Lars Gotrich

Updated on May 18 at 9:47 a.m. ET.

The listening party has ended, but you can stream the album below via Spotify or Apple Music.

"Nothing to be done."

Estragon's opening line from Waiting for Godot has been spooling around like a tape loop, decaying yet cacophonous, in my head all week. Revisiting a dog-eared copy from high school, Samuel Beckett's play reads like the same piece of music played in two noise-canceled rooms — we the audience experience a melody waver in discord, briefly align, turn out of sorts, and on and on.

Updated on June 18 at 1:33 p.m. ET.

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As more festivals, performances and concerts are canceled due to the coronavirus shutdown, musicians of all stripes and sizes are taking to social and streaming platforms to play live for their fans,

When Jay Electronica dropped "Exhibit C" in late 2009 — first on Sirius Radio, then on New York's Hot 97, before hitting the big time as the pumping music behind The Boondocks' season three trailer — it was absolutely... well, electrifying. After a bidding war, Electronica signed to Jay-Z's company Roc Nation in 2010.

You know those scenes in horror movies when some creep (who, of course, turns out to be a skull-sucking monster from hell) opens its mouth wider than it should? With jaw unhinged, Code Orange's Underneath, out Friday, devours a body of extreme sounds — sludge, noise, metallic hardcore, doom, grunge, industrial and whatever else it takes to make the mosh pit swarm — to make uncompromisingly chaotic metal.

Donning floral gasmasks and brandishing liberty torches against an apocalyptic, ombré pink landscape, Natalie Maines, Emily Strayer and Martie Maguire look ready for battle. And that's just the promotional photo.

There must be some alternate reality where Danielle, Este and Alana — the sisters HAIM — are the tough-talkin'-but-tender co-owners of a deli. They've got the best pastrami in town, never skimp on the smoked salmon spread and get their pumpernickel from the nice old man down the street. They dish tough love to young folks, experiment with weird schmears and hug-it-out over bad breakups. At the very least, it's a heart-warming sitcom idea.

When I can't wrap my head around a piece of music — be it a monstrous orchestral work, twisted death metal or skittering electronics — I reframe the abstract in terms of visual art or dance. What is the movement of the music? How would the sonic shapes translate to a canvas or to the jumping, stretching and gyrating contours of the human body?

Elyse Weinberg, a late '60s singer-songwriter and guitarist once lost to time and later rediscovered by crate-diggers, died Feb. 20 in Ashland, Ore., after battling lung cancer. The news was confirmed to NPR through both her label, Numero Group, and close friend, Satya Alcorn. She was 74.

When Archers of Loaf reunited in 2011 for a series of shows, members of the '90s indie-rock band looked downright elated onstage. Eric Bachmann, in particular, fed off the energy of the crowd with a giddiness that contrast his gruff exterior. But rather than blithely dive into the studio after renewed purpose, the band wisely waited until it had more to say.

What better way to spend a beautifully sunny, long weekend than indoors on a liquid diet watching movies in a fever-induced haze? (Mashed potatoes and gravy count as liquid, right?) Between comfort viewings of Bob's Burgers and King of the Hill, I caught up on my queue.

It's not too late to make a musical resolution for 2020, right?

No, I'm not planning to spend any diaper money on rare 7-inches, or develop an unhealthy effects pedal habit. But I do need to get outside my musical comfort zone — and I want to get into calypso music.

When guitarist Ian MacKaye, bassist Joe Lally and drummer Amy Farina played their first live gig together — a benefit, of course — in late 2018, at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington D.C., they didn't even have a name. "Every band name has been taken, and they all have lawyers," MacKaye said that night. They were and are members of Fugazi, The Evens and The Warmers, bands thick with D.C.

Gonna keep it 100: I absolutely judge an album by its cover. Does it have a sick wizard? A most-pleasing font and color combination? An impossible and-or nightmarish fantasia?

When I scroll through Bandcamp, on the hunt for hidden corners of punk, metal and outer sounds, the first sense is always sight. Maybe a killer band name will catch my eye, or a trusted record label, but amid a bloated glut of music, image is queen.

"There will never be another one like him. Peace to his family and all of his fans around the world. Listen to Sean play his drums and hear his heart sing," Cynic's Paul Masvidal wrote in remembrance of his bandmate Sean Reinert, who died last Friday at the age of 48.

Polvo imagined a language as thick and viscous as cheese grits. Here was an indie-rock band of Southerners, messing with alternate guitar tunings based on Indian and Middle Eastern drones, noodlin' on aberrant grooves that simultaneously repelled and sucked in ears attuned to a long-winded, surprisingly catchy weirdness.

New year, new choices. Call your friends, drink more water, watch movies with subtitles, and listen to more drone and hardcore. I can't help you with the first two, but I can recommend Ana Lily Amirpour's feminist vampire western A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night towards the third. (If you're fresh from my year-end All Songs Considered episode — hi there, by the way — I'm here every week with music of both extreme and soothing flavors.)

Some of us keep our grits simple: butter, salt and pepper. Some add sugar, which is just chaos incarnate. Some keep it real Maryland with Old Bay and the internet goes mad. Viking's Choice, as ever, welcomes and encourages unexpected dashes of this and that to make the mix a little weirder, a little louder, a little homey-er.

As we take a bottle cap to the lava-spewing volcano that was 2019, we're about to make sense of all of the music that it contained — or at least the parts that hardened on our hearts like pyroclastic rocks. Be on the lookout for our year-end lists very soon, plus my annual Viking's Choice episode of All Songs Considered, which comes out Dec. 31.