The Exbats distill the vibrant history of pop music into 2- to 3-minute anthems that recall everything from The Archies to The Ramones.

SPELLLING, aka Chrystia Cabral, Sacred Bones’ new radical star, is full of extraterrestrial vibes. Mazy Fly, Cabral’s second album, is total ‘80s, but also The X-Files, The Twilight Zone, or a more fucked up version of The Sound of Music.

In an era of laptop DJs and SoundCloud rappers, how on earth can a guitar still sound cool? Well, if you’re asking yourself that question, you’ve obviously never heard the singing axe of Steve Marion.

Presumably becoming friends during a 23-date tour from San Francisco (The Fillmore) to Atlanta (MJQ Concourse) in the fall of 2007, Aesop Rock (Ian Matthias Bavitz) and TOBACCO (Thomas J. Fec) parlay, 12 years later, in a synthesizer time warp as disorientation duo Malibu Ken.

After causing a stir with her debut EP, the magnificently titled Thrush Metal, the much-lauded Australian singer/songwriter rocks up with her debut full-length, with only one song (more on that later) making the transition from said EP to debut proper.

When Rivers Cuomo’s Californian crew rode the post-grunge wave to glory on their debut Blue Album and heart-worn classic follow-up Pinkerton in 1994 and 1996 respectively, we never could have imagined just how saddening and crushingly disappointing Weezer’s career would be over the next 20+ years.

It’s a slog, sometimes, picking through the generic to find the specific, more so to find the specifically good. It’s not that there’s anything truly awful about Said The Whale or this, their sixth album and first since the departure of their longtime rhythm section, but there’s also little to be said in favor of them either.

Some albums articulate themselves like finely chiseled sculptures. They depict the diverse panoply of sensation through a shared sensibility that elevates the disparate snapshots into a common aesthetic approach that holds them all together.

The title for Helado Negro‘s spectral and triumphant seventh studio album—This Is How You Smile—derives from a Jamaica Kincaid story titled “Girl” that is narrated from the perspective of a mother giving her daughter advice on how to survive in the world.