Liars

Out of all the bands that emerged on the New York scene of the late ’90s and early 2000s, few pushed the envelope as far as Liars. With its 2001 debut album, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top, Liars made some of the most dense, dynamic and forbidding post-punk of the time. But even with their early success, these guys never really let themselves get comfortable, and with each album, they explored different sounds, instrumentation and ideas. Their latest effort, WIXIW, sounds like they picked up where another band with similar artistic ambitions left off — like what Wire might have done after 154 if it had continued on the same creative trajectory.