Deerhoof

Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t spent enough time listening to Deerhoof—the furiously inventive quartet treats each of their new albums as an opportunity for creative rebirth. And yet somehow, they’re also profoundly reliable, a strange but true descriptor for a band so creatively restless. You never know what a new Deerhoof album might sound like, except that it will always sound like Deerhoof.

They are defined by such paradoxes, as Noble and Godlike in Ruin reaffirms. Their latest album is either a portrait of a world descending into monstrous hate, dehumanization, and dollar signs, or a haunting self-portrait of band-as-monster: an intelligent, sensitive, hybrid creature, singing tirelessly of love, but increasingly alienated from that world.