FLOOD

Whether tenderly crooned or roughly rapped, whether stoically alone or with a crew of features, the songs on the rapper’s eighth LP find him calling into question his past, present, and future.

The lyrical doom and gloom that matches the music’s slowed, metallic, ethereal ambience on the band’s first record in 16 years focuses very pointedly on true death.

Far from isolating Ferry from Roxy Music, this 50-year retrospective examines collaboration as the throughline between his elegant early material and his latter-day paeans to loneliness.

The illustrator explores the ketamine researcher’s “peculiar and distressing” fantasies in his latest psychedelic graphic novel, out now via Anthology Editions.

The indie-folk vets take maximalist swings on their eleventh record, with their swelling, sophisticated soundscapes often feeling muted by Conor Oberst’s sullen lyrics.

Sophie Allison’s fourth album digs deeper both poetically and personally as her dozy, conversational vocals and pop-grunge arrangements reach their clearest form.

Composed of the avant-garde songwriter’s first four solo records along with live recordings and other oddities, this collection is a wealth of weird ranging from pastoral freak-folk to circus noise.

The threadbare arrangements and starkly poetic sense of woe and wonder found on Justin Vernon’s new EP fit his back catalog like a wooly, moth-eaten sweater.

The rapper-producer discusses her debut mixtape for Capitol and TDE as her tour in support of it kicks off this week.

Like any great party, some of this remix album’s guest revelers are loud and boisterous, while others show up empty-handed.

Producer Kevin Martin’s debut for the metal-focused Relapse Records is a collection of instrumentals harkening back to his earliest work while always opting to go darker and heavier.

The varied atmospheres, moods, and instrumentals prove to be the real highlight of what Warren Defever was responsible for during the four-year period captured within this six-LP box set.

The focus of this 27-disc live collection is how Robbie Robertson & Co. helped forge a rich, rough-and-tumble backing ensemble during the flashpoint of the Dylan-gone-electric explosion.

Repackaged with a 7-inch of demos and nearly 100 pages of photos, the cult Philly pop-punk quartet’s second album remains contagiously catchy and smartly lyrical a decade later.

Before Pearl Jam, Devo, and more take the stage this weekend in Dana Point, California, the showrunners share how environmentalism and other important causes remain at the event’s heart.

These factory-line recordings of doo-wop balladry, girl-group pop, and Brill Building sheen show how the guitarist-composer initially developed his melodic songcraft and lovelorn lyricism.

The freak-folk trailblazer’s 1976 debut continues to be a wild-eyed vision of what internationalist traditional music could be when unconsciously unbound to convention.

The melodiously haunting experimental quartet’s full discography of studio albums, rarities, and live recordings highlights their oddly uncategorizable sense of danger and darkness.

Adam Granduciel continues to evolve his septet’s recordings in invigorating ways, injecting a youthful enthusiasm into these live versions as well as an overheated panther’s sense of stalking.

Embodying the perspective of Amelia Earhart, the avant-garde icon teams up with ANOHNI and the Filharmonie Brno to filter hard fact and flighty perspective into one tight audio-verité package.