Xiu Xiu has been waging a war against passive listening for close to 20 years. It’s possible to have mixed feelings about the band’s difficult discography, but real-time exposure to their music is an either/or affair: You’re either giving Jamie Stewart & Co. your full attention or you’re not. Xiu Xiu isn’t here to soundtrack your life. They’re here to stop you in your tracks. The band’s new album, Girl with Basket of Fruit, is a bracing and brutal work that exists in the sliver of space where the Bomb Squad’s pummeling production overlaps with Scott Walker’s haunted epics. Crank it or kill it. There’s no in-between.

by Chris Stamm