Onion tones down the Oakland-based quartet’s propensity for quirk and polishes their music’s lo-fi edges.
Always Ascending speaks to existential angst that prompts a grim outlook on the pursuit of happiness.
The album promotes a personal reckoning of one’s complicity in an increasingly toxic culture.
The album pares back Norwegian producer Hans-Peter Lindstrøm’s sound to the point of quasi-minimalism.
The music on St. Vincent’s latest is rooted in retro influences while the lyrics are decidedly forward-looking.
Despite the incessant theme of freedom on Colors, Beck’s idiosyncrasies seem constrained.
On Cry Cry Cry, Wolf Parade captures how complacency allows simmering tensions to metastasize.
The expansive Hiss Spun marks the most cohesive iteration of Wolfe’s sound to date.
Okovi reprises Zola Jesus’s familiar formula of pained, soaring vocals set to ghostly atmospherics.
Despite Haiku from Zero’s sunny musicality, there’s often a grim, apocalyptic subtext to the album’s songs.
The album explores self-imposed barriers rather than bracing against outside pressures.
Grizzly Bear’s Painted Ruins explores the inner conflict experienced when our best-laid plans fall apart.
The Road, Pt 1 is an eclectic, cinematic effort that’s also surprisingly cohesive.
The Haim sisters convey heartsick sentiments in only the broadest and vaguest of terms.
By failing to transcend binary pop tropes, Harris undermines what could’ve been a creative reinvention.
The album offers both dark clouds and silver linings through the band’s juxtaposition of anxiety and hope.
Portugal. The Man aims squarely at the 21st-century mainstream with their eighth album, Woodstock.
Crack-Up takes contrasting musical ideas and textures and makes them functional, if not transcendent.
The Mountain Goats’s Goths focuses on the blurry boundary separating artistic success from failure.
Though it’s encouraging to see DeMarco explore the darker side of life, This Old Dog feels thematically muddled.