It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all.

More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless.

On Puberty 2, every note she's played comes together. It’s a resounding personal statement and the clearest sign that while she might be an “indie rock” artist, she currently stands apart from--and above--much of the genre.

The Avalanches are all about feel. And Wildflower, though it misses some of its predecessor’s thematic unity and from-nowhere sense of surprise, has that feel in spades.

Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here.

Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.

The leap in range and ambition from their 2015 EP Bodies and Control and Money and Power is huge: There hasn’t been a punk debut this certain and poised since Savages’ Silence Yourself.

He is whimsical and somber, funny and meaningful, sometimes all at once.

Guided by a more mature sound, Infinite Worlds is the rock music we need nowadays, when it seems like home, wherever it might be, is getting farther away.

The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque--it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily.

Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole.

It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods.

Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent. On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case.

His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said.

Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again.

Ultimately, Badu’s reimagining of Fela succeeds better than any of the previous box sets by making his music feel both very much alive and very much her own. Her curation pulls together a sonically and thematically coherent experience that comes close to being the macro-album these album-length macro-grooves seem to demand.

Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

The “new” material on Piano & a Microphone has already circulated as bootlegs, but this album clarifies its details, rescues it from indistinct hiss.

By stepping out of focus and receding into his assembled ranks, Hecker has found a renewed compositional approach. And on the most fascinating album of his career, he has, at last, expressed an idea he has pursued for a decade.

Robyn presents them in a way that makes her resolutions feel both instinctive and deeply traveled; melodies and emotions resolve simultaneously, slowly, and imperfectly, without editorialized conclusions.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.

The members of the 1975 began playing together in their teens as an emo band, and they are still interested in wringing out unadulterated feeling from everything they touch. This is the thread that grounds even their most dubious dabblings, and makes their dilettantism amount to more than a series of stunts.

This ambient music is not psychedelic. It never evokes outer space or the cosmos or, for that matter, the natural world, even when it uses the sound of water. It’s music for the indoors, music for doing things, there for you if you want to listen closely but also content to exist on a subliminal plane.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

There’s something special about Agora in how it integrates the immediate pleasure of his pop influences with the patience of his extended works.

Building on the psychedelic chamber-folk of 2016’s Front Row Seat to Earth, these convictions push the 30-year-old songwriter towards her most ambitious and complex work yet.

With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods positions herself to join the battle, bridging the gap, once and for all, between our unresolved past and the promise that awaits us all on the horizon.

Shepherd feels like his most something album ever—his warmest, his most generous, possibly his most profound. It is his longest, for sure, lounging comfortably across four sides of vinyl, none of it wasted. It is a high note, fond and deep and sustained.

The subject matter of Purple Mountains is grim, but he’s still David Berman, and he can still dazzle with the sheer beauty of his writing or wink at the camera to lighten the mood when necessary.

We Are Beat Happening, a new vinyl box set that collects all of the bands’ records in one place for the first time since 2002, is a crucial step in recognizing the trio’s seismic influence. Though Beat Happening are frequently written off as cloyingly twee (which, to be clear, should not be an insult), in truth, the band created a crucial link between the minimalist experimentations of post-punk and Riot Grrrls’ demystification of perfection.

What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop.

Compared to 2017’s ken, a gothic-sounding record distinguished by chillier tones and pared-down lyrics, his masterful new album Have We Met sets a larger canvas. Produced by bandmate John Collins, the music is sweeping and bold and surprising.

Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another. So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall.

From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. ... Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

The best and most essential part is the fifth disc: Townshend’s solo demos, scratchy and awkward, like a novelty private press album by someone with far too many ideas to capture on tape, on his own. The good news is that it all holds up. Minus the eternal “I Can See for Miles,” none of these songs found a permanent home on classic rock radio and so they belong entirely to this album, unburdened by decades of overplay.

It’s a graceful record. ... Cheek and co-producer Andrew Lappin’s work is painterly and methodical, daubing vocal loops over clattering percussion, sweeping strings, and resonant synths to create a shapeshifting strain of experimental pop.

Like a great sacred text, the music of Kirtan: Turiya Sings is concentrated and rigorous, yet simple and full of ease. Like the original Turiya Sings, it’s also a pleasure.

The rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike.

As Colourgrade highlights, love, family, intimacy are central to her everyday. Luckily, she allows us to partake in these familial affairs, and the outcome is spellbinding.

Where parts of Lush revealed themselves slowly, saving their secrets for intent listening, Valentine is more immediate, grabbing your gaze and refusing to let go for 32 straight minutes.

If you haven’t listened to Red, recently or ever, it’s well worth your time; in its ecstatic, expressive vocals, tart humor, vivid imagery, and tender attention to the nuances of love and loss, you’ll find everything that makes Taylor Swift great. ... Some of the vault tracks feel like they were left off of Red because they weren’t up to snuff.

Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive.

Le Bon’s creative power remains in the circuitous jaggedness with which she navigates pop and poetry, uncertainty and revelation.

Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade.

It’s a testament to the band’s ambitions and execution peaking in lockstep that Diaspora Problems can be appreciated as both a fully visceral experience and a cerebral one.

Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. ... ou get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves. It’s best experienced as a whole, but some tracks stand on their own.

Against the Odds perfectly captures the band’s legacy precisely because it presents the history, music, and memories with an admirable degree of honesty and doesn’t try to make the story into something it wasn’t.

Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. ... And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof.

This Stupid World is just a particularly timely chapter in the modest saga of indie rock’s most unassuming institution. Its songs capture not only the darkness so many of us feel with each waking day but also the impulse to keep waking, to keep going.

Oh Me Oh My manages to be Holley’s most approachable and most ambitious album all at once.

Iyer and Ismaily’s hypnotic interplay leaves the listener unmoored in time and space. The grand sweep of Aftab’s voice is a galactic super-wind capable of carrying you off to wondrous new worlds. The force of their collaboration is so much greater than the sum of its simple parts that it borders on the mystical.

Half of rage is confronting the sorrow that births it and watching it metamorphize. Witnessing the chrysalis is With a Hammer’s most generous gift.

The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.

Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too.

It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.

After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.

The cacophonous, vexing, endlessly fascinating The Collective represents the experience of logging off and finding that your perception of the real world has been forever altered. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

A testament to the influences of their youth; echoes of Lennon and McCartney, Simon and Garfunkel, Nick Drake, and Fairport Convention glide through the album before tiptoeing into a corner and reappearing a few tracks later.

Each of Alter's twelve tracks are structurally slippery, shifting seamlessly from style to style in a way that makes it almost impossible to accurately map their paths. The subsequent mazes can be disorienting, but it's the most thrilling brand of dementia, as well as an acute reminder of the tension and balance true songwriting prowess can build.

Fantasma offers a better introduction to Songs: Ohia than the last couple of proper albums.

Their peppy, gleeful, headstrong guitar pop sounds a hell of a lot like yesteryear's Britpop.

Arab Strap's music is still fractured, Smog-like, and woefully beautiful. The group's pitted, narky ambience fuses Irvine Welsh with Brian Eno's Another Green World-- Elephant Shoe is ambient for the Tamazipan massive.... Arab Strap's depression is as addictive as their expression of it is alluring.

Heart is a valuable pop record for those of us whose cardiac muscle hasn't stained completely black.

Surprisingly personal and emotionally resonant, Ether Teeth is potent inspiration stretched perhaps too thin, but undeniably captivating in its moments of brilliance.

Wonderful Rainbow delivers what Ride the Skies most lacked: Musical diversity.

In the process of recording another incredible album, he's discovered that light is most visible when it's flickering alone in the dark.

With Califone's penchant for extemporaneous creation finally being properly indulged, Heron King Blues is an appropriately loose and sprawling record, requiring a bit more patience than some of the band's previous projects.

What we have here is a long-awaited stepchild of IDM and hair metal sensibilities, joined by the omnivorous appetite of hip-hop.

Plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell.

Granted, a few tracks here require perhaps too much patience, or never peak as one might expect, or are overburdened with sound. But even these lesser tracks contain the simple, yet stunning affirmations that make Pierce so engaging.

Rejoicing in the Hands establishes Banhart as a major voice in new folk music. Not only does it improve on the promise of his earlier releases; it effortlessly removes the listener from the context of the recording.

Each of the dozen laments on Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers balance catchy choruses, exquisite instrumental interludes, and the complex words of a man's grieving.

Yes, it sounds quite a bit like The Books' debut, but it also sounds like nobody else. The Books remain more or less a genre of one.

From hip-hop to no-wave, jazz-punk disco to house music to electroclash, sleek funk to crusty noise, there's a lot to cover, and Soul Jazz does the job admirably, touring the biggest landmarks and some of the interesting diversions not on the map, but nonetheless co-existing side-by-side.

What they do well might be best exemplified by "I Believe in a Thing Called Love", which most effectively pairs their sense of theatricality and grandiosity with their penchant for great pop hooks.

Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots is a bold and inventive work, brimming with ideas and sublime moments of brilliance. But it's also unfocused and top-heavy.

The Dirty South is more consistent and cohesive song-for-song, its wide scope more public than personal.

It continues Björk's run of releases that sound nothing like their predecessors, yet is, as ever, particular to her.

Soft and subtle, Superwolf is the kind of record that unwinds slowly, and is best enjoyed over multiple listens and, unsurprisingly, many glasses of wine.

Set Yourself on Fire is about breaking up and breaking down, and as such the album feels wontedly cathartic, like the moments right after you hit your emotional nadir and start getting your shit together. Stars handle the mood delicately with few slip-ups; my only complaint is that they never handle much of anything else.

Forget the details: The sheer comfort of this stuff can charm just about anyone, from the rock bar to the office to your grandma's house.

The album loses a little of its steam toward the end, when too many songs play up the rap side of the equation over the rock, but on the whole A Gun Called Tension is surprisingly balanced and beholden to no preconceptions of how these two styles should mix.

The band's lack of swagger is refreshing amid the hot fussed-over convicts and misogynistic sun kings of the New Wave sphere, but it also hampers the less convincing tracks.

Kano doesn't just defy the sonic tradition of grime on Home Sweet Home, he defies the tidy boxes MCs are usually plopped in upon their arrival.

Quit +/or Fight may lack the immediate melodic punch of the band's debut-- it forsakes pristine strums for skewering electric guitar and scrappier arrangements-- but what the record sacrifices in warmth, it makes up for in atmospherics.

Cripple Crow is undoubtedly impressive, vastly singular but entirely accessible, and an inspired listening experience where Banhart again proves himself one of the more talented and charismatic forces in modern folk.