Finding new ways to speak old truths. I think that’s why we may be here. I think that’s what Phil and Julie find as they wing and waver their voices around the songs of Lost Wisdom pt. 2.

With a less captivating vocalist, this kind of genre-hopping might have felt inconsistent, a potpourri in constant motion, too scattered to register an impact. But Polachek’s range, her penchant for leaving her gasps and deep breaths in her vocal tracks, her carefully thought-over phrasing — these tie Pang together into one very earwormy book of spells.

The 10 selections are less a swirling cacophonous summation of Purgas and Ginzburg’s documents thus far than a series of muted, disorganized footnotes. They step out and freeze like models on a runway at a pace both deliberate and seemingly tentative. ... Most vitally, Blossoms is Emptyset continuing to do uncompromising, restless Emptyset, with no sign of stagnation (even if this very phenomenon continues to be a crucial aspect of their sound).

There is a true communion with the brimmed-over melodies and rhythms, but a desperation that seems to know solemn silence isn’t what’s left over. Often, the listen feels like an impossible reprieve in a crumbling structure, with a rich echo helping to sell you on your own resolve. Not unlike love itself, it is a riveting, wrenching, and absurdly rewarding experience.

It’s a party album, which means it’s utopian. It’s a solo album, which means it’s rebooting. “Next Level Charli” doesn’t sound like a version we’ve never heard before; it sounds like the very same, not even accelerated but integrated, at 100% synchronization rate.

It’s comprised largely of several years of demos and “field recordings” and collected samples and experiments and improvisations. Perhaps that’s why it feels so novel at the precipice of a new decade; after 10(+) years of failed political experiments and improvisations, here’s a new songbook stripped of the arrogance and pretense of capitalist evangelism.

As a propulsive work, fueled by immediacy and intensity, Devour rejects the attempt to escape the body through the gear-consumed noise fetishist.

These songs won’t necessarily get stuck in your head, but the swerving asymmetry to C’est ça has you clinging to these hooks like handles on a speeding train.

Guitarist Cassie Ramone and bassist Katy Goodman haven’t tweaked much of their fast-paced and fuzz-caked formula this time around, but they’ve certainly refined the hell out of it. Never has the band sounded so imposing in a studio setting, reining their once-uncontainable feedback into a beefy wall of sound.

All My Heroes Are Cornballs serves as an electronic manifesto for his fans, guerilla warfare of the auditory kind. Umberto Eco would be proud.

In House of Sugar, Alex Giannascoli relinquishes the ownership in authorship, providing a venue for those voices that regale him to decompress, elongate, saunter. It is roomy in House of Sugar, where possession recedes into usufruct.

There’s little apparent by way of concept, lyrical wit, and aesthetic quirk — qualities that illuminate the work of many of Duterte’s colleagues — but ambience, style, and ingenuity are well at work, making the album a vibe-y classic worth hanging onto.

Overall, Venus in Leo deviates minimally, fearful of letting light shine in, but the moods it creates shimmer with a gorgeous, melancholic atmosphere.

As dub creates stripped canvases to then be used to host further expressions, so do these versions. They encourage engagement and further remixing by projecting the past and present into an unknown future.

The Flower and the Vessel is etymological in the magical realist sense. It traces language as a memory.

Surprisingly, it’s far more tuneful than her previous release, ALL BITCHES DIE, and yet arguably even less listenable. ... Her voice is an astonishing instrument, moving from operatic fullness to hyperventilating shredded shrieks, but always foregrounding intelligibility.

This is music for that, a form of attention, a voice answering a voice.

Bandana continues a conversation not only between eras and between styles, but also between Freddie Gibbs and Madlib, both of whom continue to carve a path wholly their own — with little regard for what lays outside of it.

With Sarah Davachi’s baroque venture on Pale Bloom into the sensuous folds of light blooming into light, one can hear unfolding this always light and lightness.

black midi aim to dazzle and perform, and with Schlagenheim, their mammoth ideations never cease to thrill, the product of a boundless creative spirit and unwavering techni

Rap is an extrovert’s game, but the dynamism that Megan possesses is nearly unmatched. Her verses are absolutely electrifying, packing the heat she sponged up from her favorites like UGK, Project Pat, and Trina. Sprinkle a little Memphis here, some Miami bass there, and a bit of Houston swagger, and it’s a chemistry experiment gone horribly right.

YG’s songs about women are just clumsy from a basic storytelling standpoint, rehashing the same clichés that you’d find on a Hotep Facebook group. It stunts the flow of 4REAL 4REAL. ... But while he oftentimes plays the role of hyper-masculine rapper, he also defines his anxiety in deeply traumatic and thorough ways. He has a knack for boisterous exuberance, stressing the finer things while being relatable to regular people on every block in every town.

Dedicated isn’t a perfect album--it’s overlong and occasionally concedes too much to chart tastes to be interesting. But by the time Jepsen takes a bow following bonus track “Party For One,” you’re reminded once again of her generosity, of all the space she’s cleared for strength and weakness, for personal epiphanies and communal release.

His arrangements stay wondrous as usual, carrying a gravitas that hasn’t been present in his recent creative (see: non-musical) work.

Titanic Rising is even more accomplished than putting Mering’s state of grace to music; with her 70s-inflected approach to songwriting, she succeeds in nothing less than recalibrating time.

It’s a good album. ... It’s a lusher, synthy, melodramatically gothy version of Tamaryn’s sound. More Soft Cell, less Chapterhouse.

This recording renders music back into its essence, that language that, instead of communicating meanings, is, as Adorno has it, the human attempt, doomed as ever, to name the Name, which has been dispersed.

Like a stew, this album takes energies and flavors from its components, each contribution blending and acquiring the vibrations of everything around it. The songs reverberate, flow into one another, sooth and intrigue.

Marrying the weight of her subject matter and boundless ideas into such a light and airy form can sometimes yield lopsided results. But given enough space, Lafawndah can truly soar.

When I listen to this, when it hits me when I’m living or trying to be with others, or trying to be with myself, or trying, it is all I need.

Plastic Anniversary is unfamiliar, strange, unsettling, and wonderful.

Ultimately, that’s what it all comes down to: not necessarily violence, but feeling. That feeling when a tune hits you right in the chest, connects to you in a visceral way, spreading bubbles across your skin like spilt champagne. That feeling, so brilliantly conveyed by AJ Tracey on this album, of no longer just surviving but actually living.

No question, This Is How You Smile is a love album, a happy album in spite of everything and anything else. It’s there in the title. Instructions for sanity and joy can be simple to follow. Roberto Carlos Lange seems to have it figured out.

The handful of atmospheric pieces on Careful don’t necessarily contribute but do nod to the filmic quality of Boy Harsher’s work. But where the adjective “cinematic” is usually an upsell these days of “boring,” Boy Harsher have a gift at conjuring visceral emotions with subtlety.

Despite the flying dog daydream that inspired the record, Cabral often underlines the more fantastical elements of her work with a deep sense of melancholy.

thank u, next builds on Sweetener by switching modes of scale. It’s less about looking at the world than being by yourself, more focused on the textures of memory than our actions stemming from it. ... thank u, next is also Ariana’s most stunning vocal album.

For going on 20 years, when Xiu Xiu have put out an album, it’s one of that year’s best. It’s no small thrill to see this trend continue.

The elusive details in the songs here are what bring me back, haunted.

What Chaos Is Imaginary serves as an important document of the Girlpool narrative: a juncture in the band’s career that highlights the emotional (and in Tucker’s case, physical) changes its artists are reckoning with as their success grows in the indie community.

Assume Form, at its center, feels like genre gloop spread over toast: good but too-easily digested. Sometimes it cloys. Sometimes it gets you through the day.

He might not be making sounds for fighting the many injustices of our current place and time, but Unseen in Between is nonetheless a solid compatriot against the confounding effect of going forward among them.

For all its signs of progression, the record is never heavy-handed with its ambition. Its unforced attempt at making sense of the fraught present, at finding shelter without resorting to convenient escape, is a rare and, dare I say, sincere feat.

It is a strange softness that contains all in a luminescence that exceeds it.

Eden’s greatest asset is cupcakKe’s domineering voice; she wields hooks that effectively complement her verses and maintains a flow that not only justifies but also elevates her puerile sense of humor.

Ultimately, despite Gainsborough’s troubling of dance, of the physical, of expectations, the most successful (and most fascinating) tracks are those that engage with the dancefloor, or at least with rhythm, rather than do away with it completely.

Even if it frontloads the strongest and newest material, Black Velvet provides a largely engaging second side. The one exception being his cover of Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold,” originally released as a single in 2011, which feels somehow more gimmicky than the (solid, even if it highlights how cloying Cobain’s lyrics could be) Nirvana cover preceding it.

Stadium here is an exposition of time, in this stadion, this measureless measure, or rather, time is here exposed.

Allways, then, is simply a welcome return from one of Chicago’s most consistent artists, reaffirming their primacy among contemporary exploratory rock bands.

It represents an astounding step forward in its scope and ambition. The claustrophobia of Loud City Song and the self-imposed aesthetic limitations of Have You in My Wilderness have given way to wide-screen, exploratory, celebratory triumph.

As gorgeous and misstep-free as it is, the soundtrack risks a bit of that souvenir, collector’s item feel native to score-based soundtracks. That being said, it’s nowhere near as padded-out as those typically are. While melodies and tones recur, track to track, it plays out with an ear toward immersion.

An architecture of mediated sound is being built here, flecked with the indelible traces of the locations, communities, and forms of feeling contained in the music. And, importantly, the process of this construction is suffused with joy, with the afterglow of countless nights remembered and forgotten.

The album’s second half becomes noticeably more lo-fi as it draws to a close, with the band laying down instrumental nebulas into which Vile allows his voice to languidly recline. It’s a hazy ending to a bear of an album, but one that rewards those who stuck with it through the 80 or so minutes.

This is remarkable music that proves the expansive possibilities present in one note. It feels symmetrical, but it’s not; it feels additive, but it’s not. Instead, Barbieri coaxes provocative, varied textures and melodies out of the continuous electric field generated by her synthesizer, and in doing so, she has made a drone record that feels very much alive.

Mother of My Children is, generously and radically, an attempt to reconcile an identity with a universe.

Another Life, chameleonic as it is demonic, aggregates its influences and kaleidoscopes them into earworming shards of electronic puncta, a diabolical mimesis whose loathsome grin belies its functionality as dance music.

At 35 minutes, Room 25 is more of a mission statement than a treatise on Noname’s self-examination. Its 11 songs leave us wanting more.

It sits in the top tier with other indie folk/rock live albums, like Bill Callahan’s Rough Travel for a Rare Thing, Ryan Adams’s Live at Carnegie Hall (the full version), the Elliott Smith bootleg Live at Studion, and, of course, Kozelek’s Live at Biko. But there’s something worthwhile about these albums that goes beyond their technical mastery and the songs they contain.

Serenity and temperance are peculiar words to use in praise of popular music, yet these are In Another Life’s most appealing features. Its greatest achievement entails the mindset it creates and invites the listener into, as the LP humbly ventures into well-tread musical territories.

Bowie’s only consistent trajectory has been one of tearing down his mythos even as his builds it, and his latest manages to knock down yet another wall as he steps more fully into the light than he’s ever dared tread before. On Safe in the Hands of Love, Yves Tumor isn’t concerned with being “experimental;” he’s simply concerned with being.

While James is here less austere than on Cheetah EP and less eccentric than on landmark release Richard D. James Album, Collapse nevertheless proves to be a serviceable Aphex Twin release at this point in his career. His knack for finding interesting textures and layers hasn’t been compromised nor has his willingness to build off of previous styles in his oeuvre.

That Body ends so softly is itself a brilliant resolution, even though its obvious contrast with its first notes is more clever than I care.

One of the most masterful things about the album is the way it flows, highlighting fugitive detail the way clothing highlights body parts, abandoning the traditional ups and downs of verse/chorus structure. Double Negative owes this poise to its intentional construction--a collaboration and a transferring of creative heft

A big album, grandly ambitious and sonically expansive.

The Morning Star is both an Exaltation of the Guitar and a magician’s vanishing act: Bachman himself, noise-man under the role of hypnotist, embracing chance and slippages and sloppiness and draperies.

EPHEM:ERA cheats our trained cognition and creates a space for itself, playing with our restless thirst for difference, working itself into the gaps in our memory.

Death Lust expands post-hardcore and its asphyxiating spatializations, giving the genre and the sweaty people in it room to breathe. Reinvigorated by this pneumatic procedure, respiration transpires: Chastity’s pulmonary labor sets the stifling structures of headphone listening alight, giving us light and letting us (mired in the heavy) feel light.

The sound of loving is consistent, even as it appears in radically different instances. The mechanism of love song fits all bodies, all modes. It lands on ears, it laps and licks and it does no harm.

Be the Cowboy is about capriciousness, denying the contrivances of beauty in some ways while bending to its standards in others. She’s walking the divide between love and heartache, between dejection and fury. But Miyawaki has the talent to straddle that line with poise and aplomb; she’s the geyser and also the slow dancer. She’s singing for herself, but also for her audience. There’s a little Mitski in us all, pilgrim.

Eight of the twelve tracks here surpass a four-minute run time and few would sound as good on a dancefloor as they do on a laptop. So to ask the audience to remain patient for the record’s 55 minutes proves a tall order, especially for music as subdued as this. Still, Weatherall demonstrates an indisputable talent for compiling and arranging a diverse array of sounds into one cohesive song on Family Portrait.

Gate of Grief puts the band back on the map, and while it sometimes stumbles, it nevertheless continues to slink around in the shadows, cackling.

Soil is a crucial psalm; crucial for its queerness, crucial for its catholicism, its pagan roots protruding into sidewalks, crucial for its purity of heart, crucial for how it avoids imperative, softly chiming.

Rausch is a portrait of nature as the birthplace of modernity, and the birthplace of modernity is here.

Although disintegration’s reach is far, infinite abandonment, even imagined, can’t be contained, but it can be uttered in a cry. All vibrantly tactile, this realization that it took self to cry for a self with which you’re now commingled in song.

The live shows Body/Head have done in the interim, where much of the material comprising The Switch sprang from, seems to’ve helped them nail down a more cohesive approach. It’s still wide open, drifting music, but with a relative brevity that helps it lodge more with the listener as an album.

Lamp Lit Prose is a quiet retreat into the confines of basic rock and pop trappings--perhaps not an unpredictable stepping stone in the group’s career, but certainly not unwelcome either.

After navigating complex matrices of identity under an indulgent, accessible veneer, Dirty Computer is ultimately--even “simply”--a cathartic assertion of self in a hostile system.

Musically, the album’s apparent incompleteness--the always dissolving lack of coherence, the mosaic of multiple voices, the chance and chaos by which the songs were arranged--abides by the peripheral pull of curiosity. ... Curiosity perforates the veil and returns, yet remains ephemeral.

Fractured, inconsistent, broken, torn, OIL OF EVERY PEARL’S UN-INSIDES aims toward the stylistic grandness of High Pop, and in that inconsistence, it achieves it. ... It’s incredible.

Airs resists the cheap gratification of the indie genre’s tendency of plundering from rock & roll’s rich past with only a passing fancy. Rae’s commitment to serving the dignity and stateliness of those genres is the record’s greatest asset, and with it comes the authenticity of a younger artist who’s keenly aware of her modest place in Nashville’s wide musical tapestry, but nonetheless confident enough to prove her salt time and again.

Although there is no absence of noise on this record, what is quieter about it gives space to hear what was always there: a fully embodied voice that, through pain as through love, ceaselessly gives only herself, an angel whose message becomes indistinguishable in grace from the messenger.

ye really does what a self-titled album should do: it says “Hey, this is who I am.” Even at 23 minutes, it almost feels like two different albums: an aggressive, dissonant one, and an empathetic, soulful one. Yet, those aren’t the two sides of Kanye, because those things exist in him simultaneously, all the time.

Atonement is the name of the game on this record, and when paired with Tillman’s gorgeous baritone and humble melodies, the self-reflective end result is often heartening. Not every track here captures this doleful magic (“The Songwriter” and closer “We’re Only People” occasionally get lost in their own sorrow), but it’s commendable all the same.

Puff doesn’t grab your attention directly. Rather, it occupies your subconscious, leaving vestiges of melodies and lyrics behind that lie dormant for stretches of time, resurfacing intermittently and maddeningly.

Even if The Long Sleep is (deep down or hiding in plain sight) a resigned, muted, end-of-the-line Kool-Aid party, the bug juice is delectable enough to call one back from the great unknown for seconds and so on.

Walker is still ultimately a troubadour at heart, a keeper of old languages retelling us stories from years past, and Deafman Glance shows that he’s continuing to sharpen his tongue.

It remains first and foremost a very fun album.

A tightly-controlled, affectively capacious accumulation of sound that communicates beyond speech. In its collection of styles, histories, and genres, it weaves a mesh for the listener to inhabit.

A return to/remaining within form where Carey’s freewheeling guitar and (thankfully) sandblasted and virtuosic voice beam at us from our speakers in triumphant denouement.

Panic Blooms is a long overdue sound from a project that sees the absurdity in holding onto feelings while desperately trying to feel. It’s borderline pop.

Wide Awake! is the album in which America’s most consistent punk band once again distill their myriad influences, this time with a whole new list of reasons why their minds never push the brakes.

At times, the record is just classically Surreal, a bucolic unheimlich provoking a fleeting confrontation with the unconscious. What remains most alluring about this experiment’s broken logic is the sense that you’re furtively occupying someone else’s dream.

Knock Knock is full of surprises, and Koze is floating, in a meditative stance, watching over your shoulder as you revel in its resplendent glory.

The Sea and Cake continue to be champions for the weary and resolute alike, being both the soothing reassurance of beauty and the wistful resolve that the most dogged absolute is the very impermanence of everything. It’s a deceptively tricky feat and one that they continue to thrive on.

For the most part, it’s the moments that pivot between shadow and light that provide the most pleasure. “L’Inconnue” emerges from its chrysalis around the 1:40 mark, Legrand singing in French as a heavenly choral loop begins to surround her voice. Both musically and lyrically, the development feels closer to the sound of falling in love than anything they’ve made, an ecstatic payoff that ranks among their finest work.

Maybe much will be made of their newplayful trifling with those muchmaligned indiedancetronica influences, but I don’think this is the mereaesthetic synthwave chill,man plasticity of the endlessly reproducible shoppingmall sunset.

It contains extraordinary moments of dissonance, rhythms coalescing and congealing then melting away, quietly shimmering choral vocoders. It’s (even) less pop-influenced than earlier works of Dalt’s (Commotus, for example). In its latter half, it sometimes errs into a backgroundish quality, disappearing into its own subtlety

In Rebound, Friedberger meets mementos of happier times and opportunities for immediate joy with identical ease. And that is the promise, making her latest album an intriguing open door from an artist who continues to grow in all possible ways.

Caer is a magnificent oasis of feeling and reflection, where self-doubt, confidence, love, and lust live so comfortably alongside one another.