From start to finish, lolling hooks flood Cara's mind as much as indecision, skepticism, and other negative thoughts. They make all the bad stuff go down easy, enabling the listener to have a proper sulk that soothes.

Let Me Do One More makes the leap from "very good" to "great," and this is pleasurable and full of grand surprises in the way that great pop music connects with the listener. You need to hear this.

Colourgrade is a strikingly honest audio portrait of love and creativity. It was a bold choice to make an album that's this much of a grower when attention spans are shrinking rapidly, but like the relationships Mastin and her friends allude to, it's well worth investing the time in Colourgrade.

Any Young completist will need Carnegie Hall 1970, but it's a special performance that can be appreciated by more casual listeners as well. Alone at the microphone, the purity, simplicity, and one-of-a-kind magic of some of Neil Young's best songs come into view in a way that's undeniable.

A bit less club-ready than Livanskiy's other releases, Liminal Soul is a stirring set of late-night reflections.

Throughout the album, BadBadNotGood and their guest collaborators flesh out the sonic canvas without taking away from the raw energy of the performances.

The band injects their own perspectives -- both lyrical and compositional -- into Modern Fiction, giving the songs personal angles and emotional color that place them very much in the now.

A 25-minute blast of brief, confused, oversaturated synth rock tunes, All Day Gentle Hold! is over before you know it but won't soon fade from memory.

The quartet sound more cohesive than they've been in years, benefitting from a single producer's vision in a similar fashion to what Brian Eno pulled off with Viva La Vida.

That Magdalena Bay also augment their capital "P" pop melodies with industrial textures, shoegaze flourishes, and plenty of funked-out bass grooves means that Mercurial World offers both sugary melodic highs and deeper sonic layers to explore.

A pair of mellower tracks near the end, the dembow-inspired "All My Friends Know" and the lush, string-laden "Nineteen," are more restrained yet just as considered and affectionate, pointing to a potential direction for an artist whose emergence was one of the most welcome left-field surprises of 2021.

The moments of uncertainty and incompleteness that sometimes surface only get closer to the unvarnished core of what Morby was aiming for with these songs: a state of emotional suspension that's not quite the end of the day, but not nightfall just yet.

The love and fire on display here confirm what his best work has always shown -- he's not just a fine songwriter, he's a top-shelf musician who lives for this stuff, and it's a pleasure to hear him dig into this material.

Instead of party-starting excitement, the band refracts echoes of Can, Bowie, and the Talking Heads at their most abstract for an album that feels tense and bleary, like a party that's still fun but has burned on for so long that the sun is coming up and things are starting to get weird.

My Morning Jacket is MMJ's most satisfying work since 2008's Evil Urges, and a splendid example of what can happen when their group mind is in sync.

Mod Prog Sic finds Black Dice pushing themselves even further into a place of singularity, making music that's gross, funny, captivating, scary, and beguiling at once, and finding new details in the extremes they've been exploring for decades.

Chaotic yet tightly controlled, Eternal Home is boundlessly creative, and up there with Skinless X-1 as Marcloid's best work.

Perfect listening for solitude, Ookii Gekkou discovers strange beauty within the mundane -- and once again demonstrates that Vanishing Twin's imagination is boundless, even when the world only extends as far as the walls around them.

It's a startling performance. The package design is simply stellar and the liner essays by critic/historian Ashley Kahn and Coltrane biographer Lewis Porter are educational, authoritative, and indispensable.

While technically a companion work to 2020's A Celebration of Endings, Biffy Clyro's ninth studio album, the emotionally sanguine The Myth of Happily Ever After, stands on its own.

With its balance of eras, sounds, and short and extended songs, Shade has the depth of a career retrospective and the freshness of a new album, both of which make it especially appealing to new and longtime Grouper fans alike.

A manifesto that only Deerhoof could create, Actually, You Can is a perfect example of how they achieve what seems like the impossible time and time again -- and with its heroic doses of fun and optimism, it reminds listeners that actually, they can too.

Intriguing from beginning to end, Cocker's lush, emphatic takes should delight fans of vintage French and Baroque pop.

Duran Duran are taking some calculated risks here which sometimes means they stumble -- occasionally, the ballads feel a shade strident -- but the restlessness makes for a kinetic, exciting album.

Radical has all of the mathy riffage, radiant melodies, and neck-snapping energy of a group fresh out of the basement. It also has the emotional maturity and brinksmanship of a seasoned crew who know which buttons to push and for how long, and it's in between those two persuasions that the album achieves greatness.

It's Not Them. It Couldn't Be Them. It Is Them! is superior work from a great rock band. If this is going to be typical from this point on, we're all pretty fortunate.

The band's grandiose hellscapes can sometimes feel like horror-fiction cosplay, but in trading some of the myth and magic for the genuine torment of existential dread, they've managed to produce their most humanistic work to date.

On top of the more accessible production, this record also boasts some of Granduciel's most immediate songs, making it some of the best work from a band with a near-spotless track record.