It feels like treading water. Like you’re at the starting line of a marathon, already out of breath. Like spiraling, but you can’t tell if you’re headed up or down. Like all your stupid little songs are all starting to sound the same.

Sometimes, the story is bigger than the music. In the case of Regional Justice Center, the story starts like this: In 2016, 18-year-old Max Hellesto was sent to prison for six years for first degree assault. Whenever someone goes to prison, that person’s entire family suffers. Hellesto’s brother Ian Shelton, already playing in Seattle-area hardcore bands, needed some way to cope with what was happening, so he started Regional Justice Center, a band named after the jail where his brother was locked up.

In recent years, plenty of shoegaze songs became unlikely viral sensations: Wisp’s “Your face,” Flyingfish’s “wonder if you care,” quannnic’s “life imitates life.” Before any of them, there was julie’s 2020 single “flutter,” a frantic and fuzzed-out whirlwind, reminiscent of Swirlies, sweeping the listener into its mess of caustic guitars and hypnotic dual vocals. Since its release, it’s accumulated 36 million streams on Spotify and almost 3 million watches on YouTube. The tune is a sonic triptych — two outbursts of chaos separated by a meandering interlude. “flutter” isn’t afraid to wander; it’s confident that it can keep the listener hooked until the very end, and it succeeds.

It’s a bit like naming your band Illmatic, isn’t it? “Dummy” is a great word with lots of fun uses, but if you bring it up in a music-nerd context, people’s brains will all wander to the same lonely, desolate, beautiful Portishead album. The members of Dummy absolutely belong to the music-nerd community, and they know that better than most.

“I’ve seen so many shit bands throughout the year and often have found myself saying, ‘I can do better than that.’ So that’s what I’m doing. There’s a lot of bands that are almost there or just have no idea how to make something cohesive, or with swag, or literally anything that elevates the experience of just being people with instruments. So I gotta have a vision that’s better than the competition.”

In Víctor Erice’s 1973 coming-of-age film The Spirit Of The Beehive, a young girl and her sister growing up in 1940s Spain see a mobile cinema’s screening of Frankenstein. “The film’s producers do not wish to present it without a preliminary word of caution,” goes the presenter’s spoken introduction. “But I would encourage you to not take it so seriously.” Six-year-old Ana takes it as gospel. Plagued by unanswerable questions – how could Frankenstein’s monster accidentally kill someone, and why would the villagers murder him in retaliation? – she sets out in search of unknowable answers. The real world’s monsters, she soon discovers, tend to hide in plain sight.

The story of Oso Oso’s new album life till bones begins with tragedy: A month after recording the demos to what would become his 2022 LP sore thumb, emo-pop dignitary Jade Lilitri’s cousin and creative partner Tavish Maloney died suddenly at 24. Lilitri isn’t necessarily known for bringing collaborators into the studio – he’s admitted to being a bit controlling, playing most, if not all instruments himself – but Maloney had been there for the entire recording process. Lilitri wasn’t planning on releasing the demos as-is, but he decided the world had to hear those songs the same way Maloney last heard them. With a touch of minimal final mixing, Lilitri let sore thumb into the world. There was no other way to do it while keeping a quiet conscience.

Navy Blue’s new album is called Memoirs In Armour, but it’s more like memories in mist. Over the course of about 27 minutes, the Brooklyn-based spitter shrouds fractured recollections in floral, imagistic poetry, leaving listeners to sift through the dense metaphors to find the trauma and catharsis at the center. With its blend of hazily soulful production and esoteric self-created truisms, the LP plays out like an audio cipher; he unspools personal vignettes in layers of thoughts and sensations he leaves you to peel back. Like the best riddles, it’s all as tedious as it is engrossing, further evidence of the rhyme prowess that’s made him a face of New York’s underground vanguard.

The history of DIY punk rock in Washington, DC spans something like 45 years. In that time, DC punk has nurtured all sorts of vocalists: growlers, howlers, barkers, snarkers, whiners, moaners, yappers, zappers, preachers, screechers, gurglers, motormouths, dreamy waifs, deadpan wraiths, mock-operatic divas, whatever you want to call Ian Svenonius. For the life of me, however, I cannot remember a DC punk singer who delivers lyrics with Broadway-style flair. I’m not talking about the Broadway of generations past; I bet Shudder To Think’s Craig Wedren could’ve found a place there. I’m talking about recent Broadway — the precise, crystalline, self-aware diction that seems to thrive in movie-adaptation musicals like Mean Girls or Heathers. If you threw Ian MacKaye or HR or Mary Timony or Travis Morrison or Jael Holzman into one of those shows, bad things would happen. But Katie McD would be right at home.

Let’s start at the top: I fell desperately in love with someone I knew was bound to fuck me up. So begins “Horny Hangover,” the second track and second single of Queen Of Jeans’ third album All Again. “We’re trying to tell the story of when you look back at an important relationship,” guitarist and pianist Matheson Glass explained about the LP. “Years go by, and the more you reflect on it, it becomes more warped and the facts become a little bit more murky.”

If Water From Your Eyes take an “everything but the kitchen sink” approach to making music, Nate Amos’ solo work as This Is Lorelei tosses in the whole damn kitchen. Referring to This Is Lorelei as Amos’ “side project” would be inaccurate. While the New York-based singer, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist is best known as half of the Matador-signed duo making anarchic, mechanical stoner pop, he’s been releasing an honestly intimidating amount of music under the This Is Lorelei moniker for the past decade, averaging at least one album every year, often an EP or two as well. Over the course of his discography, Amos has ricocheted between glitchy bedroom pop, soft folk balladry, rambly slacker rock, and noisy garage grunge. On Box For Buddy, Box For Star, he streamlines his focus without sacrificing his omnivorous sonic appetite.

Last year, Peggy Gou made a worldwide hit. Up until the moment that it happened, this didn’t seem especially likely. Gou was a well-known figure in the dance-music intelligentsia, the type of ultra-cool DJ who hangs out with Four Tet and plays terrifyingly fashionable European clubs. She was hugely successful in her universe, jetting all over the planet and maintaining a record label and clothing line as well as managing her own career. But her music — sparse, textured, perfectly manicured, in touch with its place in dance history — didn’t exactly seem likely to break out of its bubble and into the larger world. A track like 2019’s “Starry Night,” Gou’s biggest single until last year, is catchy and slinky and hypnotic, but it’s defined, at least in part, by its chilliness. That was not the case with “(It Goes Like) Nanana.”

Summer is here, and so is its soundtrack. Whereas some forms of dream-pop sound unmistakably like winter, the Marías make music for sweltering poolsides, afternoons encased in air conditioning, and glamorous waterfront locales after dark. On their 2021 debut Cinema, the band established an aesthetic that both aligned them with the zeitgeist and gave them their own singular presence. The album won them Grammy nominations, spun off an Adult Alternative radio hit in “Hush,” and made a superfan out of Bad Bunny, who featured them on 2022’s biggest album. Sophomore LP Submarine, out this week, is just as appealing.

If a decade ago you told me that not only would DIIV still be around, but that they’d be considered a modern standard bearer to a younger generation, I’d be equal parts surprised and relieved.

My body instantly locks in with the driving drumbeat — my pulse, my breathing, the insatiable urge to bop along. The guitar chords ripple and shimmer, and a tail of colorful dissolving static seems to follow every steady strum. The music feels plastic and brittle yet glows like a neon sign, blurring together the organic and synthetic into something grimy and hyperreal. It carries on in this alluring state for about 15 seconds. Then, after a brief pause, the bass drops, Joey Vannucchi’s grizzled vocals enter the frame, and that bleary, distant beauty shifts to the foreground, its undertow now so powerful that I’m instantly swept away.

All music is the product of thoughts and feelings, but Tom Krell’s derives from so many thoughts, from emotions felt so deeply. Most albums released into the music industry slipstream are presented with some degree of “director’s commentary”-style guideposts explaining how to think about the work — interviews, press releases, an official biography — even before getting into the common language of cover art, music videos, stage visuals, merch, and social media posts. Music is an ancient form of human expression; popular music, especially in the internet era, tends to be a multimedia art project. Krell understands both points, and with How To Dress Well, the great creative endeavor of his life, he goes beyond the norm to give the world a little extra. Or maybe a lot. Extra is who he is. He pours his whole heart and mind into his records, and then he gives you detailed footnotes.

Funeral For Justice is a fantastic record that should not have to exist. Last summer, during Tuareg rocker Mdou Moctar’s North American tour, his home country of Niger was thrown into chaos when right-wing militants overthrew the government. The coup temporarily stranded Moctar, aka Mahamadou Souleymane, and bandmates Ahmoudou Madassane and Souleymane Ibrahim in the US, wondering what would become of their loved ones back home. It was an infuriating, terrifying situation, but it was hardly the first upsetting development in Nigerien politics lately. Moctar was so distraught and enraged by his country’s situation that he and the band had already completed their new album of political rallying cries before the coup.

Dumpster-diving by a Dunkin’ Donuts. Spraying insecticide in closets to get rid of roaches. Walking seven miles with friends after getting too high to drive, only to realize you forgot your wallet. Pissing off of a porch. Going 65 in a 25. Trading a hat for a pack of Newports. Wedging a hanger into a car window to unlock it. For over a decade, Atlanta’s Microwave have masterfully captured self-destruction in the South, painting vivid scenes of desperation, slick with sweat and spilled beer, set to a concoction of acerbic pop-punk and razor-sharp emo. Their debut full-length, 2014’s Stovall, and its follow-up, 2016’s Much Love, are powerful bursts of summery rock, while 2019’s Death Is A Warm Blanket was heavy with grungy darkness. Now, they’re back with Let’s Start Degeneracy, an album about enlightenment.

Listening to Still House Plants can feel like witnessing a song come together in real time. Years ago, the UK-based trio would open sets with “Pleasures,” a track from their landmark 2020 album Fast Edit, by having drummer David Kennedy’s kit all over the stage. Once he set everything up, it would cue the band to start the next song. To begin their concerts like this was a symbol of the band’s driving force; they write music, first and foremost, as a group of best friends who trust each other, and their tracks are a way to challenge themselves, to grow through communication, and to push through life’s difficulties.

They don’t make pop music like this anymore.

Here’s a folk-rock album that actually rocks, folks.

Something changed when I turned 40. I developed a taste for tea. I started dressing, in the words of one friend, “like a history teacher.” And suddenly, after never giving the genre more than a respectful hat tip, I want to listen to jazz all the time.

“Bye Bye” doesn’t just sound like a Playboi Carti song. The beat was actually made for Playboi Carti. According to a recent Kim Gordon profile in the New York Times, Justin Raisen — who’s produced for indie-rock pop stars like Sky Ferreira and Yves Tumor, hip-hop weirdos like Lil Yachty and Teezo Touchdown, and even rap superstars like Kid Cudi and Drake — was with his brother Jeremiah over the holidays cooking up music to submit to Carti, Atlanta’s king of fractured, illegible, noise-bombed trap music. When they wrapped up the beat that became “Bye Bye,” the opener and lead single from Gordon’s new album The Collective, Justin recognized it as perhaps too out-there for even Playboi Carti. “But it could be cool for Kim,” he told his brother.

Three songs into Half Divorced, the sixth album from long-running Philadelphia noise-punk band Pissed Jeans, we’re really hitting a groove. Drums hit like nutpunches. Guitars squall and splatter. If you heard the bass tone while driving, it would cause you to pull over and call a mechanic immediately. Singer Matt Korvette sounds like a kodiak bear who’s been laid off from his job wherever kodiak bears work and who just found out that his severance check didn’t come through. It’s some real prime ’90s sludge ugliness, the type of thing that you might pull from the second side a half-forgotten Amphetamine Reptile compilation, until you notice the words that Korvette is belching out: “Guess you’re a helicopter parent! Figure it out, man! You’re just a helicopter parent! And that’s one thing I cannot stand!”

Standing in the back of the 85-cap Long Island music venue Amityville Music Hall in December, I was bewildered. No one was moving as Glitterer’s idiosyncratic clamor erupted from the stage as they opened for Fiddlehead, their early synth-pop earworms and newer indie-rock explosions threaded together into one continuous wave of sound. I was headbanging, invigorated by the rapid-fire stream of infectious tunes, and I couldn’t help but feel annoyed that no one else was relishing Glitterer’s performance. Everyone’s always complaining that Title Fight aren’t making music anymore, but how much different is Glitterer, really?

Throughout all of this past year’s discourse over the commercial decline of rap music, I wondered if the problem was less that listeners had lost interest in the genre than the artists themselves had stopped having fun?

Many years ago, I got stopped on the street in New York by a woman who wanted to talk about Slutever. I was wearing one of the band’s T-shirts — I can’t remember exactly what it looked like, though I’m pretty sure mucus and Tweety bird were involved. This woman did not want to talk to me about my Slutever, the sneering California-via-Philadelphia duo, but instead about the blog turned Vice show of the same name that would end up just as forgotten to time. I don’t really know why, but I think about this interaction most times that Slutever crosses my mind (more often than you’d think!), maybe because I feel like it’s unfair that more people didn’t know about them when they existed.

If you’re ever driving along the highway outside Marquette, Michigan, you might see a 50-foot metal dinosaur holding a fishing pole. That dinosaur marks the entrance of a very strange place called Lakenenland. A construction worker named Tom Lakenen bought the plot of land that became Lakenenland in 2003, when his local township told him that he couldn’t display his scrap-metal sculptures in his front yard. Those sculptures are wild — monsters, skeletons, wolves, reapers, alligators, all done up in deeply personal outsider-art style. Some of the sculptures involve 9/11; others seem to be about the voices in Lakenen’s head. When I was there about a decade ago, there was a sign that said Lakenen had never been to a real sculpture park but that he imagined this is how one might look. In Marquette, Lakenenland is considered a family-friendly tourist attraction. It’s got a TripAdvisor page and everything.

Katy Kirby didn’t exactly come out of nowhere, but her debut Cool Dry Place was the sort of album that snuck up on you. When I wrote about it for Album Of The Week in 2021, I made sure to note that it might take a few listens to really sink in. I used words like unhurried and sparse, and I said that those qualities only made it feel all the more special. Kirby’s subtlety doesn’t draw attention to itself, but Cool Dry Place kept finding the right ears. Following its release, she opened for Waxahatchee and Julia Jacklin and for Alex G, whose “Bad Man” Kirby managed to twist into her own off-kilter rollick. She made the label jump from Keeled Scales to ANTI-, and Cool Dry Place started to solidify itself into what it really is: a promising introduction to an immensely talented songwriter.

Glass Beach disappeared for half a decade and came back a different band. It’s not that new album Plastic Death forgoes the ambitious sweep and madcap inspiration of 2019’s The First Glass Beach Album, but the Los Angeles quartet wields those powers in alternate ways here, in service of music that seems to exist in a separate dimension from the band’s early work. You know how in TRON human characters enter into a video game world and become digital versions of themselves? Plastic Death feels like Glass Beach making the opposite move, crossing over from their hyper-online origins into the pages of rock history.

Kali Uchis, connoisseur of a gooey R&B that dims the lights of the mind and puts the blunt between your fingers, opens her fourth album in a curl of smoke and giggles, the bass a down blanket to fall into.

Some band names are instructive, and the Dublin punk band Sprints live up to their moniker more often than not. At some point during most songs on Sprints’ debut album Letter To Self, the music breaks out into runaway-train mode: drums incessantly bashing, bass urgently rumbling, guitars ripping away at power chords so rapid-fire they seem like they might actually burst into flames. A lesser singer might sound like they’re barely hanging on when the songs rush forward so frantically, but Karla Chubb commandingly rides the wave, harnessing all that intensity in unrestrained howls and shout-along refrains.

One of my favorite movies of all time is Matewan, the 1987 historical drama directed by John Sayles. The film depicts the struggle of the coal miners of Matewan, West Virginia as they form a union, go on strike, and ultimately take up arms against the brutal tactics and hired goons of the Stone Mountain Coal Company. The cast list is a who’s who of great character actors: Chris Cooper in his first screen role, David Strathairn, James Earl Jones, Mary McDonnell, Kevin Tighe, a teenaged Will Oldham. The legendary Haskell Wexler’s cinematography was never better, and Sayles’ sharp-edged, leftist politics are front and center in every scene. Matewan is also a great music film, with a dobro-heavy score by Mason Daring and four songs by Hazel Dickens, the West Virginia bluegrass singer whose protest songs made her a folk-world star in the ’60s and ’70s.