The resulting songs easily clear the bar for earnest expressions of affection, going into awkward, getting-to-know-you encounters, breakups, fears, and those small, secret moments when one's love grows stronger.

Thirstier's anthems of devotion might be more immediately gratifying, but the eloquent expressions of love's uncomfortable and uncertain parts that fill What an Enormous Room are a testament to Torres' insatiable need to seek out emotional truths.

The result is that Sadness Sets me Free is both uplifting and comforting at once. It's also just different enough from most of his other work that it feels fresh and exciting, providing more evidence that Rhys is one of the most interesting and satisfying singer/songwriters of any era.

More than just a bright spot in their career, Blood, Hair, and Eyeballs is a beacon of romantic punk defiance.

While Everybody Can't Go won't surprise anyone who has been following Benny, it does live up to his standards, and confirms his status as a major player in the rap industry.

The main directive of the album is paisley jangle, as with standout tracks like the enthusiastically poppy "Gone" or the fiendishly catchy "Goodbye," but the Umbrellas stretch their sound in all directions as Fairweather Friend plays out, calling on various corners of indie pop history yet translating it all into their own songwriting language.

These songs are ten of his better solo offerings, and they further refine his particular brand of hazy, half-awake beauty.

A remarkably assured set of bold-faced indie rock and maximalist goth pop teaming with earworm melodies, intelligent, darkly romantic lyrics, and thespian bluster.

Vera Sola's blurring of past and present sounds especially apt to the early 2020s here, but more often, Peacemaker's dreamlike world has a timeless appeal that fans of Calexico, Timber Timbre, and Marissa Nadler will love.

Alternately affectionate, suspenseful, weird, and poignant, TPTGATKOMDM is a journey, but it's brought to you by straight-up good songs.

The individual tracks matter less than the collective experience. Isolated songs may hint at Howard expanded emotional and musical pallette, but What Now is a proper album, where each segment expands and interlocks, providing a whole that's greater than its separate parts.

Floating between the interior world and the external one with ephemeral ease, PHASOR is a pleasure to experience -- and another fine example of Lange's receptive, responsive artistry.

Ducks Ltd. come fully into their own with a combination of heightened production values, arrangements that lean into discrete synthesizers and vocal layers, and sneakily depressive lyrics hidden in songs overflowing with brisk pop charm.

Among the many earnest earworms here (the cringier "KFM" notwithstanding) are songs like "God Person" ("I'm not a god person/But I'm never not searchin'") and "Don't Do Me Good," an early single featuring her friend Kacey Musgraves. Mournful but defiant, the latter song makes catchy country-rock of tough sentiments.

Personal but still very fun, Venus is a bold but totally sensical evolution in sound that avoids a third LP of the same old songs and pushes Larsson's sonic style into the future.

This isn't an acoustic album: it's a lean, nervy rock album that uses its mess and its contradictions to its own advantage.

"Dig a Hole" has a big, funky swagger, "Be So Lucky" rides its chunky tremolo riff into the sunset, and "Other Side of the Light" is a sunkissed open-road anthem worthy of the Marshall Tucker Band. These tunes provide Be Right Here with a solid foundation to endure multiple plays, but it's immediately appealing upon first spin thanks to that burnished Cobb production.

Like Deacon before it, Grip suggests serpentwithfeet's confessions and declarations can take many forms, and its light, limber songs don't sacrifice any of his innovation or soul-baring.

Compassion is a hefty companion to Uneasy. Musically, it's deeper and wider. Their mature group invention is heightened by their playing together live. They bring a fresh, intensely interactive, seemingly time-elasticizing approach to the jazz piano trio that is at once bracingly kinetic, intimate, and lyrical.

Shah's most exciting collection yet.

On Untame the Tiger, balance doesn't mean compromise; as Timony works her way through grief, she creates moving, memorable songs that fans of any point in her career can appreciate.

Though the communion and self-awareness Sadier envisions seemed almost impossible at the time of Rooting for Love's release, that's precisely why the album feels so vital.

Ross rounds out the session with two vibrant covers, including a shadowy, off-kilter take of Thelonious Monk's "Evidence" and a dewy, after-hours reading of the John Coltrane ballad "Central Park West." Those last songs nicely underscore the vibraphonist's thoughtful, entrancing distillation of blues and ballads at play throughout all of nublues.

The very pleasant surprise is that Nance and his bandmates -- guitarist James Schroeder, bassist Derrick Higgins, and drummer Kevin Donahue, with some extra guests sitting in -- slip into this music with an easy authority, more languid but no less emotionally engaged than his more raucous efforts, and the spare acoustic closer, "In Orlando," leaves no doubt that Nance can do heartache at 3 A.M. every bit as well as he can summon a wall of fuzzy mania.

There's an intimacy to the interaction between Lund and the Hurtin' Albertans that gives El Viejo a warm, weathered vibe that's every bit as appealing as the songs themselves.

"Get Numb to It!" is a late-arriving outright banger with headbanging drums, a soaring singalong chorus, and lyrics that include "do do, do do do" as well as an anthemic "No, it never gets better/It just gets twice as bad…So you better get numb to it/Get numb to it." The rest of WWBWWGFH is just as nihilistic, a potentially appealing trait given the global tenor of its time.

The appeal in this refurbished soft rock lies in the atmosphere and supple interplay, how the musicians twist melodic clichés without refuting their power, an execution that mirrors how Webster writes songs that feel slightly off-center: she delivers subtle surprises without neglecting basic pop pleasures.

Though she's never been a hesitant or unfocused artist, listening to Gordon come into her own on The Collective is a wonder, especially because she's not remaking herself to stay relevant -- it's the rest of the music and pop culture world finally catching up to her.