Delicate, deliberate, and beautiful in every moment, the new record Bright Future by Big Thief vocalist Adrianne Lenker puts this generational talent's sonngwriting skill under a microscope.

The tesseractic Hit Parade of Tears blurs dimensional boundaries between Japan’s lost generation of underground artists, modern avant garde music, and a yet-to-be-realized future bizarre beyond imagination. 

Hypnotic, staccato sung vocals vary in tone and pace between verses and choruses, pairing well with a guitar sound that pulls from influences as diverse as surf rock, funk, and psychedelia, all while leaving room for some wonderfully strange and novel lead lines that give the record a distinct signature.

Despite its intense and constant distortion, Heartache to Heartache sounds extremely close and intimate, each element balanced to evoke this sense of deep emotion.

On their new record Cats, Dogs, and Dwarves, Polish jazz experimentalists MIDI 4 celebrate the tales where mild mischief is met with absurd retaliation and a deep forest of menacing mystery lurks just outside at all times.

From annoying interpersonal microaggressions to crimes that glow dully from the front page news, we encounter systemic, social, and personal problems in our everyday lives that we feel powerless to stop, all while we’re cursed with the mentality that the burden of change falls on each of us all the time.

Despite the interest in preserving cultural customs from around the globe, the deterioration of audio recordings means these works are becoming totally lost to the passage of time. Folklore 1979 by Milkweed is an album that reconstructs existing works by cutting up and rearranging segments of articles from Folklore Volume 90, a 1979 journal of folkloristics published by the Folklore Society.

Where one may expect Angell to continually circle closer to a specific sound that defines her, she instead turns her eclectic taste and ability into an identity in and of itself, giving all of these diverse sounds a distinctive flair.

Loves Is Yes paints us into the story of someone drowning in mundanity, slowly losing their ability to daydream as more and more flickering images of the everyday invade their sacred imagination.

As a group of noise musicians turned their attention to traditional folk music, the new album Lacrimae or Eleven Tears by Aune Mire emerged, combining a meticulous understanding of atmosphere with some of the oldest melodies that history can remember.

As a working musician with 50 years of experience, the septuagenarian El’Zabar does not just channel the cultural current of African and African-American music, but performs with a reverent awareness of his own legacy within the scene, joyfully participating in the creation of another historic work.

However, just by taking the time and energy to make such a thoughtful, personal album, Astrel K has honed his musical identity which should go on to serve him well on his identity construction project, suggesting for any of us who face similar issues in our lives to turn to artistic expression as an answer.

Swedish sound collagists Arv & Miljö bring to light the very recent past of radical, tactical environmentalism on their album Jorden Först, a retrospective on the Earth First! and Earth Liberation Front movements using archival snippets, field recordings, and folk music backed by Mort Garson-esque electronica.

By holding our attention with these masterfully executed vocals, the strange, swirling instrumentation gels together into a whole that makes intuitive emotional sense, drawing us into these repeated lyrical mantras.

In the end, Frances decides that a stoic acceptance of personal and interpersonal emptiness will minimize our pain, leaving the album on a somber note as she continues to navigate this trying moment in her life.

Passage from room to room within this space fails to provide any relief, only increasing the feelings of alienation and anxiety as sirens wail and a layer of noise leaks in from the outside.

However, as much as this album focuses on the unstoppable discomfort that comes along with the passage of time, Lihla offers us one comfort to keep our hearts from freezing to the core: love.

These themes of luxurious melancholy are explored on the new album Last Liasse by helen island, a collection of dark ambient synthpop imbued with both breathtaking opulence and somber gloom.

The few moments of uninterrupted peace on this album draw us in with their angelic tone and rich atmosphere, but just as we settle in the entire track bubbles over with the nervous energy of glitchy digital noise.

Composed of a supercut of the catchiest and heaviest riffs to emerge from lengthy improvised guitar and bass recordings, this record perfectly synthesizes digital pattern-based sequencing with the sort of groove and grit that can only come from analog instrumentation.