32 Levels is a line in the sand, rather than a high watermark, for Clams Casino and the genre as a whole; a fertile growth outward, rather than a zeitgeist-recapturing album.

Records like this are what will eventually outmode the contradiction of “too street for the industry,” eschewing both categories in the unique accomplishment of a profit-driven truth-telling venture. More like this.

For all the admiration and absorption of realness, Take Her Up To Monto is wholly surreal, enjoyable nonetheless.

A resonant narrative of apocalypse and transformation.

Blank Face is one of the strongest, most consistently enjoyable in years, even if its glossy and misanthropic merits falls just shy of GOAT status.

These are performative anthems, which use the sonic and affective history of their sounds to construct towering emotional peaks. It is essential inasmuch as it succeeds in touching on something inherent, drawing from a pre-conscious set of sounds to create music that is as striking as it is affecting.

Craig has become so good at his craft that one might be tempted to call Centres a magnum opus--it’s certainly grand enough.

Its intensity and aggressiveness reveal Truths about Raime’s process that “process music” can’t really tap into.

Anderson’s guitar-for-the-sake-of-guitar approach eludes grandeur and self-proclamation.

Freetown Sound is a clapback, a healing song, a historical re-embodiment of the (infinite number of) (also) black experience(s) contained within the vantage of a single individual.

You could diagnose I, Gemini as a frustrating text, a scattershot indulgence that only occasionally succeeds as a collection of songs: it is.

Wildflower isn’t going to shift any paradigms, and it’s not going to leave the same impression on the world that Since I Left You did all those years ago, but none of that makes it any less of a delight to listen to.

Unfortunately, for all the polish and gut that Grammy-winning producer Vance Powell brings to help turn diarrhea to gold, the songs lack idiosyncrasy, and Diarrhea Planet’s winking anachronistic irony is lost.

Bat For Lashes has contributed an imaginative installment to our love affair with marriage, in all its charms and discontents.

This isn’t their first release, but it’s no doubt their best so far, a fully realized space of shimmering notes and subtle signs toward a masterful production and shared creative mindset of defying expectation.

Autodrama feels just several adjustments away from fullness.

The Magic is Deerhoof’s 13th full-length album, and it’s one of their most well-rounded, sweeter offerings, perhaps a companion to Friend Opportunity or Offend Maggie in size and spirit.

Poetry aside, none of these 14 songs are highlights of any of the three artists’ vast catalogs. The stories and the production alike are pure sunshine, which often passes into the saccharine.

It’s Hard For Me to Say I’m Sorry feels brief, too, but it’s still highly allusive and transportive, dense and beautiful, like a field recording without a field.

Clean and expertly rendered, it will be interesting to hear what Haley Fohr’s musical world will next inhabit, though for now, Jackie Lynn has left her mark.

Every song lands, resounds, resists, and repeats true to its aim.

Mitski may not be any taller or feel like any less of a child, yet Puberty 2 is a monument built high, visible to more and more.

Co-opted as they may be, the best tracks tend to be the ones that aren’t attempting to mine old hooks for new hits.

For a record seeking personal elevation via uncontainable energy, The Glowing Man doesn’t always glow often or energetically enough to help its listeners realize that it’s trying to attain such elevation.

Wyatt processes his music through epic terms, even in its mildest moments, and if Union and Return isn’t a final destination, it is still undeniably a stepping stone, a vista for us to gaze upon with Wyatt as he campaigns on towards total, purified elevation of the mind and body.

Huerco S. claimed he wanted to make something timeless. Both genuinely and emblematically, he’s done just that.

Its library-lite funk may be full of syrupy drift, but the progressions are crafty enough to keep the listener from glazing over.

This record transcends genre and everybody knows it. Country music is haggard and calloused and hung up on itself, and Introducing Karl Blau is none of those things.