FLOOD

It’s all so calculatedly quirky that you almost wonder if Pee-wee Herman wasn’t called in as a consultant.

Styles has a way of making music with plenty of discernible references, yet it somehow emerges as era-less.

Gallagher’s latest is a sonic show of maturation.

Though she’s always better when she’s just having fun, Madonna constantly yearns to be more poignant.

There is a haunted quality to any music released after the person who created it is no longer counted among the living.

Despite its flawless production, “Lux Prima” is a noticeably restrained affair, considering what a feral creature Karen O has always been.

The level of pandemonium and desperation here makes for deeply unsettling but fascinatingly involved listening.

Though it’s by no means a masterpiece, “Why You So Crazy?” proves that boring is something The Dandy Warhols will never, ever be.

It’s really about the sheer thrill of Redd Kross’ ability to just matter-of-factly, glam-a-riffically rock the fuck out.

Thom Yorke’s soundtrack is that rarest of beasts: music for a cinematic work that can stand on its own.

Echo & the Bunnymen are as much a religious denomination as a band. And rewriting a prayer is tricky business.

None of this has anything to do with what’s currently clogging up the charts—but then, when did Lenny ever neatly fit the zeitgeist?

Existential melancholy and staccato guitars have been Interpol’s signature for well over a decade, and they still carry it out with panache.

This is not music that wants to play on your emotions—rather, it wants you to leave the nuisance of them behind altogether.

Even if you don’t 100 percent buy into all of Lykke’s dark/light kooky mysticism, “so sad so sexy” is what it promises. 

There’s little doubt they genuinely mean every echo-drenched, wall-of-grinding-guitars second.

As much fun as all those disco-fab collabs were, it’s heartwarming to hear Minogue pouring her heart out.

This is the sort of record everyone should make twenty years into their career.

“Criminal” is, in a sense, the new gothic for a new century—paranoid, solitary, and powerfully visceral.

What makes Shame’s debut powerful is just how musically accomplished they are, despite the high-anxiety relentlessness of their sonic gospel.

Spinning Coin’s true strength lies in not just being some manner of revival of those pop-post-punk tenets, as much as clever guardians of the aesthetic flame.

The latest from the iconic Malian duo has surprises at every turn.

Andy Butler has become the multi-faceted songwriter and profound expressionist he always meant to be.

The return from the shoegaze legends seems as if it was made by a bunch of twenty-year-olds excitedly let loose in the studio for the first time—and the result is one of the more vital comeback records you’re likely to hear this year.

On their first album in twenty-two years, Slowdive prove that, despite its introverted nature, shoegaze possesses the possibility for truly anthemic gestures.

Billionaires in the White House? Come Armageddon, come.

No one would make this record if they didn’t have to.

The British composer bravely journeys deep into the interior of Virginia Woolf’s novels and her inimitable characters.

If there’s anything disappointing about Brian Eno’s career thus far, it’s that his oblique strategies have never taken him radically far away from the zones he settled and perfected.

Equipped with nothing more than a piano and occasionally a guitar on this live album from 1992, the former member of The Velvet Underground pulls something new out of so many songs from across his career.

Maybe Nashville is just where the British R&B singer needs to be.

If she’s really retiring, Maya Arulpragasam is going out on her own terms.

On their third record, the mysterious Swedish collective take psychedelic world music deadly seriously.

Cut from the streets of Memphis, this punk quartet turns the cacophony of city living into a symphony of distortion and dread—as well as hope.

“Innocence Reaches” isn’t a masterpiece by any means, but it’s a refreshing change.

The Broken Social Scene co-founder returns with his third solo album.

For a collection of outlier bits, the second album from Nils Frahm’s nonkeen project is remarkably cohesive.

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Wouldn’t it be great if someone could combine the virtuoso scuzz of Black Sabbath with the sneering vitriol of The Fall?”

The Verve frontman’s first solo album in six years finds him back in his familiarly affective but downtrodden form.

No strangers to a tumultuous road, Bernard Sumner and Gillian Gilbert reflect on the Peter Hook–less era of their legendary group, and the new album that recently came out of it—”Music Complete,” the special edition of which is out May 13.

Infinity. Dude.

It’s all here: the squiggly synth horns, the effected electric piano, the sultry sax breaks.

The history of music from Manchester, England, is littered with doom and, well, gloom.

Perhaps next time they’ll let it rip.

There’s a mission for musical cred here on her highly anticipated eighth album “Anti.”

Suede, surely, were the most unlikely of acts to reanimate the wanton, substance-addled serpents of their tender years.

The onetime Jam frontman—and now fashion designer—tells us about style and punk’s halcyon days.

It’s far too glib to refer to John Malkovich as a “Renaissance Man.”

What impresses and concerns is their self-titled debut album’s unapologetically dead-on referencing

The new collection of collaborative works (as the title is keen to note) from composers Ólafur Arnalds and Nils Frahm stands ideologically athwart all that mindless cacophony.

Our altars and sacrifices are ready.

Make no mistake, this is aural effrontery at its most relentless.

Ah, but now The Libertines’ arch wastrel is ostensibly “clean,” and he and Lib-mate Carl Barât are back fighting the good fight. Admittedly, it bears the scent of glory-grabbing.

Truly, Low are at their best when awash in intrigue and inexplicability, and the mystically titled “Ones and Sixes” offers plenty of aural equivocality.

What cannot be emphasized enough is the natural grace and elegance of her singing, especially in stark contrast to the insufferable over-modulating of so many nu-gen R&B vocalists.

Going east and west in modern-day Turkey.

Her fifth album, the confessionally titled “Abyss,” is a dark dive into a deep chasm of negation and dread.

The Bee Gees made disco; Moroder made dee-sko danse muziq.

A veritable zeitgeist of one, Jamie xx has managed to spin off from his soul-goth namesake band into an agent of perpetual buzz generation.

With rock and roll sputtering along like a Soviet Trabant with two punctured tires, electro-sonic architectrix Holly Herndon has a distinct herald-of-the-future vibe about her.

Despite its punk inception, Wire has done a good deal of trade in thought-provoking, future-pop for nearly four decades.

The boys were even thoughtful enough to bring along the tunes, should you care to wiggle whilst Blighty burns amidst political squabbles and clashing egos.

Conor O’Brien—better known as Villagers—is the latest within a long line of strikingly melodic Irish singer-songwriters that invite listeners to daydream about the lush and green motherland.

A Libertines reunion, of course, is right ’round the bend. Perhaps he’s saving the real stormers for then?

A discourse on music, technology and the state of the kingdom

Through the album these renegade Franco-Cuban sisters scrupulously skirt the minefield of trippy-dippy spirit-mother clichés.

If rock and roll teeters on cultural irrelevance in this young century, it is surely due to being stripped of an elemental fear. Whether the genre is recoverable is debatable, but A Place to Bury Strangers refuses to abandon the expedition.

After Björk had literally (and awesomely, intellectually) deconstructed the sound of the universe on “Biophilia” in 2011, it is a surprising, stinging disappointment to discover that this, her ninth record is…a breakup album? But, of course, Björk would never do anything so insipid as whine about a broken heart.

Corgan promises (or threatens) here, “I will bang this drum ’til my dying day.” Surely, there’s got to be still more buried greatness to actually come?

2014 finds holiday depressives in less surprising company, as Mr. Misery Guts himself, Mark Kozelek, has a go at some of our wintry faves.

Marr seems happy just frolicking through the basic landscape of rock and roll, rather more Keith Richards than Jimmy Page.

Apparently the three-year creative journey that was the creation of Sparks began with striking a match.

With her (ostensibly calculatedly) cloying moniker, one might easily wonder if “the artist” FKA twigs is already plotting to someday transmogrify into an unpronounceable symbol.

Hardly surprising, then, even the gloriously bombastic title of his latest, World Peace Is None of Your Business, seems to be straining for that very same lapsed monumentality.