She’s an outsider claiming a piece of the mainstream for herself without sacrificing what makes her music so special.

There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away.

Its vivid imagery, anthemic arrangements, and unsuspecting listenability position it as hardcore’s Carrie & Lowell: an autobiographical tragedy that soars in spite of an overwhelming urge to succumb.

More than ever, DEP have songs. They're also the band's most colorful to date.

while other young UK-based electronic experimentalists like Floating Points make it onto the mix, Thomson's heavy label love is a reminder that he's constantly one step ahead of the game.

On their best album yet, Hiatus Kaiyote shine by building an architecture around these emotions, coming alive when they allow themselves to be more than just a great band.

Dust is a dense and heady record, and from certain angles can seem intimidating, even impenetrable. But between the clever track sequencing and a handful of irresistible outcrops of groove and melody, Halo provides plenty of footholds to cling onto while you acclimatise to her lawless universe.

It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes--but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.

Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward, an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process.

Entrench is the work of veterans who earned the rare second chance to make a first impression. They do not waste the opportunity.

On Blue Skies, they made the best choice, which is the only choice: Change nothing. Not one thing.

Rather than sounding as if they’ve been optimized by a digital studio, his beats tend to impart the illusion of different objects crashing to the ground at varying distances. They’re loose, anxious assemblages that leave plenty of space for the ear to play in.

Audacious and spectacular high stakes.

While Sulphur English is their least welcoming album, it is also their most rewarding. ... They’ve delivered a cohesive vision of internal destruction, all the more explosive for everything they’ve left behind.

Most of Lost and Safe is pleasant enough but not much more.

As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment.

Excavation gains power from gathering a little dust for a while, becoming a dark treat to occasionally sink into.

As a portrait of this ageless artist as a truly young man, Sugar Mountain is an invaluable document--and a pretty compelling one, too.

Instead of coming from noise and chaos, they're rooted in pastiche and show business-- especially on their one midtempo song, the 50s pop knockoff "Find Another Girl." Your parents might dig this album as much as you do.

Abstract, yet brutally honest, Burma shame the transparent, insecure and phony, reminding us that ideals can be standards.

Given its fragmented genesis, it's surprising how listenable and of-a-piece Fall Be Kind is.

Holley does with music what he’s done with visual art for decades: He collects our ugliest obscured objects and transforms them into singular reflections on our troubled world.

The profane marriage of old and new, big ugly riffs and shrieking noise, beauty and brutality seems like the clearest marker indicating where Full of Hell may intend to head next.

Even at its most inexplicable, there’s not a moment on Dolphine that feels careless. As her imagination roams, Birgy understands that sometimes irrationality is necessary to make sense of reality.

Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP.

A hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream.

Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, NV emerges with a visionary avant-pop record that offers an escape from gloom.