The 31 Best Rock Albums of 2021

From Snail Mail’s explosive breakup anthems to the Armed’s conceptual fireworks, Lucy Dacus’ home movies to Mdou Moctar’s virtuosic guitar anthems, these are the rock albums that stood out this year.

By Pitchfork

December 8, 2021

It was a rebuilding year for rock in some ways. Finally able to get back on the road, a number of established stars returned with new albums in 2021, but the guitar music that kept us on our toes often came from indie acts with well-deserved breakthroughs beyond their corners of the genre. Turnstile threw a hardcore party. Japanese Breakfast let her joy spill out. Mdou Moctar played some of his most explosive guitar solos yet. Dry Cleaning left their inscrutable thoughts ringing in our ears. Illuminati Hotties offered a pop-punk opus from the brink, and Spirit of the Beehive honed their nihilistic, cut-and-paste psychedelia.

If there is one unifying factor, it’s that 2021’s best rock albums are filled with surprises, from Iceage’s sunny turn to black midi’s nightmarish prog-punk showtunes to Low’s prism of distortion. Below, we round out entries culled from our overall albums list with more LPs and EPs just as worthy of your time, which are listed alphabetically.

Check out all of Pitchfork’s 2021 wrap-up coverage here.

(All releases featured here are independently selected by our editors. When you buy something through our retail links, however, Pitchfork may earn an affiliate commission.)

Run for Cover

Another Michael: New Music and Big Pop

On their big-hearted debut, Another Michael dwell on simple pleasures: a song shared between friends, a cup of coffee enjoyed in a basement, a long walk spent dreaming about the California sunshine. The Philadelphia band—composed of Nick Sebastiano, Alenni Davis, and the titular Michael Doherty—bring these moments to life with gentle, lightly country-tinged arrangements that make a nice day feel even brighter. But woven between these pleasant scenes and tender melodies are heavier concerns, like the pressure to “make something timeless” as life’s hourglass drains. Together, the members of Another Michael face the horizon with the knowledge that tomorrow is a new day full of infinite possibilities. –Quinn Moreland

Sargent House

The Armed: ULTRAPOP

Like David Blaine, elusive Detroit collective the Armed have spent their career building false personas just to dramatically set fire to them. With third album ULTRAPOP, they elevate their blend of blistering hardcore and melodic pop hooks by roping in chipper synths (“ALL FUTURES”), relentless drum change-ups (“AN ITERATION”), and strangely soothing vocal harmonies (“AVERAGE DEATH”). Now boasting an expanded lineup of 19 members, the Armed have made the rare rock breakthrough that feels all the more inviting—and not to mention, fun—for how mysterious it remains. –Nina Corcoran

Polyvinyl

Bachelor: Doomin’ Sun

The intimate songs of Doomin’ Sun bleed into one another like watercolors on a giant canvas. The collaborative project from Jay Som’s Melina Duterte and Palehound’s Ellen Kempner first emerged through jam sessions, and the resulting music carries the feeling of steadfast and seamless companionship. Incorporating synths, strings, and some of both songwriters’ most driving arrangements to date, the music charts a slow-burning kind of breakdown and plays like a helping hand in desolate times. –Kelly Liu

Further Reading: Jay Som and Palehound on Their New Band Bachelor and Friendship at First Sight

Drag City

Birds of Maya: Valdez

The year’s best scuzzy rock’n’roll record spent seven years in the vault, ready and waiting until Drag City pressed it to vinyl. Valdez is the fourth album of sprawling stoner rock rippers from Birds of Maya, the Philadelphia power trio featuring two members of Purling Hiss—Mike Polizze and Ben Leaphart—and Spacin’ mastermind Jason Killinger. If you are in need of a steady jam session voyage that goes for more than seven minutes, all slathered in fuzz and stuffed full of sick guitar solos, then you will be pleased to learn that Valdez has four songs’ worth. And if you need a bite-sized proto-punk destroyer to beef out the playlist, it’s “BFIOU.” Valdez is the sound of three talented musicians locking in to create something at once ambitious and immediate. –Evan Minsker

Ninja Tune

Black Country, New Road: For the first time

If keeping track of all the young London post-punk bands with vaguely spoken-word vocals is confusing, here’s a rough cheat sheet: black midi, arguably the scene leaders, are proggy and ever-changing; Dry Cleaning have the cleverest narrator by a mile; Squid are the nervy, funky underdogs, like a British Parquet Courts. Black Country, New Road split the differences between these acts in some ways—the musical experimentation meeting more imagistic lyrics—but one distinct element is the thread of klezmer music, which adds a 2000s-indie warmth to the group’s chaotic, frequently beautiful six-song debut. There’s also the distinguishing factor of singer Isaac Wood, who is lucid, pompous, and looking to start some arguments, at least based on those mentions of Kanye and chemtrails. –Jillian Mapes

Rough Trade

black midi: Cavalcade

When their berserk live sets started going viral on YouTube a few years ago, black midi were hailed as the second coming of math-punk cranks like the Jesus Lizard. But with each passing year, that initial assessment seems increasingly off the mark. Countering their proudly inscrutable musicality with a newfound melodic elegance, Cavalcade makes it feel like we’re still discovering this band anew. These days, it’s more apt to think of black midi as the free-jazz Talk Talk, or the post-punk Scott Walker, or the symphonic Slint, or the art-school Primus—with each and every song, Cavalcade captures black midi in a perpetual state of spontaneous combustion and radical reanimation. –Stuart Berman

4AD

Dry Cleaning: New Long Leg

One way to hear New Long Leg is as a cringe-tinged dramedy—like Fleabag or Girls—with Florence Shaw as the performer who knows exactly how to deliver her own script. This album is not the type to be nominated for a Grammy, but it really ought to get Emmys for writing and acting. The lyrics infest your brain with quotables that reverberate for days, but more than the words it’s Shaw’s intonation that’s so funny and so heartbreaking: the grudging cadences, the way she can inject an unreadable alloy of earnestness and irony into an inanity like “I can rebuild.” The self-portrait painted here is of a burned-out shell drifting numbly through a life that senselessly accumulates irritations, humiliations, discomforts, chores, and interpersonal skirmishes, offset by the tiny comforts of Twix bars and artisanal treats. There’s a personal dimension to the inner emptiness (a sapping break-up), but because New Long Leg’s release coincided with the depressive pall that swept over the world thanks to lockdown, Shaw’s interiority synced up perfectly with exterior conditions. It’s no coincidence that the most exciting rock record in years is about the inability to feel excitement. Within Shaw is a voice of a generation distilling how it feels to be alive right now: “Do everything and feel nothing.” –Simon Reynolds

Further Reading: Dry Cleaning’s Everyday Surrealism

Secretly Canadian

Faye Webster: I Know I’m Funny haha

Faye Webster strikes an unusual balance to keep her fourth album in motion: self-effacing and lovesick, but also knowing and a little cocky. Nothing much happens in these songs because nothing much needs to; Webster’s internal monologue is winsome and cutting enough to keep people occupied, and she knows it. “I like your songs even though they’re not about me,” she tells a love interest. When they’re together, she apologizes for being the first one to nod off, and when she’s by herself, she sleeps with the lights on to feel less alone. If she has to be sad, she’s going to be in on the joke. –Anna Gaca

Further Reading: Faye Webster on How a Shade of Blue, Her Boyfriend, and This One Animal Crossing Song Inspired Her New Album

Saddle Creek

Hand Habits: Fun House

Meg Duffy’s contributions to the indie rock world are manifold, having loaned their ranging guitar textures to Perfume Genius, Kevin Morby, Weyes Blood, and plenty more. On Fun House, Duffy’s third album as Hand Habits, they show off some limber songwriting of their own. Duffy’s reflections are gentle and nuanced: “Aquamarine” is a deceptively wistful number wrapped in a charging rhythm, while “Graves” stands out as an elegant acoustic foray. As Duffy works through ideas of memory, self-determination, grief, and shifting identity, these songs imbue the search with a sense of comfort. –Allison Hussey

Father/Daughter

Home Is Where: I Became Birds

Clocking in at just 18 minutes, Home Is Where’s debut album I Became Birds is at once indulgent and concise, overflowing with emotional urgency that never overstays its welcome. Although the Florida quartet are best summarized by their punk-rock crescendos and bursts of screamo, it’s their scruffy folk sheen—the harmonica, singing saw, and acoustic guitar that hang across these six tracks like a string of lights—that warrants the band’s most apt comparison: Neutral Milk Hotel. Like Jeff Mangum, singer Brandon MacDonald writes in abstract and poetic verse, calling out power structures and narrating their gender transition in evocative vignettes, rooted in nostalgia, salvation, and rebirth. –Nina Corcoran

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Polyvinyl

IAN SWEET: Show Me How You Disappear

All hail the indie-rock drop. The tried and true technique—where a song is quiet and empty until it suddenly isn’t, and an adrenaline rush wallops your lizard brain—is often associated with more overtly crowd-pleasing genres like EDM, rap, and arena rock. But when it works, it works, and no indie rocker did drops better this year than Jilian Medford on her third album as IAN SWEET. Just listen to “Sing Till I Cry,” where a scraggly guitar line is smashed into bits by a doomy bassline and glittering cymbal crashes. Or “Power,” when she stomps her distortion pedal through the floorboards while singing of newfound strength. The fact that so many of these songs are personal purges following Medford’s battles with crippling anxiety makes such epiphanies even more ecstatic. Catharsis doesn’t get more satisfying than this. –Ryan Dombal

Mexican Summer

Iceage: Seek Shelter

For 10 years, Danish punks Iceage have made marvelous art of misanthropy. Sumptuous and brooding, their music is colored with death, crime, and love gone sour. That palette still shades their fifth album, but there is a light creeping in around the edges. A gospel choir lifts opener “Shelter Song” to the rafters; “Gold City” bursts into full-blown Rolling Stones arena rock. On “Drink Rain,” frontman Elias Bender Rønnenfelt plays the lovestruck fop, soft-shoeing through puddles in a blissful, Bacharachian daze. Some might attribute Iceage’s newfound levity to producer Sonic Boom, who’s worked as a dreamscaper for Beach House and MGMT. But it is also the result of a band building upward, refining and sharpening their sound until it is a clean, sparkling spire. –Madison Bloom

Further Reading: Iceage’s Ruthless Evolution

Hopeless / Snack Shack Tracks

Illuminati Hotties: Let Me Do One More

Sarah Tudzin does her sharpest songwriting when she’s got an axe to grind. On Let Me Do One More, her second album as Illuminati Hotties, she dishes up snarky takedowns of industry big-shots, capitalist sheeple, and West Coast health goths, but it’s the self-owns that best showcase her lyrical wit: leaning away during kisses, burning Pop-Tarts, sporting matching sneakers like a dork. Alternating between folk-punk ballads and power-pop rippers, Tudzin cracks open an oversized champagne bottle of fun and feelings, a celebration of maybe almost figuring herself out. –Nina Corcoran

Saddle Creek

Indigo De Souza: Any Shape You Take

Tapping into a deep well of human emotion, Indigo De Souza makes familiar experiences feel new. The North Carolina musician’s writing and delivery are so unguarded that you can’t help but relate, whether she’s screaming in anguish or reassuring a loved one that things will be OK. Her second album, Any Shape You Take, often feels like a series of battles as she fights off ghosts, both real and imagined, in an attempt to gain understanding. “I wanna be a light,” she sings, and when she shines, the brightness can be overwhelming. In fact, it’s all you can see. –Kelly Liu

Further Reading: Indigo De Souza’s Ultimate Indie Rock Glow Up

Dead Oceans

Japanese Breakfast: Jubilee

After two albums and a best-selling memoir that grappled with her mother’s death, grief had been a top note in Michelle Zauner’s work for too long. On Jubilee, her splashy third album as Japanese Breakfast, Zauner sucks up life through a crazy straw. She boosts her sound for a growing audience without smoothing over her idiosyncrasies, taking inspiration from the daily battle to tame one’s anxieties, from capitalist buffoonery, and even from the concept of inspiration itself. “How’s it feel to stand at the height of your powers?” she sings. The answer is hers to divulge. –Olivia Horn

Further Reading: Japanese Breakfast Is Working the Pain Away

Self-released

Liquids: Life is pain Idiot

More than a bratty voice who can yammer out classic rock standards at triple speed, prolific Northwest Indiana punk Mat Williams is a multi-instrumentalist who explores a broad cross-section of rock’n’roll without painting himself into an aesthetic corner. On his latest album Life is pain, Idiot, the tightly written one-minute punk burner “When You Were Born (You Should’ve Died)” leads into the emotionally ambivalent power-pop of “Don’t Wanna Get to Know You.” He’s singing a full-on ballad with “Night the Lights Went Out,” and one song later, it’s Oi! worship. There are 27 songs on Life is pain, Idiot—an embarrassment of riches from a dude who somehow consistently tops his extremely fun cover of Meat Loaf’s “Bat Out of Hell.” –Evan Minsker

Listen/Buy: Bandcamp

Sub Pop

Low: HEY WHAT

Nearly 30 years into their career, Low have moved beyond simply writing great songs: They are now focused on the way those songs travel from the speakers to our ears: a strange, circuitous journey that makes HEY WHAT feel like genuinely new territory. It is easy to imagine any of these 10 warped, noisy pieces of music in stripped-down arrangements. In fact, most of the songs tease that kind of delivery: Alan Sparhawk and Mimi Parker’s voices arrive in unison like folk singers, stripped of effects and clear in the mix, every word audible and sung in simple, hummable melodies. But with producer BJ Burton, Sparhawk and Parker interrupt and distort themselves, filtering their stark, psalm-like compositions through the kind of processing that makes a guitar solo squeal into feedback, or the sound from your speakers clip into static. It is a beautiful, adventurous album from a band who is letting their music fall into disorder and who, in doing so, have never sounded more in control. –Sam Sodomsky

Further Reading: Low Still Don’t Sound Like Anyone Else

Matador

Lucy Dacus: Home Video

Not many people willingly revisit the tumult of their teen years, but on her third album Home Video, Lucy Dacus embraces a perspective gained only by the passage of time. Atop synths like glowing orbs and hushed strumming, she recalls the loneliness of being a late bloomer, the confusion of burgeoning queerness, and the hormonal paradise that was Christian sleepaway camp. In these quietly unspooling songs, Dacus lifts scenes straight from her journals and renders them anew with poetic sensuality: flushed red cheeks, sun-kissed skin, the crescent moon indents of nails pressed into flesh, and a looming future. –Quinn Moreland

Further Reading: Lucy Dacus Breaks Down Every Song on Her Nostalgic Third Album, Home Video

Matador

Mdou Moctar: Afrique Victime

Mdou Moctar first riveted listeners as a wedding performer in his home country of Niger; his live recordings circulated over shared SIM cards. Since then, he’s continued to find electrified approaches to the vernacular music of his Tuareg background with uninhibited guitar. On Afrique Victime, his first release for Matador, Moctar chases lively arrangements even further while excoriating the traumatic legacy of brutal French colonialism in Africa. His solos rip like lightning bolts across a storm of melody and rhythm, with Mikey Coltun’s bass roiling in ecstatic complement. The band charges through energetic and lightly psychedelic numbers (“Chismiten,” “Ya Habibti”), and find more knots to untangle in their quieter asides (“Asdikte Akal,” “Tala Tannam”). Its title track is a pure thrill, detonating as Moctar’s cohort locks into a churning groove from his sung invocation and only growing wilder from there. Reports of the death of rock have been greatly exaggerated: Afrique Victime is a uniquely vibrant and kinetic recording, one that proves that the future of rock music exists far beyond what any genre or geographic borders can define. –Allison Hussey

Further Reading: How Eddie Van Halen, Homemade Hot Pepper, and a Simple Fuzz Pedal Inspired Mdou Moctar’s New Album

Paradise of Bachelors

Mega Bog: Life, and Another

Erin Birgy, the songwriter and playful deviant behind Mega Bog, has mastered the art of hodgepodge. Her songs, particularly those on Mega Bog’s sixth LP Life, and Another, are crammed with multicolored imagery of floating dogs, beetles housed in jars, and blue-bellied lizards. Birgy sings about them in a soft-spoken mania, stumbling over tightly-packed syllables like Destroyer’s Dan Bejar leading a seance. Her arrangements are weightless, weaving lounge jazz and cosmic soft rock into an otherworldly fabric, but her approach to language is supremely odd. On the dreamy “Station to Station,” she compares the dying, dissolving self to “an artichoke being gutted around its spine.” It is one of Birgy’s greatest gifts: the ability to transform worldly materials into lush psychedelia. –Madison Bloom

Further Reading: Step Into the Inscrutable World of Mega Bog

Goliath

Nick Cave / Warren Ellis: Carnage

During the title track of Carnage, a strange and quiet album that Nick Cave recorded with his longtime accompanist Warren Ellis, the 64-year-old musician sits on his balcony and tries to write a song. He’s got a pencil in his hand and a Flannery O’Connor book open for inspiration as his mind drifts to a childhood memory of his uncle. Suddenly, Cave sees himself as a kid, and we see him, too. The arrangement, which began as a dreary trudge of electric guitar and synth, slowly fills with color, like a rainbow forming in a gray sky. As with the best of Cave’s recent work, it is an intimate moment presented as documentary and psychological horror, blending the boundaries between past and future, dreams and nightmares. –Sam Sodomsky

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Self-released

파란노을 (Parannoul): To See the Next Part of the Dream

To See the Next Part of the Dream is Korean indie rock informed by UK shoegaze, Midwest emo, ’90s alternative, modern-day bedroom pop, the popular anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, M83’s early masterpiece Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts, and a dark Japanese film about bullying and teenage fandom. The album was self-released by an anonymous music student living in Seoul, who quite possibly recorded every part themself; the little that is known about its background comes from a note on Parannoul’s Bandcamp, about memories that never existed and rock-star dreams realized, “the wide gap between ideal and reality.” With this context in mind, you can’t help but hear the album’s scale—the textural layers of sound and static, the cinematic swirl of influences, the crushing breakdowns—as a statement of intent, an artist putting everything on the line. Some will be drawn to To See the Next Part of the Dream for its darkness—even the acoustic songs, like “Extra Story,” are undergirded by a paranoid twinkle—but the dread lingering in every moment of beauty on this record only adds to the sense of hope emanating from its very existence. –Jillian Mapes

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Matador

Snail Mail: Valentine

Considering its bounty of pleaded pet names—“baby,” “honey,” “sugar,” “darling”—Valentine seems to pick up the pieces of Lindsey Jordan’s bleeding heart right where she left them on Snail Mail’s 2018 debut, Lush. But while that album promised forever, the songs on Jordan’s sophomore record are wrapped in day-glo caution tape: “Nothing stays as good as how it starts,” she sings with a wariness that makes her hopeless obsessions all the more devastating. Her world has expanded in the last three years—“parasitic cameras,” relapsing, and rehab are all mentioned—and her lyrics are sharper and more intentional, if only to make room for it all. She is now accompanied by synths, string sections, and even a disco sample, but Valentine’s pop sheen never overshadows Jordan’s unflinching honesty. Her deep growl of a voice flickers and flares above taut arrangements—a reminder that even the neatest songs can’t hide the messiness of heartbreak. –Arielle Gordon

Further Reading: Snail Mail Can’t Help But Confess

Saddle Creek

Spirit of the Beehive: ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH

ENTERTAINMENT, DEATH plays like it was recorded on a recycled VHS, with ghostly echoes of whatever late-night ephemera was originally on the tape bleeding through. For their fourth album, Philadelphia’s Spirit of the Beehive made their already expansive sound feel even more hallucinatory, blending psychedelia, shoegaze, and scuzz with newly prominent electronic trappings. At their core, these are delicate pop songs, but they’ve been dissected and plastinated, like corpses in a human body exhibit. The spectacle is unnerving, to be sure, but it’s strangely engrossing too. –Evan Rytlewski

Warp

Squid: Bright Green Field

Squid belong to a cohort of UK bands who are marrying the rhythmic economy and literate alienation of post-punk with the instrumental dexterity and formal ambition of prog. Drop in on the first few minutes of any given song from their debut full-length and you might hear only the former: The guitars are tightly wound, the hi-hats are ticking away, someone is nervously shouting. Stick around a little longer and the world opens up. Jazzy fills poke in at the edges, grooves dissolve into long stretches of synthesized drone. The songs may stretch to seven or eight minutes, but they’re never indulgent, eschewing individual showmanship in favor of scorching collective peaks. –Andy Cush

Mexican Summer

Tonstartssbandht: Petunia

“Being at peace only slows you down,” brothers Andy and Edwin White of the Florida duo Tonstartssbandht sing in harmony near the beginning of their latest album. This lyric is an insight into their remarkable prolificacy: Like any good jam band, they have toured nonstop since forming in 2007 while issuing a steady stream of live and studio releases showcasing their restless, ever-changing chemistry. And yet, Petunia stands out in their vast catalog specifically because of how at peace they sound: It is their most confident and compositionally beautiful release to date, at once settled and surprising in its range of textures and moods. Sometimes, slowing down isn’t such a bad thing. –Sam Sodomsky

Roadrunner

Turnstile: Glow On

After the world spent 18 months at home, the Baltimore band Turnstile unleashed Glow On unto a rapidly-growing audience that could not have possibly been better primed to receive its 34 minutes of nonstop feeling. Is this post-hardcore? Pop hardcore? Streetwear Fugazi? Do you “have to see it live to get it”? No matter how you square their multitudes, Turnstile know that hardcore is fundamentally interactive music—you don’t just listen; you participate; together—and Glow On facilitates it. This might mean screaming along to the tidal hooks of “Mystery” and “Holiday” to lock in with a kinetic crowd. It might mean having a moment of connected introspection with lyrics like “I just need to know I’m working for the big prize” or “Can’t be the only one” or “Thank you for letting me see myself” (just like those Turnstilemaniacs nodding along in the sublime Turnstile Love Connection film). Or maybe it means allowing Glow On’s hypercharged riffs and blast beats—its synth arpeggios, sing-rapping, Caribbean rhythms, and Dev Hynes harmonies—to fluidly eclipse your misfit soul, clarifying that it belongs here. –Jenn Pelly

Further Reading: How Riley Gale, Go-Go Music, and Jet Li Inspired Turnstile’s Glow On

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Atlantic

The War on Drugs: I Don’t Live Here Anymore

The War on Drugs’ synth-heavy fifth album is bright and sparkly—it fizzes and pops and then glows until fading into darkness—as bandleader Adam Granduciel yet again channels and transforms the once-maligned sound of big-ticket mainstream rock circa 1987. The songs he writes are about heavy things—love, death, loneliness—but, whatever the subject, they always circle back to memory, our deeply flawed process for storing and retrieving the past. Granduciel’s characters are haunted by where they’ve been and what they’ve seen, and he surrounds them with discarded fragments of music history that become special because of how he remembers them. –Mark Richardson

Further Reading: The War on Drugs Find Lightness on the Edge of Town

Listen/Buy: Rough Trade | Amazon | Apple Music | Spotify | Tidal

Fat Possum

The Weather Station: Ignorance

A Canadian singer-songwriter with an aura of purposeful solitude, a gift for drawing insight and revelation from minute observations of relationships and environments, and an ear for melodies that dip, wind, and double back like trains of thought. After a few great albums, most of them sparse and muted, she assembles a band that can channel the exuberance of her era’s pop rhythms and twist them toward her own idiosyncratic ends. Far from dampening the music’s acuity and expressiveness, making them softly palatable, these new grooves accompany some of the sharpest songs of her career. Weather Station bandleader Tamara Lindeman might be tired of hearing Joni Mitchell comparisons at this point, but the resemblance is uncanny: Ignorance is something like her Court and Spark.

Not that it sounds much like Mitchell’s 1974 masterpiece. Where that album is warm and jazzy, Ignorance is single-mindedly propulsive, befitting songs concerned with the shrinking possibility of love on a planet hurtling toward collapse. Multiple percussionists provide an unflagging beat; strings, woodwinds, and electronic keyboards float above these girders like an iridescent sunset after a wildfire. Lindeman’s inimitable voice wanders the spaces between, taking in trees choked by buildings, birds alighting on rooftops, a world that hangs over her with the indifference of a secondhand jacket. Perhaps the comparison has more to do with the space Court and Spark opened in Joni’s canon, making room for the run of wonderful and profoundly strange albums that came next. After this, it seems, Tamara Lindeman can do anything. –Andy Cush

Further Reading: The Weather Station Battles Climate-Change Anxiety, One Song at a Time

Orindal

Wednesday: Twin Plagues

Asheville band Wednesday complicate the shoegaze formula on their second album, favoring specificity and grit over the usual washed-out atmosphere. The guitar tones are dialed-in and immersive, but riffs often resolve in queasy dissonance just as you’re expecting euphoric release. Bandleader Karly Hartzman’s songs are documents of distinctly American strangeness and sadness: a burned-out chain restaurant, a Dallas Cowboys-branded urn, “a neighborhood kid with a fucked-up buzz cut.” She delivers these observations with raw-throated urgency, refusing to settle into the background. –Andy Cush

Listen/Buy: Amazon | Apple Music | Bandcamp | Spotify | Tidal

Warp

Yves Tumor: The Asymptotical World EP

On The Asymptotical World, Yves Tumor turns love and beauty into something uncanny. From the hair-raising guitar run on “Crushed Velvet” to the body horror of “Tuck,” the EP is marked by moments where desire is so acute it seems to distort sound and shape. Tumor’s shortest collection to date, The Asymptotical World is backed with trip-hop beats and sticky glam-rock melodies below the fuzz. Even in its most straightforward moments, like the irresistible “Jackie,” you can still sense some chaos in the air. –Kelly Liu