Bold and fearless, Chappell Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess is the best kind of pop album: it captures a generational zeitgeist and introduces the world to a refreshing new voice that can hopefully stand the test of time and a fickle industry.

It's an active, engaging album from an artist whose travels ultimately brought her more knowledge of herself.

Top to bottom, this is a coveted no-skips effort, elevated by the fun, liberated approach that helps the listener escape reality and push the limits like the characters in the film.

These six discs certainly illuminate the studio albums they appear on, but their evolutionary processes in studio and on-stage make this set an essential companion to the previous volume.

If there's any bone to pick, it's that some of the slower, more atmospheric numbers don't quite gel as well as the rest of the tracks. Still, the high points make Cutouts every bit as worthy of devoted listening as the first two Smile albums.

The Hard Quartet reject no idea on their debut, and the results are usually familiar, strange, and fun, and at its strongest, the album reframes the individualized sounds of all four powerhouses as something new.

Highway Prayers is too long -- there is a fantastic 40-minute album in there -- but it's also a lot of fun, and it may take a young superstar like Strings to bend and stretch bluegrass enough to deliver it to the masses.

It does feel like a b-sides, here's-what's-left collection at times, for better or worse. However, for fans clamoring for more of anything from Berryman, Buckland, Champion, and Martin, this'll do the trick.

It has a rustic elegance stabilized by workmanlike drums and lively acoustic guitars.

As with all of the band's work, this album is inspiring and life-affirming.

Much like his longtime collaborator Four Tet, Snaith has fully entered his festival dance era, making some of his most outwardly expressive music by injecting his own personality and emotions into superbly crafted club tracks.

Even setting sequencing, production, and stylistic reference points aside, EELS is simply chock-full of great songs.

The album is certain to satisfy Richter's fans from all around the classical-to-pop spectrum.

More or less what fans would expect from a Fred again.. album at this point, Ten Days is a diaristic emotional whirlwind with a handful of highlights.

Dance, No One's Watching is an ambitious step forward from Where I'm Meant to Be, and a musical extension of its creativity. In all, it proves Ezra Collective's prize-winning debut was no fluke.

Throughout, Eisenberg defies the concept of following a single path, instead finding a way to arrange it all so deftly that every disparate sound and conflicting idea becomes a passenger on the same vessel.

Also involving contributions from PJ, Jennifer Hudson, J Rocc, and Tuamie, the album is an inspired extension of hip-hop's 50th anniversary celebrations.

He's as present and raw beneath the computer voice as he's ever been, but with these darkroom synth tracks, Sparhawk makes his audience work a little harder to locate him.

Moody it is. Having said that, it's singer and songwriter Anouska Sokolow's engaging, spoke-sung recitations that are the focus and defining component of Real Deal, which gets off to a proggy start with "Hide."

Just because it's fun doesn't make it a divertissement, as Ishibashi brings complex feelings to the table alongside some virtuosic genre exercises.

By the time the finer details of closing track "The Diver" sink in (subsonic noise synth frequencies, muted and hypnotic drums, underwater guitar harmonics, and controlled muttering vocals), it's time to play the entire record over again and sit for another cycle in the beautiful, otherworldly loneliness it creates.

143 rings the death knell for Perry for no other reason than it commits pop music’s ultimate sin: it’s boring.

It seems this was collected from material recorded over the space of several years. But Wynn was right to hold on to this stuff, as these ten tracks cohere into a very pleasing album.

The format [just over 20 minutes long] proves again to be well-suited for the singer, providing another highly concentrated shot of material that shows her moving with ease -- sometimes blurring the line -- between sensual slow jams and pop-flavored dance tracks.

Champion's affecting, thoughtful, occasionally hyperactive songs open up new possibilities for the band and celebrate being true to yourself -- no matter what your age.

Caws and Nada Surf hone in so eloquently on the essential, bittersweet ideas at the core of Moon Mirror that their honesty and sweetness can hit unexpectedly hard in the way the best rock albums often do.

Rack is living, breathing, sweaty proof the Jesus Lizard can write songs and give them shape in the studio just as well as they ever did, and it honestly stands beside the best of their Touch & Go catalog in both spirit and execution. And they still hit like a crescent wrench to the face. Which is a compliment.

Throughout their career, Ed Schrader has retained energy and spirit, even as their direction has shifted from noisy, primal blues-punk shouting to dramatic, new romantic-style crooning. Orchestra Hits reflects the sophistication of aging, and relating to the past while continuing to artistically evolve.