Dr. Dog returns from hiatus with an album of perfectly on-brand alt-rock and 11 more reminders of the immense void they'll leave when they walk away for good.

Casual, spacey alt-folk that shares a likeness to Here We Go Magic (String), Belle and Sebastian (Everlee), and Cass McCombs (Under Burden, Lady's Mantle).

Marbled Eye's second full-length builds on their strong debut, Leisure, released five years earlier. Ten songs of angular count-me-out post-punk.

Intricate, explorative art-rock by Ulrika Spacek guitarist and vocalist Rhys Edwards, full of beautiful melody and captivating sonic diversions.

On what might be their last album after announcing plans for an indefinite hiatus, METZ continues to evolve its distinctive brand of sonorous, melodic noise rock. If this is truly the band's endpoint, Up On Gravity Hill is a reverberating final statement.

“I can go anywhere that I want / I just gotta turn myself inside out and back to front,” Thom Yorke sings on Friend of a Friend. This creative awareness helped Yorke's other band leap the chasm between OK Computer and Kid A with bold abandon, and it allowed The Smile to conceive the music on its second album. Visceral and limitless. Of its own space and time. Eerily brilliant.

One of two collections of previously unreleased Broadcast recordings brought about by Warp this year, Distant Call and Spell Blanket (see number 2 below) are more than a mesmerizing window into the band's creative process: they are communications from a departed friend, like a bottle washed ashore from a time long feared lost.

See number 3 above. Thirty-six song sketches from the era immediately following the band's Tender Buttons LP (2005): unquestionably one of the greatest albums of the 2000s. The ethereal beauty of songs like Join In Together (track 33) seems to pause time.

Dreams. Personhood. Sun Records. Empty towns. Bus stations and train yards. Trying to find my way back to you. Quiet nights. Brian Wilson. The Velvet Underground & Nico. Nico solo. Public Strain. Death to devices. Death to memes. Death to the vacant wave. Only you. The Castiles. Nancy Sinatra. T Rex. Lost songs by The Shangri-Las beamed from a distant planet. The past is gone. The past is now. True expression. Fuck what they think. The road, the rail, the sun, the (silver) moon. The guitar. The underground. The early 1960s. Longing. The magical properties of recorded noise.

These are just some of the thoughts that have entered my mind while listening to Diamond Jubilee, the hypnotizing, boundaryless 32-track collection of music released by Cindy Lee (Patrick Flegel) earlier this year, first in digital-only format and more recently as a 3xLP vinyl edition by Superior Viaduct.

Across the album's 32 tracks, Flegel cross-pollinates haunting melodies, intricate arrangements, and distinctive pop sensibilities. The eerie splendor of Glitz. The odd exuberance of Olive Drab. The dissonant, screeching guitar trance of I Have My Doubts. The shimmering instrumental elegance of Realistik Heaven. The Khruangbin-esque funk of Dracula. There are so many turns. So many hooks. The ideas are as limitless as Flegel’s capacity to express them.

Diamond Jubilee is a wonderfully sprawling work—errant but never uneven—blending nostalgia and here-and-now existence, deeply rooted in the psychedelic echoes of 60s pop but unquestionably new. It's such a deep well, and it captures the strange miscellany of human existence with such sweet idiosyncrasy that when it ends, the only thing to do is play it again.