one of those rare, almost perfect follow-up, albums from a promising artist unafraid of taking her music to even more thrilling places without sacrificing what made it so compelling to begin with.

Even if Lost Girls often sounds like scrapped ideas taken from a larger project, Khan doesn't go too deep into nostalgia—still working firmly within a pop framework.

Relying less on atmosphere, tracks like Savage Nomad and Negro Spiritual reveal a rawness that balances his brisk delivery and minimal samples with renewed urgency. It comes with a caveat, though, as taking a more formalist direction puts the focus on technique rather than subject matter. And that's okay.

You can hear how she gradually tempers her busy thoughts, setting her mind at ease with a sense of renewal. And in her clean, unembellished melodies, reminding us that we can take our true selves whichever way we choose to roam.

On Heavy Lifter, Martin and Taylor continue to lean on each others’ strengths while also allowing room for pushing out prior boundaries. By expanding the sandbox, Hovvdy open up possibilities that promise more good things to come. If you’ve missed the duo’s prior releases, Heavy Lifter is a good place as any to get on board.

The result is an album of uncompromising vulnerability and rawness.

Big Thief proves that it can feed your head, your heart, and your hands in equal measure. Like the musical giants of old there is nothing they can’t do, ably going from strength to strength. Two Hands serves as the band’s call to arms.

Dear Tommy may still be lost in the ether, and who knows when Jewel decides to complete it. But Closer to Grey feels like a fully-fleshed concept, and it should be considered the long-awaited follow-up to Kill for Love fans have been clamoring for for years.

The process of writing this album was personal and intimate, but the end result is a confident, bold debut.

The most striking aspect of Ode to Joy is how weary Tweedy sounds. From upfront political themes (Citizens, which wavers and rumbles with minor harmonies, lines about white lies, and distorted guitars) to thoughts of personal tragedy (White Wooden Cross), there's one clear conclusion: Tweedy is beaten down. But Tweedy is at his best when he's processing that exhaustion.

The tightest tunes here tend to be the mid-tempo ones, or the ones with the cleanest production.

It's a remarkably sharp pop record that retains her fascination with pop-culture iconography and the rosey simplicity of a post-war America where classic rock and blue jeans ruled and takes them to much deeper places. ... Think of it as an hour-long car ride peeling down the highway with classic rock blaring out of the radio and no real destination in mind other than where your impulsive nature might take you.

If In The Morse Code Of Brake Lights isn’t remembered as the peak of The New Pornographers' work, its heart is squarely where it needs to be—and is still head and shoulders above most of the choices we are presented with these days. Electoral or otherwise.

Perri needs to lean into the experimental nature of his work—take more risks, and avoid being so laid back that his ghostly melodies have all the impact of a polite, good-natured apparition.

In many ways, Memory poignantly conveys how time has caught up with the Vivian Girls. It may look into the past, but the trio are not the same anymore both creatively and personally—and the time they took apart to explore other avenues works to their benefit. Armed with a deeper understanding of those trying times, and each other, the trio moves forward—and live in harmony with it.

Devour is best experienced from front to back. Shifting from Chardiet’s possessed screams (Spit It Out), to the dial-up-modem-from-Hell (Self-Regulating System), to grotesque static (Deprivation), Devour is shockingly sublime, like some warped, morally corrupt gradient. What’s equally mystifying is how textured and thematic these songs are, subtleties and surprises that are only revealed through brave, dedicated consumption.

On an album where Taylor nakedly reveals his most pressing moments of despair, it’s only in the album's handful of brighter moments that you wish for maybe just another small taste of the darkness. Taylor manages to flip his career-long look for the silver lining by acknowledging the pull of the worldly can only be put in a tidy little box for so long.

Inspired by B&S leader Stuart Murdoch’s read of the novel, the soundtrack thankfully veers more towards the bibliophile than the head-banger. Two B&S classics are re-worked, including a spritely updating of the perfect fitting I Know Where The Summer Goes as well as more of a straight read of Get Me Away From Here I’m Dying.

There's a lot to ponder while listening to Powers' dynamic and exuberant contours, coming from a band that's adapting to life's changes with piercing directness.