A concept album about Amelia Earhart’s fateful final trip in 1937, The Last Flight is full of the kind of majesty and awe that’s marked Public Service Broadcasting’s previous four full-lengths, but it doesn’t hide from the terror of the dawning knowledge that things have gone wrong in a circumstance where perfection means living and anything less is fatal.

There has been some online speculation that Josh Tillman might sunset his sage but wisecracking Father John Misty alter-ego after his sixth album, Mahashmashana, which takes its name from the Sanskrit word meaning “great cremation pit.”

The sophomore album from Oklahoma City’s Chat Pile is an expansive, genre-defying deep dive on themes of violence and despair that grips you from its opening riff and dumps you 40 minutes later in a metaphorical vacant parking lot.

There is something special found in the bliss of the dancefloor. Few feelings can match the collective, kinetic joy of being caught up in a rush of rhythms and moving bodies, each individual moving at once to a shared transcendent pull. At its height, it can feel like a dream. That same euphoria lies at the heart of Kelly Lee Owens’ fourth full-length album, Dreamstate.

Louisville legends Slint left behind an outsized legacy established on a mere two albums, not counting the EP released long after they split.

“Are these guys called Americ Anfootball?” A friend was scrutinizing a Polyvinyl ad in the latest issue of Punk Planet, noting this unknown band and the similarities between their album cover and those of Don Caballero’s What Burns Never Returns and Braid’s The Age of Octeen.

On Small Changes—his fourth full-length, and first since his Mercury Prize-winning Kiwanuka five years ago—Michael Kiwanuka continues to seemingly pluck songs from the ether, creating music whose strongest impression is that of déjà vu.

Lauren Mayberry’s Vicious Creature marks a compelling recalibration for an artist who has spent the past decade as one of the most captivating voices in modern synth-pop.

Ray LaMontagne’s latest album is uncontroversial with its simplistic folk guitar and vocal tendencies.