No matter the strength of our creative talents, the art we create will always fall short of fully realizing our imaginations, but the new album Shapeshitter by I’m Being Good makes a deliberate decision to lean into this mismatch.

Such an experience of achieving the meager dreams of a small town animates Gem of the West by SENTRIES, an instant art rock classic from this increasingly entrenched internet music powerhouse.

Experimental folk collective Milkweed recount one such story on Remscéla, an album rendered timeless through its fascinating combination of modern instrumentation and deliberately cobwebbed production.

Lydia Roberts captures this widespread helpless stagnation on Quitters, a harsh noise record with a fleshy human core.

Despite the rise of the hypnagogic pop genre to capture this condition, the sound and its capabilities only really reached fruition with the new album Går I Kras by Amateur Hour, a generationally powerful read of an inescapable zeitgeist.

Electronica artist Heith documents this process on Escape Lounge, an experimental pop record that sets atmosphere and structure against each other in an existential battle for the mind.

Earthworks by Nathan Davis and Sylvia Milo renders this hidden life as an electroacoustic collage, a lively composition of inorganic sounds featuring the guiding hand of human narration.

From the same astoundingly prolific artist who brought you Sadness, Trhä, and many other aliases, Life and their new album My Heart the Dreaming Memory reinvents old-school skramz from the ground up.

This epiphany roars to life on The Age of Ephemerality by BRUIT ≤, a post rock neoclassical piece that shares our wide-eyed horror at the soulless machine destroying all we hold dear.

As the British prog scene continues down its maximalist, energetic, virtuosic path, London experimental outfit World Sanguine Report forges their own path on Songs from the Harbour, a dark, minimal, subdued emotional tinderbox that constantly teeters on the edge of cathartic explosion.

Italian experimentalists Queimada paint this horrifying view from below on Derive, stoking our well-founded fears of a world with no respect for our future existence.

As algorithms and AI close in, proving their superiority to humans in the process of so-called “content creation,” art like Lullaby’s from an Unlanguaged Underneath. by Wormhook stages the last stand for biological consciousness.

Hope increasingly feels less natural, more contrived, and sometimes downright impossible. Italian experimentalists Mamuthones overcome this hope deficiency on From Word to Flesh by ritualizing our optimism, creating an automatic mechanism for future creation that ensures we always have something to look forward to.

Philadelphia no-wave outfit My Wife’s an Angel enters the studio for the first time with Yeah, I Bet, an angsty open letter dissecting our socially-conditioned sociopathy.

We’re given a front row seat to the creative process on Le Sacre Du Soleil Invaincu by Neptunian Maximalism, a psychedelic epic that uses the form of Indian classical music to construct something unquestionably postmodern.

A rejection of respectability politics, ask not, want not by cybergrind darling Bottom Surgery holds nothing back in its militant stance against the status quo, laying bare raw emotion in all its ugly and unapologetic glory.

The 90s post hardcore revival continues with WorldWorldWorldWorldWorld by sassya-, an album that recalls early emo and metal influences on the scene and deepens them further with contemporary styles and production.

Suddenly, we wonder how and why we got here, and we realize with a jolt we’ve been sucked into the beautiful dream world of Thauma by Big Hands.

Johanna Warren reflects on this fundamental loss on The Night of the Wind, an experimental synth pop collaboration between this adult artist and her toddler self.

As the title suggests, Flummox returns to familiar themes of political adversity that arises from growing up queer in Tennessee, using their intense, theatrical style to place us in the pews next to them as the millionaire megachurch pastor damns us to hell.