Opening up into segments of wider instrumentation and ear-splitting noise, these tracks meander through a misty pathway defined by different shades of anguish, through alternate expressions of the same fundamental image of lashing out at a mirror.

The artist sits with their father on the last days of his life, the two looking out into the world and their pasts together with new eyes as time screeches to a halt.

Ov Pain wraps their music in circles, slowly descending further into their cave, incrementally adding elements and building tension before allowing the music to disappear into the far distance.

Fatou’s range is impressive, from her smooth jazzy vocals on “The other side”, to her energetic triplet flow on the title track “Adaeh”.

Stress Positions feels wholly unsatisfied not only by the injustice and strife they name outright, but also by the feelings of monotony and hopelessness that come with accepting the status quo laid before them. They are absolutely fed up with the stagnation, perfectly encapsulating our deepest unsettlement with the world, Harsh Reality provides a moment to feel the weight of everything around you.

As electroacoustic, classical, and experimental electronic worlds collide on the collaborative album I by Musique Infinie, a rich, intricate, yet fundamentally minimalist style crystalizes.

Whether it's the longer, darker nights, or the dropping temperature inspiring ice-cold riffs, it seems like the best metal releases always come out in the winter. See below for my top 3 picks for best metal albums this week.

It’s been a while, but this week had some hip hop releases that got us talking. Here’s the long-awaited continuation of our hip-hop roundup!

Frida and the Filibusters Bid Farewell and Fall Asunder embodies the anarchic energy and radical inclusivity that makes DIY music feel like home. As a live record, listeners are given a front row seat to CIME’s molotov cocktail of noise rock, freak folk, jazz, funk, Latin music, and art punk. While their sound is already explosive in-studio, CIME’s live work is even more intense and captivating. Conga percussion and swells of alto saxophone back Monty Cime’s expressive vocals, her voice strained to its limits in a performance that would draw any porch-dwellers back inside the house to catch this unmissable set.

Where church tradition depicts such moments with choirs and organs, both musical elements with a clean, open sound that soars high above our physical bodies, Saint Elisabeth exhibits a willingness to engage with Jesus and Francis’s shared bodily nature.

From just behind the horizon, however, a slow yet certain march encroaches, bringing with it bulletproof bureaucracy, unsolvable resource shortages, and factory farms.

With an anxious and in-your-face approach, ni downright refuses to fit in any one category as they explore techniques in black metal, avante-garde jazz, math rock, psychedelic prog metal, and more across this 10-track run.

This week, our Inside Noise roundup consists of one standout album all by itself: The Rime of Memory by Panopticon!

As an end result, these typically straightforward words become these abstract masses that convey more of a feeling than an actual concrete meaning.

Haunted Disco employs a variety of genres and styles that all get treated to a distinct lofi aesthetic, making every second of this release almost uncomfortably intimate.

Of course, the loose cannon vocals are this record’s crowning jewel, stringing together shrill screams, throaty yells, defeated speech, and wailing singing to tell a story of a deeply troubled person in the midst of a mental breakdown.

From the dark and twisted to the beautiful and bright, this week brought us an incredible variety of great underground metal albums!

Overall, the record only takes a cautious step forward when that step brings the sound more in tune with the flow of the world, a design philosophy that makes the integration of field samples so seamless as to be nearly unnoticeable.

We got alternative funk. We got outsider pop. Put them all together, and we have one strange dance roundup for you this week.

Pulling elements from industrial music and dark techno, these sounds are deconstructed down to their base elements and reformed to create highly textured beats and an atmosphere of unrestrained chaos.