Following 2017’s rightly lauded Goths, John Darnielle and his band The Mountain Goats return with a new LP, produced by the always magnificent Owen Pallett, and, to some unknown extent, telling the tale of a seaside community ruled over by a kindly wizard.

Reclaiming black and brown history through its poets, musicians, intellectuals, and activists, Chicago-based multi-hyphenate Jamila Woods—herself many of these things—gives props to her inspirational heroes.

If you’ll excuse the pun, the problem with having an iconic, much beloved, genre-defining record in your back catalogue is that the weight of expectation to meet or better that record becomes too great. The Get Up Kids’ 1999 classic Something to Write Home About is one of these such examples.

In 2017, The Drums released Abysmal Thoughts. It was the New York outfit’s fourth full-length, but the first since the band had become a solo project for main-man Jonny Pierce.

With 2017’s debut album, Guppy, boasting indie disco floor-filler “Ruby,” New York City’s Charly Bliss reintroduced the pop tunes to post-grunge with great and widely praised effect. A brief and brisk album, bristling with scratchy guitar and thundering drum parts, it introduced the world to Eva Hendricks’ honeyed vocals and contrastingly caustic worldview.

Nilüfer Yanya’s debut album Miss Universe begins with a phone message from the titular character, a fictional health counselor who periodically pops in to recite some postmodern mental-health non-sequiturs, voiced by Yanya herself.

Staggering out of a Brixton blur of warehouse parties and cheap drugs, London’s Fat White Family appeared to be a bunch of sloppy urchins with a penchant for Birthday Party rip-offs; songs like 2014’s “Touch the Leather” and “I Am Mark E Smith” setting out a vaguely shambolic stall of bleak but perhaps humorous, crawling, creeping punk rock.

Hot on the heels off Malibu and Oxnard, comes Ventura the third in California-native Anderson .Paak’s trilogy. His titles may be the SoCal beach towns he loves but the influences he pulls from here return largely to ‘60s Motown and ‘70s Funkadelic.

Since their beginnings in league with Los Angeles garage greats Ty Segall and Mikal Cronin, Cory Hanson and his compatriots in Wand proved themselves restless rock inventors.