The pop singer has superstar ambition and a knack for clever genre collisions. But while her new album sometimes matches intensity with innovation, it more often grinds her nuanced story to a paste.

Written after her divorce from her longtime producer, Veirs' new album vibrates with a sense of potential, balancing the weight of experience with the rewards of staying attuned to wonder.

As a kid discovering music, you assemble a hodgepodge of other people's opinions. But there's a lot of joy to be found when the urge to agree with the critics melts away, writes critic Laura Snapes.

M.C. Taylor has a rueful, weary reediness that makes the tensions in his songs pull that much harder. In a beautiful outtake from Heart Like A Levee, dreaming and reality are at odds.

The 16-minute track manages to be concise and lean, almost speeding on an empty tank through a tireless groove that solders dusty Ohio punk to krautrock's soothing repetitions.

Ever since Boxer, the band's pledged to release a record channeling the cataclysmic energy of its concerts. With the first single from Sleep Well Beast, it's finally come through.

Inspired by its time at an experimental Berlin festival, this single offers a cool, cryptic introduction to the Bristol-Paris folk band's kaleidoscopic new phase.

Defiance is exhausting. Mike Hadreas' cosmically expansive, baroque declaration of love also acts as a protest song, depicting his lover as a godlike being who sustains his spirit.

In the lead single from her new, self-titled album, the folk singer addresses another person while turning inward. "If I had my way, every song would eventually lead to empathy," she says.

For the singer, introspection became a lens that nearly ended his career. Focusing on the lives of others changed that. "In a world of mouths," Lekman sings on his new album, "I want to be an ear."

The Melbourne artist's Susan persona, whom she calls "a manifestation of social media metadata," gets a taste of freedom in a Butoh-inspired video.

After more than a decade on the road, the prolific punk singer (of Swearin' and p.s. eliot fame) releases her solo debut in a bold attempt to unhitch love from nostalgia.

Fussell's cover of the Jimmy Lee Williams song marks a move into more existential territory: The maturing artist is now less a force of nature than someone keen to sync with its rhythms.

Alynda Lee Segarra tells NPR her new song is about "people of color claiming their space and their right to exist." It's dedicated to the protesters at Standing Rock and Peñuelas, Puerto Rico.

With her softly echoing guitar and slight strings, Byrne channels some ancient wavelength, then suddenly sticks a pin in the universal.

Erin Birgy echoes the liberationist vibe of the West Coast's hippie heyday with a seven-piece rock band blissing out by a glimmering shoreline.

Earlier this month, musicians — invited by Bon Iver and The National — gathered at a former East German radio facility for an unconventional festival that pieced its story together as it went along.

"It can be really tough to be bold," says the Norwegian art-pop singer of her approach to performance. On her sixth album, Blood Bitch, she aims to balance provocation and complexity.

Frontwoman Cosima Jaala tries and fails to leave someone in a proggy freakout of a song about feeling all kinds of different ways at once.

To celebrate new reissues of his work, friends, fans and peers share favorite songs and memories of the musician whose influence on American Primitive Guitar has grown to monumental heights.