However, the new album An Error Has Occurred by psych rock mainstays The Janitors takes us on a bad trip that violates all of these expectations, unflinchingly staring down evil head-on, despite the discomfort that follows.

After losing her husband to the wild, frigid slopes of Mount Everest, Tamil folk music experimentalist Sushma Soma entered a deep, dark period of grieving that culminated in The Mountain Has the Last Say, a heartbreaking tale of the most difficult kind of stoic acceptance.

Distorted soul samples place us in a heavy headspace, forcing us to examine time poorly spent and imagine a world where we used every moment to the fullest.

This record is rooted in but not restrained by the typical Power Electronics sound, taking a more dynamic approach by incorporating influences from other industrial and experimental music genres. With these carefully constructed tracks navigating between stillness and explosive movements, Cute strikes a delicate balance between expansive atmospheric soundscapes, and extreme gut-churning chaos.

This jazzy, kraut-inspired, psychedelic album embeds intense solos and vocal performances into an underlying bed of traditional percussion and strong countermelodies, setting dramatic, busy scenes that generally resolve peacefully.

By beginning and ending each track at the same ambient point, Female Gaze designed the songs to be played in any order, representing the meaninglessness of day and night, morning and evening, week and weekend in this homebound state.

With all of the annoyingly sterile new wave and goth rock out there, Tongue in the Mind’s debut self-titled EP goes far beyond a mere breath of fresh air.

Thoughts explode into shrapnel, each stanza appearing as a distinct obsession with its own melodic motif before quickly falling off track as the speaker locates a new source of anxiety.

Glitch pop collective Pet Wife with their new record Foam Set explores love as the fulfillment of an essential lack, as an interaction that requires an uncomfortable amount of vulnerability, always teetering on the edge of codependence.

When confronted with the horrifying mundanity of Weezer’s post-hiatus stage presence and the crowds that accumulate to watch it, however, this kid flew headfirst into an existential crisis that lead to the creation of Weezer’s Blue Album under the name Trashdog.

The Japanese psychedelic rock underground has been on the radar of the international music scene for decades, but few groups in the community have been as prolific as Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O..

An increasingly common byproduct of this sound, tinnitus, wreaks havoc on many people’s ability to produce or enjoy music, but experimental artist Lola de la Mata turned her own symptoms into auditory art on her new album Oceans on Azimuth.

After losing her mother, Quebec avant-folk artist Myriam Gendron started work on Mayday, a collection of songs that eloquently retell the story of her long, cyclical recovery process.

Suddenly, a chaotic, jubilant big band busts down the door, accepting the refined, individual artistic voice into an unstoppable chorus of pure energy, pure ecstasy as the group unifies in a call to the divine.

Unaddressed, intense emotions hit a bottleneck and spew out in the shape of Back to Shilmarine by HAAL, a gritty post rock album that revels in the tension of misunderstood and awkward feelings.

If you've ever had serious concerns in your life met with trite, regurgitated sayings from those you're meant to respect, You Won't Go Before You're Supposed To by Knocked Loose should hit close to home.

This optimistic record touches on themes of universality and immortality, enjoying the chemistry of its three musicians and encouraging us to find similar egalitarian partnerships in our own lives.

This discomfort structures the aesthetic direction of Spine by Kee Avil, an experimental pop album that balances beautiful, airy vocals with gritty, organic, noisy, and  dissonant instrumentals to show us the two-faced nature of time.

As the independent rock world turns in a darker, heavier, more dissonant direction, Quebec band Possibles introduces themselves on their self-titled debut as a group unafraid of a lighter, leaner sound.

To Welsh rock experimentalists Obey Cobra on their new record Mwg Drwg, humans have no identifiable purpose on earth but to annihilate harmony, to degrade the perfect order of nature into an industrial planet-killing machine.