Steve

I've had this on CD since it came out and only got round to the vinyl recently, which tells you something. Thirty-odd years in, and I never once felt I needed a better copy. Dulli narrates his own cruelty in real time and dares you to enjoy the swagger, and the awful part is that you do. The band swing where they should snarl, all that Cincinnati soul running underneath the meanness. He hands My Curse to Marcy Mays because he can't bring himself to sing those words, still the most honest gesture on a record built entirely out of dishonesty. I've seen them a few times and met Dulli once, long enough to tell him what this record meant to me. Top five, and it isn't moving.

Some records you admire. This one I've just lived alongside. It takes its time and asks the same of you: seven minutes here, nine there, keyboards stacked into rooms you can walk around inside, Smith's voice arriving so late in Plainsong that the wait becomes part of the song. Grief and infatuation and self-pity all sound identical in here, which is either a flaw or the whole point depending on your mood. I've been listening to it for decades now, and I've never once put it on out of nostalgia. In my top 5 of all time.

Opens with a 1970s cassette of her mother singing and closes by returning to it. Recorded largely live at Studios Opus in L'Assomption, and you can hear the room: air around the piano, a trumpet that appears and fades. The mid-album tempo can flatten out, but Rhythm of Nature, nine minutes in a single take, justifies the patience it asks for. The moment she stopped proving anything.

Chaos sculpted into something controlled without being restrained. A gallery of personas, with St. Chroma the newest mask, and features that land like oddball cameos in his own cinematic universe. Take Your Mask Off is his most introspective and uncomfortably so, calling out gang members, preachers and himself, then leaving the question open. His mother's voice closes it, grounding all of it.

Kurt Ballou back on the controls, and it sounds massive without losing clarity. Give Me the Painkiller brings an unexpected rock 'n' roll swagger; Lacking the Ability to Process Empathy is a slow grinding dirge that oozes malice. Familiar ground in places, and eight years for under 17 minutes is a strange trade, but every second lands.

Fewer arrows aimed at the back row this time. Granduciel co-produces and the songs breathe, taking their time. Chin Up handles the cost-of-living crisis as something felt in bones and counted in coins, and Crumbling Empire has him wrestling openly with his own changed position. Fans expecting Seventeen Going Under Part Two may balk, but this one reveals more with each listen.

Grown up but not grown out of the angst, dressed now in strings, synths and the occasional nu-metal flirtation. Where Skinty Fia got bogged down in its own seriousness, this one allows for levity. Starburster came out of a panic attack and keeps feeling like it might veer off the rails without ever doing it. Beauty in the darkness, and a damn good pop song at the end.

Named for the street she grew up on, her debut works as memoir and meditation, disillusionment without despair. The restraint is the point: she's not shouting for attention, just leaving the door ajar. It can get predictable, and the orchestral climax of Common Sense shows how much a bit more contrast would have helped. Designed to grow on you gradually.

Sixth solo album, and the shift is small but real: less omniscient narrator, more empathetic witness. Adam Granduciel produces, building environments rather than arrangements that compete with the stories. Kathleen Edwards turns up on three tracks. Works like a collection of short films, refinement over reinvention, attentive to mundane sadness without embellishment.

Rather than picking between Infinite Granite's shoegaze and the old ferocity, they synthesise both. Justin Meldal-Johnsen's mix gives each instrument space without thinning the density, and Daniel Tracy's drumming serves the emotional intent rather than showmanship. Spoken-word interludes

The Montreal band's debut starts like you've walked into someone's half-finished thought. Recorded at Studio Saint Zo with Scott Munro and Marlaena Moore producing, tactile but never slick. Buswa doesn't explain her Anishinaabe identity, she inhabits it, and the cultural references are embedded rather than footnoted. Its most affecting moments arrive casually.

Time drifts rather than passes. Folk if you need a label, though it sits closer to an ambient-naturalist diary: tape hiss, a creaking chair, friends listening to each other exist. Sprague's writing skips linear storytelling for fragments caught in amber. It occasionally drifts too far inward, but that may be the point. It doesn't push or pull, it floats and waits.

Yates produces this time, and the record sidesteps the Glow On expectations rather than answering them. Latin horns on Dreaming, Shabaka Hutchings' flute turning Sunshower into ambient jazz, and Daniel Fang's drumming is what keeps the wandering anchored. A few interludes read as range-showing rather than necessary. Growth that feels natural rather than forced.

Not chasing fireworks. Tracked live off the floor in living rooms and backyard garages, and you catch the creak of a chair, the air between instruments. Where Stay In Touch described moments as they happened, this one sits with what they leave behind. She trusts a single chord change to do the heavy lifting.

No reinvention, no throwback, just the band being themselves, which now means crushing you and caressing you in the same breath. Raskulinecz produces for the first time since 2010 and the sound is massive with space still in the mix. Carpenter's riffs feel weightless even while pummelling. More focused than Ohms, and they've stopped trying to prove anything.

Her sixth album, and the first in five years, produced by Jason Isbell and Gena Johnson in a more expansive, muscular frame than Total Freedom. Where that one leaned inward, this pushes outward, arrangements immediate and live. The words stay sharp: Other People's Bands skewers the small indignities of an industry that sidelines women, funny in its bite rather than bitter. Little Red Ranger is the centrepiece, building patiently, the chorus slipping in like a revelation rather than a hook. Her voice carries a weathered edge now, less pristine than on Failer, richer for it. Not a reinvention or a retreat. A recalibration.

The first sound isn't distortion, it's a clean guitar, unguarded and almost hesitant, before the calm fractures into feedback and anguish. Where Mire was defiant and Páthos tightened the screws, this one breathes. Dani Nightingale's autism diagnosis and coming out as non-binary form the emotional core, not as a concept but as lived experience poured into sound. Their vocal partnership with Brady Deeprose still works like conflicting thoughts, one snarling, one soaring, neither winning. Let Us Live opens on a sample from trans activist Carla Antonelli and turns into a demand for empathy carried on shared defiance. Having seen them tear through Montreal more than once, this sounds less like a controlled detonation now and more like an exorcism.

Julia Steiner walks straight up to the problem on Open Up: "What's it gonna take to open up?" Conversational but not casual, the hard version of honesty where you don't get to control the reaction. Ratboys keep their sunshower brightness but stop using it as camouflage. Then they get weird, and it feels central rather than a side quest, Light Night Mountains All That full of images that refuse linear narrative while Dave Sagan's guitar acts like a nervous system. The centrepiece Just Want You to Know the Truth sprawls past eight minutes because the subject demands it, and its most devastating moment is its least theatrical. The chair stays empty. The songs keep talking anyway.

Back at God City with Kurt Ballou, no guests, no studio tricks, four people playing like the building might come down if they hesitate. The title track explodes out of the gate, thrash riffs snapping together before swerving into powerviolence, Bannon's voice already torn to shreds. Distract and Divide packs an insane amount of rage into barely two minutes. Beyond Repair drops the vocals entirely for droning guitars and rising feedback, and the quiet hits as hard as the loud. The track order wears you out on purpose, no safe entry point, each song cranking the pressure. 35 years in and the album stops because there's nowhere left to go, not because anything got fixed.

Rain hisses through the speakers before the first riff lands, then Zeitgeist arrives on stacked tremolo runs and blast beats that feel less like a groove and more like a weather system. Speed is only one tool. The record keeps pulling back from full acceleration to open space for melody, brief shapes hovering before the next surge wipes them away, and Alex Josien's drumming stays precise enough to hold the structure together. The middle stretch finds the unsettling colours: Prekonition slides downhill as the melody returns slightly altered each time, and Nonsense bends the band's own language until it's unclear which way the track will fall. A few riffs cycle longer than they need to, though the patience is also where the best moments come from.

The songs shift internally, parts arriving a fraction early or late, harmonies that don't settle before moving again, and you can hear people listening to each other in real time. The record is most convincing when it leaves space: Kitchen barely holds onto anything at all, no bass tying it down, and lifts without trying. Lucky goes the other way, louder and more fixed, like the room got smaller and nobody noticed. Feist slips in alongside her on Living With It, not quite harmony, more a second thought running in parallel.

Six years on from It Is What It Is, Stephen Bruner got sober, lost a hundred pounds and started boxing. Sober Steve turns out to be just as scattered as the old one, only now he's running the vacuum over the same patch of carpet at midnight and feeling it. The big change is Greg Kurstin taking the controls for most of the record, with Flying Lotus down to two tracks: cleaner structures, breathers between the bass runs, choruses that resolve where Lotus would have let them dissolve. Mac Miller appears on She Knows Too Much from pre-2018 recordings, unguarded and careless and present rather than mournful. The pop clarity gives these songs oxygen, and the trade sounds deliberate.

She opens by holding back: So It Starts barely registers as a song, more a breath, before Make It All Better brings shape and leaves her voice low in the mix, close but not quite centred. The tension never resolves. The cleaner songs, To Love Somebody, White Noise, land immediately and slip away just as fast, polished into the current version of indie pop. She's more interesting when something feels slightly off, like Die Happy, where the bassline does the talking and her calm makes it heavier than it should be. The better songs keep slipping out of reach. You follow those instead.

The horns on Not Around Anymore don't announce anything, they hover while the rest of the band assembles around them, and by the time Kevin Drew's voice arrives the song is already four things at once. First record in nine years, made partly at a studio they built in Warkworth, Ontario, with David Newfeld producing. Newfeld worked on You Forgot It in People and the 2005 self-titled, and his instinct has always been to treat the stereo field as spatial rather than ornamental: instruments hard-panned, sounds dropping in mid-phrase, the mix behaving less like a finished object than a room mid-conversation. Studio chatter stays in throughout, "Can I have a little more of that click?", left there deliberately. Not a subtle gesture, and it doesn't need to be. Hannah Georgas takes lead on Only the Good I Keep, her first as a principal voice on record, and holds her ground without leaning on the ensemble. Relief is Lisa Lobsinger and hits harder than anything else here, Justin Peroff's drums up in the mix, the structure stripped to a two-chord pulse she turns into something that accumulates. Feist appears on What Happens Now, a reshaped Hug of Thunder outtake, thin arrangement and muted drums, "I just died and I'm still in love with life" holding rather than collapsing. The quieter tracks are where the record is most itself, Parking Lot Dreams closing on acoustic guitar and a murmur, ending without resolving anything.

Seven years gone, and they come back not by recreating their twenties but by kicking the door off its hinges. The math-rock contortions that defined The Weird and Wonderful Marmozets have mostly gone. Groove arrived in their place, plus hooks and an unstable confidence that flickers between snarl and surrender, sometimes mid-bar. Becca Bottomley still screams like she means it but there's control underneath now, less interested in the spectacle of its own range. Cut Back is the one that will detonate live, arcade synths and four-to-the-floor drums that refuse to let the song breathe, a song that doesn't build toward anything and just keeps arriving. Then Dandy tilts the record, acoustic guitar and voice, the quiet centre of an album that mostly refuses quiet, written almost a decade ago and sounding like a younger version of the band reaching forward. For a group that came up sounding like nervous breakdowns set to time signatures, it's striking how often this one reaches toward light, not as resolution, more like a direction they keep stumbling in. Keep Going Darling runs past seven minutes and earns itself if you let it.

Beck Zegans has spent seven years in Ridgewood playing guitar in Palehound and writing her own songs on the side, the kind that kept their distance. Her debut solo LP is where she drops it. Each of the nine songs started as a home demo, guitar and voice over a drum loop, and that mechanical heartbeat never lets up. The drum on I Want You was tracked slow and sped back up, so it lands a fraction off from anything a person would play, and Zegans lets the verses simmer over it before the chorus detonates into warm, raspy vocals knotted into fuzz guitars. Beautiful and heavy in the same breath, which is hard to fake. The frankness is the thing. It came out of the pandemic, when she got angrier, reached for angrier music and quit hiding inside metaphor. The wanting, the urge to bolt the second something good shows up. New York is everywhere in these songs, rivers of beautiful trash where everyone hides from what they want too badly, and she loves the place the worn-out way you love something that keeps flattening you. El Kempner of Palehound plays lead on Riddle and returns for Woods, which climbs through layered riffs toward something like weight lifting off before the guitars turn dissonant and stay there. She never hands you the tidy resolution. The drums hold their line to the end, the armour comes off, and she leaves it where it falls.

The kit is gone and you feel it in your chest before you register it consciously. The Montreal trio open with sustained guitar drone and Liam Andrews' bass carrying the rhythm alone, and the architecture holds. This is his first studio record with the band, tracked live, and the bass does structural and emotional work at once. On what may be the kindest way to leave it plods and churns in the low end while Robin Wattie traces elaborate melodic lines above it, resigned and unhurried, circling "Trade this body for a piece of ease" with the patience of someone who has been thinking that thought a long time. Something hymnal in the construction. Folk music filtered through noise and out the other side. a shape of shame is where the record announces what it's capable of, dry acoustic strums ringing above the feedback with a metallic clarity that feels almost misplaced before the noise rises and takes them. verdure is the centrepiece and the most harrowing stretch, a distorted bass signal and the hollow knock of a tapped pickguard cycling into something that resembles a malfunctioning synth, then escalating into harsh noise until the source barely registers as guitar. an uttering of antipathy turns condemnation inward through Auto-Tune, crystalline and psychedelic. It ends on a question dressed as a koan and the line "I could try again." The drones are still going when she says it.

An exercise tape counts off at the top of Move Like You Do, then the bassline shows up and does that rubbery Jungle thing where the groove leans a fraction ahead of the drums. Four bars and you know whose record this is. Sunshine is the first album made with Lydia Kitto as a full member rather than the voice they kept calling back, and it shows up structurally: she fronts the title track, Carry On, Reflection and the closer, so the stacked harmonies that used to live down inside the production now have somebody standing in front of them. Carry On drops the tempo, lets a jazz feel into the chords and puts something plainly confessional over the glossiest arrangement here, a pairing that should curdle and instead becomes the most disarming thing on the record. The Wave goes to Brazil, 60s and 70s rhythm under a soul-jazz base, the most intoxicating stretch. The control is also the argument against it. Volcano showed how much further this band could push, and Sunshine mostly chooses refinement over reach across eleven tracks and a little over half an hour. The group chant turns from decision into default by the third appearance. Then Heavy On My Soul arrives almost entirely acoustic, barely three minutes, and the groove the previous ten songs leaned on simply isn't there. Kitto sounds better with less around her, and somebody should have noticed earlier in the sequence.

Ten years since his last solo album, and he opens with mariachi horns like he's about to announce a reinvention. Risk It All leans into bolero melodrama, nylon string guitar and swelling strings, Mars dropping the funk flirtation for full crooner. For a minute you think he might turn the ship somewhere new. He doesn't. Within a few tracks the record settles into the familiar template: tight funk grooves, horn stabs placed with engineer precision, background vocals stacked just so. He has always been brilliant at channelling other eras, studying the inflections and the way a chorus lifts, and getting them right every time. That's also the problem. I Just Might is the centrepiece, catchy enough that your brain starts scanning for the original. The production is immaculate and the voice is still ridiculous, pivoting from crystalline to rasp in half a bar. On Why You Wanna Fight? he leans into the grit and there's actual friction, less homage than him, even if that version is still wearing someone else's suit. The lyrics thin out into love, forever, destiny, devotion, big feelings in broad strokes. The Romantic doesn't feel like a comeback because he never vacated the stage. It feels like a maintenance check. Everything is contained. The best moments are the few where it almost gets away from him.

Heroes of a Hundred Fields comes straight in swinging, drums already running when it hits, guitars piling in behind them like they're trying to catch up. Winterfylleth have always worked in that space between atmosphere and force, and this one leans harder on the force. Not faster exactly, just less patient. The guitars keep climbing even when the rhythm section is locked into something heavy, and when they open into wider melodic lines they don't float, they press. A Hollow Existence gets there through density rather than tempo, more notes, more pressure, same pace, the guitars tilting slightly off where you expect them to land. Perdition's Flame strips it back to impact, tight percussive riffing locked to the drums, Simon Lucas pushing underneath without showing off. The title track comes in fragments before the lead guitar finally breaks through, less a release than a widening. Unspoken Elegy pulls everything down to acoustic guitar and cello without settling, the same tension stripped of distortion, while In Ashen Wake takes maybe longer than it needs. They could have ended with Where Dreams Once Grew. Instead they close with a Paradise Lost cover, Enchantment, well played and respectful but sitting slightly outside the record. Most of The Unyielding Season finds Winterfylleth at close to their best, and the parts that miss don't linger long enough to matter.

Her fourth album was recorded in a studio inside a partially decommissioned hospital in Castlemaine, regional Australia, and the building seeps in. Long corridors, emptied rooms, echoes with nowhere useful to go. Not gothic, just a particular stillness that makes interior noise louder. The instrumentals scattered through the record work as weather changes rather than filler, On the Ward especially, a dub-inflected bassline threading through silence that's building-shaped. Alone With You leans poppier and warmer, Nighttime moves the other way into dub-tinged post-punk atmospheres where AC Marias and Dome feel present without being imitated. Where Come Around had hooks and release, this one withholds. The voice sits closer in the mix, less draped in reverb, and the songs are diaristic in a way her earlier work rarely was. On Going Out she wants someone she probably shouldn't: "Shouldn't want to kiss you but I do." The plain syntax is doing real work. Under the Covers gives domestic routine the same attention as the charged material, melody barely moving, vocals close enough that you notice the breath. Dal Forno set out wanting abstraction and ended up somewhere more exposed, singing plainly even when plainness costs something.

Recorded in three weeks with John Congleton, and the speed shows in the best way. There's friction in the playing that hasn't been in a Death Cab record for years: Punching the Flowers lurches on post-punk tension and math-rock angles, Envy the Birds shifts time signatures under acidic guitar and a half-heard slide line, How Heavenly a State turns feedback and a mechanical rhythm section into the album's most aggressive moment. Nick Harmer's bass refuses to sit politely anywhere on the record. The surprise isn't that Ben Gibbard is writing about divorce. It's how often he turns the knife toward himself, circling private cruelties and failures that compounded quietly over years. Trap Door is the finest thing here, a snowflake becoming an avalanche, "if only the winners write history, there'll be nothing on our page" landing like an admission held back for months. By I Built You a Tower (B), the structure he spent the album building has already crumbled. Most bands this deep into a career settle into habit. Death Cab walked back into the room with their younger selves and found fresh bruises waiting.