Chicago producer Mister Lies excels at atmosphere. The details surrounding his 4 a.m. missives are key, like the piping background noise on “I Walk”, and the drizzling shower sounds that open “Cleam”, the closing cut from his Hidden Neighbors EP. A few signifiers will be familiar here to anyone that’s downloaded an mp3 from a …

On his debut LP, UK juke/bass producer Antony Williams is still taking cues from Chicago’s South Side veterans, but for the first time it feels like he’s building something of his own.

Two years after his Bubu King EP, the N.Y.-based Sierra Leone musician offers a whiplash set of electrified bubu backed by NYC locals like Highlife’s Doug Shaw and the band Skeletons.

The Leeds producer’s sophomore LP is a nasty carnival of electronic pop that giddily hops between styles like a broken radio.

Following the glossy sheen of 2010′s Snakes for the Divine, High on Fire get back to doing what they do best: sweaty, thrashing, chipped-tooth stoner metal.

Much of Nicki Minaj’s ambitious second LP sweats with a too-big-to-fail desperation. At its best, she innovates with the playful abandon of prime-era Missy Elliott or Busta Rhymes. But in her quest to avoid becoming just another female rapper, she settles for being just another pop star.

The Burlington, Vt., singer-songwriter’s new album finds him refining his pop vision, splashing it with touches of New Age pensiveness and moments that topple into dissonance.

This small-town New Hampshire black metal band’s auspicious debut EP manages to marry ambition and efficiency without a misstep.

Deciding he was “bored of computers,” the restless English producer’s latest album (featuring guest vocals from Martina Topley-Bird) offers his most drastic shift to date.

The Brooklyn trio follows 2009′s Beast Rest Forth Mouth with a record that’s admirable in large part because its ambitions are as subtle and difficult to quantify as its pleasures.