For the duo to finally meet in the middle for a full-length project after all these years—and for that project to be as warm, gutter, and satisfying as The Elephant Man’s Bones—is remarkable.

While the subject matter of POST- ensures its relevance and substance, much like everything else Rosenstock has ever done, it also sounds like the most fun thing one could possibly do. It’s a motivation to, at the very least, get out of bed.

Against those odds, Gillis turns these perceived weaknesses into strengths; as his most fussed-over and carefully plotted album, All Day paradoxically sounds like his most effortless.

They've found a way to be ambitious while also elemental, a difficult trick that Sleep pulled off on Holy Mountain and Dopesmoker, and one that High on Fire have nailed here.

Impersonator gently twists your arm like this, song-by-song and note-by-note, and it is as discomfiting as it is transcendent.

It doesn’t hurt that their newfound transparency makes the music feel refreshingly human and relatable. Gains-obsessed beefcakes prodding the tropes and social expectations of heavy music by making an extremely heavy album is the Armed doing what the Armed do best—leading with their performative instincts.

Locrian chose to slow down and create consecutive meticulous albums. They are isolated and involved worlds of sound.

The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored.

Giving too much credit to Taylor's influence and direction, however, undermines the Morning Benders' stylistic transition, one any band would envy and many listeners will love.

The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet.

The slate of beats on Cilvia Demo unites into a consistently immersive, complete album package that's just as ruminative as the lyrics.

For the most part, Me is a requiem for a doomed romance, and the greatest measure of Rodriguez's confidence is just how candid and vulnerable she allows herself to be here.

The Satanist is a terrific coil of most everything Behemoth have ever done well, a strangely hopeful vision of hell wrested away from its very grip.

10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun.

This is an album whose every layer seems customized, whose every crease seems deliberate. That calculation doesn’t seem to have mitigated Indian’s power at all. Rather, this is the strongest they’ve ever sounded and the smartest they’ve ever sounded.

It's the sound of an artist uniquely in tune with his instrument, as Holden coaxes all manner of beastly noise out of his mighty modular synthesizer, trying to keep that sound organized and only sometimes succeeding.

It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog.

Bliss is eerie because it takes the seduction of those forms and turns it slightly askew; there's something unsettling about the musical equivalent of a permanent smile.

Aviary ultimately has the effect of looking through a new friend’s bookshelf, accessing the wild particularities of their mind.

Lucky for us, there’s no one else like them and on Present Tense, their success has allowed Wild Beasts to be even more like themselves.

As Black Is shifts through different moods, it never loses focus.

An enveloping, mysterious record that marries the idealism of "the future of tomorrow today" to the stark reality of the post-millennial present and finds beauty and fascination in the tussle between melody and rhythm.

These songs sound full and finished even in their austerity.

Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery.

Underneath these filmy and seductive layers is not a band in limbo. This may be Wild Beasts' first album, but they've got a fully developed aesthetic, one that is thematically and vocally alien, but sonically, pop and conventional.

Luck in the Valley is so vibrant, engaging, and alive, it's hard to overestimate it.

Despite the sparser arrangements and increased focus on direct lyricism, it's every bit as aurally hypnotic as his previous work. It seems like he realized there was someone he really did want to sing to.