Stuart Berman

The second album from Julian Casablancas and his motley New York band is sludgy, psychedelic sesh that occasionally coheres into surprising moments of clarity and radiance.

After brushes with extroversion, the final installment of their EP series finds singers Sarah Martin and Stuart Murdoch turning inward with songs that take you inside its characters’ private lives.

Where How to Solve Our Human Problems’ first volume felt more like a random collection of a few great songs scattered among B-side-grade material, this edition more successfully arranges its discrete, divergent elements to flow as a proper mini-album.

The Aussie psych-rock group’s fifth album of 2017 is anything but a tossed-off afterthought, showing a new dedication to pop craftsmanship.

How to Solve Our Human Problems, Part 1 is the sound of a band deploying its full arsenal of bells and whistles to seize your attention, even when the songs themselves aren’t always strong enough to retain the grip.

The debut solo LP from Andrew Savage of Parquet Courts finds him singing more intimately about love in quieter, more rustic settings. In its own peculiar way, it speaks to our current condition.

In true madcap Gizzard fashion, the band’s proggiest album turns out to also be their most visceral and vital. Murder of the Universe may be built from the band’s now-familiar krautpunk battle plan, but their ability to execute outsized architectural complexity at manic, warp-speed velocity is no less astonishing.

For all of Auerbach’s eagerness to deliver the Music Row-worthy songwriting goods, Waiting on a Song can you leave you wishing he had waited a little longer.

More than any other !!! record before it, Shake the Shudder finds Offer riffing off a rotating cast of guest vocalists. And they provide the band with multiple pivot points to explore different directions.

While working from an old, dog-eared indie rock blueprint, the Melbourne band take great delight in redrafting the lines.

If Flying Microtonal Banana’s randomized approach is ultimately less transfixing than Nonagon Infinity’s maniacal focus, it nonetheless shows that, after eight previous albums, this band’s creativity and curiosity knows no bounds, and their singular balance of anarchy and accessibility is still in check.

With renewed confidence, focus, and contentment, Alec Ounsworth delivers a consistently satisfying Clap Your Hands album, the best since their debut.

On the one hand, Saturday Night does exactly what you expect a solo record from a member of a raucous rock band to do: It’s more off the cuff and rougher around the edges, and showcases a more introspective side than the day job normally allows. On the other hand, it’s an assault on that very idea.

Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.

The further you venture into Dolls of Highland, the more its laundry-room recording locale makes sense: This is an album where dirty souls can go to be cleansed.

When it’s running at peak velocity—which is like, 90 per cent of the time—Nonagon Infinity yields some of the most outrageous, exhilarating rock ‘n’ roll in recent memory, on par with modern psych-punk touchstones like Comets on Fire’s Blue Cathedral, Thee Oh Sees’ Carrion Crawler/The Dream and Ty Segall’s Slaughterhouse.

It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic and the lows are crushing.

For all the record's eclecticism, Coldplay remain a band that put the "us" in "obvious," blowing up the simplest sentiments for maximum appeal.

Words to the Blind is the name of a 37-minute, Dada-inspired concert staged last year in London by post-punk outfit Savages and Japanese psych-punk outfit Bo Ningen. Through the deconstruction of both acts' sounds, harmony is achieved through anarchy.

On With a Little Help From My Fwends, the Flaming Lips tackle the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with help from Miley Cyrus, Tegan and Sara, J. Mascis, Tool’s Maynard James Keenan, My Morning Jacket, Foxygen, Lightning Bolt's Brian Chippendale, and others. These aren’t so much revisions as disembowelments.

As such, Mourn is the sound of outcasts congregating in a basement on a Friday night and making a savage racket to forget about the fact they weren’t invited to the big house party that all the popular kids from school are attending.