Sleater- Kinney

Sleater-Kinney’s 10th album “flouts the accepted wisdom about what happens to bands when the most beloved lineup changes,” said Craig Jenkins in NYMag .com. Drummer Janet Weiss left the trio in 2019, citing creative differences with guitarists and songwriters Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein. But fans of Olympia, Wash.’s riot-grrrl icons shouldn’t bemoan that Tucker and Brownstein have recently experimented with brighter, breezier sounds. “Sleater-Kinney is whatever Sleater-Kinney says it is,” and this potent collection “offers undisputed proof this band can still hang.” Although “the dominant musical mode on Path is spiky post-punk,” said Katie Rife in AVClub.com, “the record also reintroduces the warm, organic hard-rock sound that dominated 2005’s The Woods.” The pair have shed the burden of trying to do what fans expect, though. “Instead, it seems they’re turning their gazes inward, to see how they can still surprise each other. Because, when you get down to it, it’s always been Corin, Carrie, and their guitars.”

“Butterfly 3000 is the work of a band with a million ideas and the skills to make them all work like a dream,” said Tim Sendra in AllMusic.com. The chameleonic Australian musicians who call themselves King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard “have made a career of doing the unexpected in glorious fashion,” and the psych-rockers’ 18th album in 11 years is, of all things, “a deep dive into synth-driven dream pop.” In a major left turn for a band that recorded a thrashmetal album just two years ago, this record is laid-back and sunny, its songs laced with drum and synth loops “as bubbly as soda pop and as light as helium-filled balloons.” Vocalist Stu Mackenzie is known for writing out-there lyrics, said Brian Coney in Pitchfork.com. Here, he makes himself “oddly relatable” because even when he’s singing about floating through clouds of glue or the lens flares of the subconscious he appears to be mirroring the fragmentary nature of sleep. In its own strange way, Butterfly 3000 is this band’s “most concise and carefree” album yet.