The old cliche of "you have your whole life to write your first album" is especially true in Phoebe's case -- if you listen to some of that more obscure early material, you'll hear that some of the Stranger in the Alps songs had been in her arsenal for years and workshopped over and over. So it may have taken Punisher a while to come out, but for this album Phoebe didn't have the luxury of taking a song like "Georgia," playing it live for at least five years, and releasing an early, alternate version of it before coming out with the stunning arrangement the song has on Stranger in the Alps. (Especially in the age of YouTube and Instagram, established artists can't really road-test new songs if they want to keep them under wraps.) At the same time, Phoebe has come a long way since Stranger in the Alps and the Phoebe Bridgers who made Punisher has a whole new batch of tricks up her sleeve that she didn't have three years ago. Conor Oberst also sang on Stranger in the Alps and the album had a few exciting names behind the scenes (Mike Mogis, Rob Moose, John Doe), but Phoebe is now a masterful, chameleonic collaborator, and that's represented all over Punisher, which features Conor singing on two songs, her boygenius bandmates Julien Baker and Lucy Dacus singing on two songs, and contributions from Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner, Blake Mills, Warpaint's Jenny Lee Lindberg, Bright Eyes' Nate Walcott, Christian Lee Hutson, Tomberlin, and more. (It also features the same mixing and production team as her debut -- Mike Mogis, Tony Berg, and Ethan Gruska -- and features some of the same backing musicians, including Marshall Vore and longtime collaborator Harrison Whitford.) And though it's still Phoebe's name on the marquee and her face on the album cover, Punisher truly feels like a much more communal album than its predecessor. You could still picture Phoebe performing most of these songs solo if she wanted to, but your brain never draws up images of one person and their acoustic guitar when you listen. You notice the many guest vocalists, you notice the intricate arrangements, and it all swells together wonderfully. Full review here.

Waxahatchee signed to Merge for her third album, 2015's Ivy Tripp, following the release of American Weekend and her breakthrough second LP Cerulean Salt on Don Giovanni. Five years and two albums later, she put out Saint Cloud at the end of March, and it's already being heralded as the best album of her career. With its earthy, twangy, country and folk influenced sound, Saint Cloud is a bit of a departure from her previous, more indie rock-flavored releases, but Waxahatchee brings sensitivity and depth to whatever style she works in. This album has drawn deserved comparisons to Lucinda Williams, and while it's early to be making predictions, it feels primed to have the same kind of staying power as Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

A lot of people were introduced to Becca Mancari as a member of Bermuda Triangle alongside Brittany Howard, but Becca had also released her debut solo album Good Woman right around the same time Bermuda Triangle put out their first single, and Good Woman proved Becca was a worthwhile artist in her own right. It's one of the past few years' true gems; an alt-country record with an indie rock edge and truly timeless songwriting. For its followup The Greatest Part, Becca signed to Captured Tracks -- an indie pop label who at this point are probably best known for signing Mac DeMarco -- and she produced it with Paramore drummer Zac Farro, who also makes Tame Impala-esque psych-pop as Halfnoise. (Plus, there's backing vocals on "First Time" and "I'm Sorry" by Julien Baker.) The Greatest Part is probably the first album to ever make "Captured Tracks," "country," and "Paramore" one degree of separation from each other, and you can hear the center point of that unique venn diagram in the sound of these songs as much as you can see it on paper. Zac's influence is felt in the psych-pop guitar work that pops up from time to time, and much more so than Good Woman, this album has an indie/dream pop side that sounds right at home on Captured Tracks. Becca hasn't abandoned her folk/country roots, though, and the fusion of all of these sounds makes for an album that breaks down even more musical boundaries than Good Woman did. The sounds that Becca experiments with on this album are new, but what hasn't changed is how impactful her songwriting and delivery is. She still has a knack for wrapping powerful storytelling in warm melodies, and delivering each word in a way that captures your attention and doesn't let it go.

Last year, Bill Callahan released his first album in five years, the 20-song, hour-long double album Shepherd in a Sheepskin Vest, and he now returns just 13 and a half months later with ten more new songs, Gold Record. After taking so much time off before Shepherd, Bill must have really been hit with a creative spark, because he hasn't given us anything close to 30 songs in a one-year period since his Smog days in the mid '90s. And not only is he very prolific right now, he's on a roll quality-wise too. The Gold Record songs are at least as good as the Shepherd songs, and they're different enough to make Gold Record clearly its own distinct new album. Like its predecessor, these songs are minimal -- often with just Bill's voice, his acoustic guitar, and maybe a little light drumming or textural work in the background -- and Bill's delivery and lyricism is plainspoken and conversational. But each individual song is such a complete, compelling story on its own that they all feel like crucial additions to his catalog. It makes sense that Bill rolled this album out one song a week for ten weeks -- it's a cohesive album, but every single song stands tall on its own too.

Bob Dylan is back with his first album of new, original music in eight years -- 58 years after he released his debut album -- and it's the best record he's released in a long time. It's also a record that he only could have made now. It can't come off as a lesser version of his classic '60s and '70s work because it almost never sounds like that work. It hardly even sounds like Tempest. It's as close in spirit to Leonard Cohen's final recordings as Leonard's first album was to Dylan's early work. It's a little bit similar to the latest Nick Cave (who's a big fan of the album's lead single, "Murder Most Foul") album too. Dylan has taken on this speak-sung, stream-of-consciousness delivery that's been increasingly favored by late-career rock legends lately, and with it, he helps shape this new wave of music written by not-new artists. As someone who was never exactly, um, Frank Sinatra, Bob Dylan has long been hit with criticisms of "he can't sing," and as his voice became more gravelly in recent years, his singing started sounded even rougher than it did in the '60s. But on Rough and Rowdy Ways, he uses it to his advantage. Much more so than Tempest, these songs are perfectly suited to the way his voice sounds right now. Full review here.

In a 1975 Rolling Stone interview, Neil called his long-shelved-and-now-finally-released album Homegrown "the darker side to Harvest." With more hindsight, he called it "the missing link between Harvest, Comes a Time, Old Ways and Harvest Moon" in Jimmy McDonough's 2002 Neil Young biography Shakey. Those albums are all on Neil's folkier, more acoustic side, and Homegrown is indeed cut from that cloth. As soon as you hear the opening of "Separate Ways," you're transported right back to the warmth of the Harvest era. It's of the same proto-slowcore variety of that album's opener "Out On the Weekend," but even more haunting and melancholic. Just 30 seconds in, and Homegrown already lives up to the description Neil gave Cameron Crowe of it 45 years ago.

That same mood carries over into second track "Try," which -- like "Separate Ways" -- features The Band's Levon Helm on drums, and Levon really managed to capture the bare-bones, slow-paced drumming style that these types of quietly revolutionary Neil Young songs always demanded. "Try" is also one of two songs on Homegrown with backing vocals by Emmylou Harris (the other being "Star of Bethlehem"), and her soaring voice makes for a truly lovely contrast with Neil's more somber delivery. And as melancholic as those songs are, they've got nothing on the melancholy of the entirely-solo cuts "Mexico" (voice and piano) and "Kansas" (voice, acoustic guitar, and harmonica), or on "White Line," which features Neil, his acoustic, and his harmonica joined only by some lead guitar by The Band's Robbie Robertson. It's on those breathtaking songs where you can really hear why Neil -- coming right off the release of On The Beach -- might have felt like he was digging himself into a hole of dour, depressive music. But all these years later -- now that Neil has cemented his legacy over and over again and proven to be an artist who can evolve and adapt with the times without losing his own uniqueness -- those songs feel like buried treasure, especially for fans who gravitate towards his most hushed material. Full review here.

The Nashville Sound may have been Jason Isbell's return to making 400 Unit albums (though the members did play on Southeastern and Something More Than Free), but Reunions captures the energy of the band's live show in ways its predecessor didn't. Reunions is populated with fiery, show-stealing guitar solos, explosive hard rock choruses, and moments where all the musicians sound like they're feeding off of each other at once in a way that nears jam band territory. There's still as much Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen on Reunions as there was on the last album, but there's also stuff like the reggae-rock undercurrent of album opener "What've I Done To Help" that recalls late '70s Grateful Dead. (There's also literally some David Crosby, who sings on "What've I Done to Help" and "Only Children.") And even being a 400 Unit album, it has some bare-bones singer/songwriter songs that rival Southeastern and Something More Than Free too ("Dreamsicle," "Only Children," "St. Peter's Autograph"). Reunions is full of stuff that would sound wildly out of fashion in a lesser songwriter's hands, but Jason Isbell makes this music sound entirely relevant. He takes notes from the classic rock canon, but not in a way that comes off as reactionary to modern music. He makes familiar sounds feel fresh, he fills a void you might not've realized was there, and his subject matter resonates so much right now that these songs never feel like they're from any time but the present. Full review here.

What seemed at first like a fun side project has turned into one of the year's most replayable albums. Bonny Light Horseman -- the new supergroup of Anais Mitchell, Eric D Johnson (Fruit Bats), and The National/Craig Finn/Hiss Golden Messenger/Josh Ritter collaborator (and now member of Paul Banks' new band Muzz) Josh Kaufman -- is steeped in centuries-old tradition, but they sound like a breath of fresh air. Their debut album is a mix of traditional folk songs (including the one they're named after) and originals, and Bonny Light Horseman often drastically rework the traditionals and make them entirely their own. It's an album that could appeal to fans of classic folk rock like Fairport Convention as much as to more recent indie folk acts like Fleet Foxes or Bon Iver (whose Justin Vernon appears on the album and released it on 37d03d, the label he runs with The National's Aaron Dessner, who also played on the album), and it's one of the most refreshing albums in this style to be released in recent memory.

Laura Marling's followup to 2017's Semper Femina was originally supposed to come out later this year, but while several artists are delaying albums due to COVID-19, Laura pushed the release of hers up because of it. "I saw no reason to hold back on something that, at the very least, might entertain, and at its best, provide some sense of union... I want you to have it," she says. As the title implies, this one was inspired by Laura's own daughter -- "how would I guide my daughter, arm her and prepare her for life and all of its nuance?" It was also produced mostly by Laura herself (with some assistance from longtime collaborators Ethan Johns and Dom Monks), and even more so than Semper Femina, it finds Laura returning to the warmer, earthier sounds of her earlier material. Laura does say the album was partially inspired by "the fragmentary, nonsensical experience of trauma" too, but still, there's something comforting about it. It feels nostalgic and lived-in and whenever I put it on, it provides some escapism from all the shittiness of daily life. I know a lot of the delayed album releases are happening because artists want to be able to promote them on tour, so we should not take it for granted that Laura was gracious enough to put this out in the world at a time when we need it most.

You read that right, The Microphones in 2020. Phil Elverum (who retired the moniker in 2003 and has gone by Mount Eerie ever since) brought back the name he used for such classic albums as The Glow Pt. 2 for the first time in 17 years, and the result is a one-song, 44-minute album where he muses on the very idea of being "The Microphones." "There is too much focus on the title of a thing," Phil told us in a new interview. "Ideally, we can just make stuff without a title for it and without an identity for it. Things can just rest on their own merit, but that's too idealistic [laughs] and impossible." You can read much more about this excellent new album here.

While associated with staunch indie rock snobbery, Stephen Malkmus has long dabbled in jam band territory, all the way back to Pavement’s final album, Terror Twilight. (Before? Maybe.) So when he announced Traditional Techniques, his third album in three years, as “stoner folk” it wasn’t really as much of a stretch as Matador may have wanted you to believe. At least not in that way. It is, however, his quietest, most introspective and straight-from-the-heart record he’s ever made. Read the full review.) 

New Zealand singer/songwriter Nadia Reid slowly but surely started to take off in the US after releasing her excellent 2017 album Preservation, and now she's signed to a US label (Spacebomb) and finally back with a followup album, Out of My Province. Joining the Spacebomb family not only gave Nadia more visibility in the US, it also allowed her to work with the label's in-house production team of Matthew E. White and Trey Pollard, who have earned themselves a reputation for their grand string arrangements thanks to their work on recent albums by Foxygen, Natalie Prass, Bedouine, and more. The strings do wonders for Out of My Province, which is a beautiful sounding record and the most massive sounding album Nadia has released yet. But as much of a sell as they are, Nadia never relies on any of the embellishments to drive these songs home. Just like her first two records, Out of My Province brings you to the edge of your seat with the power of Nadia's words and voice alone.