Remember those first few glorious bars of “Seasun” from Delorean’s 2009 breakthrough EP Ayrton Senna? Damn. A huge, synth-driven, sun-soaked, opening statement if there ever was one. They’d been around since 2000, but this was their moment. The Barcelona-based foursome had arrived.

The London electronic duo Plaid have sustained their passion for sound design and relevance in the genre by being equally attentive to the emotive aura and the architecture of their compositions.

For a while after 2012’s Mirage Rock, Band of Horses’ awkward, uncomfortable attempt at the mainstream, it seemed possible that the album would be the band’s last artistic statement.

Indie music fandom 101 tells us that commercial success is overrated. Strange Little Birds, Garbage‘s first album in four years since Not Your Kind of People, though, is the lowest-charting of their career and perhaps this is telling: for it does feel like their least essential.

The latest release from Wye Oak, the project of Baltimore duo Jenn Wasner and Andy Stack, is a brief collection of songs that did not make it onto 2011’s Civilian or 2014’s Shriek. Hence the clever title, Tween, referring to the fact that these songs exist somewhere in between these more official releases.

Michael Gira’s post-2010 version of Swans chokes the air like a storm in a southern gothic nightmare, the slow-motion onslaught unrelenting as it chases restless dreamers around dark corners and long hallways.

Ever since the release of Deerhoof vs. Evil in 2009, the normally rambunctious San Francisco ensemble has seemed somewhat restrained. The improvisation that punctuated Milk Man and The Runner’s Four has vanished. Instead, the contents of Breakup Song and La Isla Bonita brought about a purer, more consistent reliance on melody.

Is this the same Caveman we met on 2011’s WWF-referencing Coco Beware? Is it even the same group we were re-introduced to two years later on their self-titled sophomore LP?

The mood of an album is often a direct corollary of the emotional state of its creators during the period of its conception. It seems that this was the first time in a while that the members of The Invisible were making music free from personal complications.