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Shame's Drunk Tank Pink emphasizes something that's become even rarer than a rock star: a legitimately exciting band.

A more complete picture of the band's period output does wonders for the Fall's The Frenz Experiment.

Released in 2006, this live LP documents This Heat as a formidable live rock presence.

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Years before rock bands regularly crafted songs of this length, This Heat presented 40 minutes of music in just two songs.

Molchat Doma's Monument makes the subtle point that water pressing on weak foundations will undercut and topple even the most colossal testament to man's hubris.

This Heat's last statement prior to their dissolution, Deceit saw the trio continuing to plot a path that harkened to other sounds of the moment, while remaining thoroughly unique.

Now available on digital formats, This Heat made what might have been a casual release into a statement of pure ambition.

After a big lineup change, Philadelphia metal-gazers Nothing play to their strengths on their fourth album, The Great Dismal.

On their self-titled debut, available for the first time on digital formats, This Heat delivered an all-time classic stitched together from several years of experiments.

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As punks were looking for some potential pathways out of the cul-de-sacs of their limited soundscapes, they saw in funk a way to expand the punk palette without sacrificing either their ethos or idea(l)s.

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Inspired by 2019's career-spanning box set, legendary Manchester post-punkers A Certain Ratio return with their first new album in 12 years, ACR Loco.

On their new album, Ultra Mono, IDLES tackle both the troubling world around them and the dissenters that want to bring them down.

The first PopMatters Picks Playlist column features searing Americana from Rett Madison, synthpop from Everything and Everybody, the stunning electropop of Jodie Nicholson, the return of post-punk's Folk Devils, and the glammy pop of Baby FuzZ.

Landowner's Consultant has all the energy of a punk-rock record but none of the distorted power chords.

Wolf Parade's debut, Apologies to the Queen Mary, is an indie rock classic. It's a testament to how creative, vital, and exciting the indie rock scene felt in the 2000s.

Sneaks' Happy Birthday is a worthwhile release for its insistence upon being categorized as music without a category.

The sophomore album from the Philadelphia's Korine is full of hooks, retro synth sounds, and plenty of emotional resonance.

TV FACE are a hard-driving post-punk band from Lancaster, UK that channel the genre's jagged edges and kinetic rhythms alongside intense, punk rock energy on "Work Hard, Have Fun".

Many only recognize ska-punk as a fad of 1990s US pop music, but its emanation and roots run much deeper and spread far wider than one may think.

Kristin Hersh thinks influences are a crutch, and chops are a barrier between artists and their truest expressions. We talk about life, music, the pandemic, dissociation, and the energy that courses not from her but through her when she's at her best.

Jaye Jayle salvage the best materials from Iggy Pop and David Bowie's Berlin-era on Prisyn to construct a powerful and impressive engine all their own.

Eyedress' Let's Skip to the Wedding is a jaggedly dreamy assemblage of sounds that's both temporally compact and imaginatively expansive, all wrapped in vintage shoegaze ephemera.

With Every Bad, Porridge Radio seduce us with the vulnerability and existential confusion of Dana Margolin's deathly beautiful lyricism interweaved with alluring pop melodies.

The first album in three decades from the Psychedelic Furs beats expectations just one track in with "The Boy That Invented Rock and Roll".

Fontaines D.C.'s A Hero's Death is the follow-up to the acclaimed Dogrel, and it features some of their best work -- alongside some of their most generic.

Fontaines D.C. guitarist Conor Curley speaks with PopMatters about their influences and the flatness around promoting their new album, A Hero's Death.

The Academy of Sun's The Quiet Earth is an interesting mish-mash of styles. Singer-songwriter-pianist-bandleader Nick Hudson prefers to use "Gothic dystopian post-punk" to describe the band.

There's a whole lotta love (and maybe a little hate) in the captivating new memoir by Chris Frantz, who is an open book while talking about life with Talking Heads, Tom Tom Club, and wife Tina Weymouth in this candid interview.

Post-punk's Protomartyr have honed their sound into something apocalyptic on their defiantly modernist Ultimate Success Today.

Television’s 1977 masterpiece Marquee Moon is the 25th Greatest Album of All Time, but is it too “too too” to put a finger on? Counterbalance sees it all backward.

Like Aaron Sorkin, the veteran rock band U2 has been making ambitious, iconic art for decades—art that can be soaring but occasionally self-important. Sorkin and U2's work draws parallels in comfort and struggle.

Cherry Red Records' six-disc Revillos compilation, Stratoplay, successfully charts the convoluted history of Scottish new wave sensations.

The eight songs on WiiRMZ's Faster Cheaper are like a good sock to the jaw, bone-rattling, and disorienting in their potency.