With Playing Favorites, Sheer Mag have made an excellent rock & roll album, and yes, sometimes that is all you need.

Wry, riveting, chaotic, and infectious throughout, Where's My Utopia? easily upstages what was an impressive debut.

Y’Y a singular meditation on ancestral history, environmental awareness and spiritual devotion, is wide ranging, complex, and in places, quite mysterious. It is also utterly compelling.

ScHoolboy Q flexes just how easy his craft is for him throughout Blue Lips, switching his styles without blinking while telling some of his most difficult truths.

Eternal Sunshine is Grande in peak form, a magical maturation that is elevated, resilient, and confidently restrained.

The ever-shifting tone of Speak to Me asks the listener to keep up with the Lage's quirks and mood swings, but the sum of its parts is quite dazzling.

Six years after Whack World, Whack has only grown more accomplished at contrasting brightly colored surfaces and what lies beneath them.

Bright Future is the type of no-filter album with enough variety and poignancy that each song is bound to be somebody's favorite.

Tigers Blood is the rarest of things: an album that feels familiar upon its surface and idiosyncratic in its details.

Even more than any music that came before it, this album highlights Rosali's unique voice, one that communicates full-hearted intensity without ever resorting to heavy-handedness or overstatement.

The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow stands as one of his best late-career master works.

There are two expertly executed albums here, each highlighting just how this group has grown from being rascally jokesters to hardened, concerned members of society. As far as swan songs go, Heaven :x: Hell is a heartfelt goodbye to fans, an overly generous gift that aims to please the full spectrum of diehards and thank them for all their years of dedication.

Only God Was Above Us isn't just a great album in its own right -- it's one that enriches the understanding of Vampire Weekend's entire history.

This is one creatively askew pop-R&B delight after another, all voiced with captivating and confident flair by a razor-sharp songwriter.

It's that sound of love, the fantasy vs. the reality of a relationship, that fascinates McAlpine and makes Older such a lovely and bittersweet experience.

Up on Gravity Hill is a significant step forward for a group that already was doing mighty work, and it suggests any number of places they could take their talents next. Anyone who doubts METZ are one of North America's best bands needs to hear Up on Gravity Hill and find out what they've been missing.

Rife with moments of artfully sustained anticipation, Orchestras is one of Frisell's most accessible and virtuosic recordings.

Clark has more than earned the freedom she gives herself to express so many different sides to her music, and it's a thrill to hear her stretch out on these ferocious, heartbroken, and ultimately life-affirming songs.

With its loping, relaxed grooves and patina of sweetened strings, $10 Cowboy could be mistaken for a product of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, not an album originating from a small studio in Austin, Texas.

Despite its lyrical intensity, there is an abundance of passion and joy in Mdou Moctar's music that can't help but spill over with communal energy. This is a band and artist working at their peak, and Funeral for Justice is a career highlight.

An indispensable addition not only to the Analog Africa catalog but to the burgeoning cultural conversation around the significance, import, and variety of techniques, innovations, aesthetics, and attitudes in African music-making from the era.

Her songs are still wounded and far away, but the expanded instrumentation gives them a prismatic glow and makes for one of the most fascinating and repeatable sets from an artist who was already in a class by herself.

The resulting album Look to the East, Look to the West is both a fitting tribute to what the band once was and a powerful new beginning.

Bullion's additions to this specific library of sounds are fresh and individualized, making Affection a soft world of its own, and one that merits frequent return visits and continued exploration.

Being able to hear any previously unreleased Broadcast music is a thrill, but discovering the raw brilliance of the music on Spell Blanket is a true privilege.

A greater amount of collaboration notwithstanding, Ten Fold couldn't feel more personal, from the in-the-moment experiential songwriting to sampled and recorded appearances from her father, Juice Crew associate Grand Daddy I.U.

Each of Dehd's album's has been smarter, stranger, and more deceptively complex than the last, and the delightful and adventurous Poetry continues this upward trend.

Lives Outgrown reveals Gibbons' music is only getting richer as the years pass.