On wide-ranging Canadian producer Ryan Hemsworth's first solo LP and second major release of 2013 after the Still Awake EP, he remains stylistically daring, but shows off a newfound focus. The material still meanders, though with more purpose, sharper hooks, and lusher instrumental textures.

On his debut LP ilp, producer/singer Kwes’ gentle songwriting sensibilities are unable to keep up with his exploratory beat making and the result is too often a mismatch.

As Special Request, UK producer Paul Woolford aimed to honor his teenage years of listening to pirate radio, hearing the sounds of first-generation jungle and rave through his speakers as rave culture was forming. The project's proper debut, Soul Music, is one of the most exciting dance records of this year.

Los Angeles indie duo Boardwalk make music eerily reminiscient of Beach House or Widowspeak and definitely have a good ear for melody. The problem is it doesn't sound like their own.

Doomriders are largely known as the rockier side project of Converge bassist Nate Newton, who handles guitars and vocals here. Their Kurt Ballou-produced third album, Grand Blood, is the band's first collection of new material since 2009.

The first album in five years from Argentinian musician Juana Molina isn't a reinvention. There are subtle differences between this and 2006's Son, but mostly it feels like visiting with an old friend who's back in town with a clutch of new stories to tell.

For this new EP, Matthew E. White set specific guidelines: Guitars stayed propped on their stands, horns were barred, and the piano remained shut. Outer Face is enlivened by this playful experimentalism, as though the Richmond, Va., musician is breaking his sound down to its barest elements.

Stepping out of their basement, the Vermont-based psych pop collective Happy Jawbone Family Band recorded their new self-titled collection in Gary’s Electric Studio with Woods’ Jarvis Taveniere. The sound is cleaner, but still very much in step with their well-established aesthetic.

On his new Drone Logic, Daniel Avery schews the hyper-rhythmic minimalism and throwback New Jersey garage sound that currently power UK club music in favor of soupy, riff-driven compositions that borrow from UK fetishes past: burbling acid house, elegant Detroit techno, big beat.

The Portland, Ore., heavy rock band Red Fang features well traveled, adequately grizzled music-lifers who had a surprise hit with the excellent 2008 track “Prehistoric Dog”. Their third album Whales and Leeches, the second for Relapse, was produced by Decemberists multi-instrumentalist Chris Funk and features guest vocals from Yob's Mike Scheidt.

Double Cup, the new album from Chicago producer Rashad Harden, is a gorgeous, invigorating collection that places equal importance on melody and rhythmic texture. It's unquestionably the strongest footwork-related LP since the genre was introduced to a wider audience.

The more willfully ugly the music of rapper/producer Black Milk becomes, the better he gets. No Poison No Paradise, his latest, features some of the ugliest- sounding, and therefore best and most fully-realized, music of his career.

The newest EP from Matt Mondanile's Ducktails project, Wish Hotel, picks up where The Flower Lane left off, playing with electronic textures to further evoke a reflexively hazy attitude toward the way of the world.

Rhythmic, syncopated drum-machine music at its core, Livity Sound—a compilation-cum-artist album from the Bristol label and crew of the same name—is too abstract to transport you, and too bewitching to sink into the background.

San Diego trio Earthless, featuring OFF! drummer Mario Rubalcaba, are hell-bent on riding their guitars out of this atmosphere. On their first album in six years, they offer long songs as well as a reminder of the fun that can be had with the most basic elements of rock.

On this new mini-LP, Best Coast return to the unmistakable elements that characterized the band when they hatched during the fuzzy garage-pop boom a few years ago. After the bland turn on The Only Place, Bethany Cosentino is back with propulsive melodies and simple lyrics about aimlessness and love. 

The 21st Motörhead album is packed with uptempo ragers, the kind of songs Lemmy seems to stockpile in unlimited supply, and Aftershock's brief song lengths and wealth of unshakeable choruses remind you he's just as fixated on catchiness and concision as on speed and power.

Cole Furlow's Dead Gaze project has, until this point, been a reliable producer of feedback-swathed pop nuggets. On his new Brain Holiday, he’s swept away the detritus and placed his personality front and center, revealing a sharp ear for psychedelia-indebted garage rock that doesn't rely on obfuscation to get across.  

On Montreal producer CFCF's new Outside, instead of simply losing himself in the haze of the translucent pastels as on previous release Continent, Silver uses the release as a bid to ground his music with more approachable song structures.

Often in doom, the impulse can be to turn up and drown out, treating the song mostly as a reason for amplifier massages. On their third album, the fascinating Salt Lake City band SubRosa—two violins, three vocalists, bass, drums, and guitar—are more meticulous than that, treating each number like its own opera.

On Cut 4 Me, an ambitiously catchy collection featuring production from Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, Kingdom, Jam City, and others, the Los Angeles vocalist Kelela Mizanekristos gives dark dance music a more pop-friendly spin.

Cass McCombs’ sprawling seventh full-length takes root in the history and mythos of the American West. Across its 85 minutes, he crafts a cosmology out of Western characters from the past two centuries and covers most of the musical themes and narrative fixations he's drawn upon since his 2003 debut. 

Following a four-year hiatus, the Chicago instrumental group Pelican return with a new guitarist and a new album, Forever Becoming, a collection that finds them raging like they never have before.

Dirk Dresselhaus, who records as Schneider TM, toyed with the poppy side of glitchtronica on his 2002 album Zoomer, a record that remains his best known work. Guitar Sounds is about as far away from that as you can get, instead emphasizing his aptitude for drone oriented pieces, improvisation, and explorations on the margins of music.

L.A. producer Deco shows off a curator's sense of knowing his context and history and how to merge those ideas into something evocative on his debut Timescales.