It’s startling to hear Cola so energized, and the band carries that momentum through the whole album. There’s a newfound confidence to sprawl out in unexpected, noisy ways.

These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. .... arish knows the seance-like arrangement of microphones that will allow the transformation to occur.

The vibey, occasionally anesthetized sound can begin to feel flat and mushy at times, but Rashad’s nimble flows and sharp songwriting keep the album in focus, even when the thematic and sonic heaviness feels like walking through the desert in a weighted vest.

For reasons I can’t quite put my finger on, it feels more satisfying than the last two records. That might have something to do with its tonal sensibility: While the melodic sounds are as wispy as ever, they’re slightly more harmonious.

A revelation. .... If six years is what Roxanne needs to produce a leap in scale as bracing as Poem 1, then so be it: This will cast shadows deep and long enough to sit underneath for a long time.

Here they are weird and jagged and noisy, occasionally abstruse and often disarmingly melodic. It seems they’re only out to impress themselves, and that’s the sort of stuff that doesn’t burn up with time.

This is the best way to approach the album—as an impressionistic work that rewards the questions and ideas it stirs, rather than a puzzle demanding a solution. Its knotted discussions of agency and morality take a backseat to how alive its characters feel in this illicitly exciting world.

So even if the songwriting guides the band toward the most impressive, experimental reaches of their sound, it also becomes their record most tethered to the lyric sheet and Kinsella’s role as a frontman. It’s a dizzying effect, as the polish of his surroundings never distracts from the rawness at its core.

Haines’ dynamic vocals often bail out the more inelegant lyrics. But it doesn’t help when her bandmates seem to be on autopilot, working with a distracting series of references to the band’s influences.

Middle of Nowhere are confident and cohesive, but Musgrave’s lyrical point of view seems to blow hither and yon from song to song.

It is a decent entry in her catalog, but by no means essential.

The trio sharpens its focus, marrying clever production with the soul-eating intensity that propelled its rise.

The songs give the intriguing impression of having been fully arranged, then severely pared away, leaving behind starkly outlined space. It’s a somnolent register from which the music seems to keep waking up.

Through written piecemeal between 2021 and 2025 (a period in which Presley focused primarily on his painting practice), Orange is by far the tightest, most cohesive record he’s made.

We toggle across this record between the same core sounds—crisp acoustic guitar, modular synths, analog drum machines, and Margaret’s alto. In some instances, these ingredients render a feast, and in others, barely a 7/11 haul.

Knowing that Kahan is capable of a song like “August” just makes the more pro forma arrangements on the rest of the album more frustrating.

The While We Wait mixtape remains their best-written release, but Kehlani, with “Folded” leading the way, proves she wants to compete in the marketplace.

On an album that otherwise counts as the Foos’ leanest and meanest since their 1995 debut, the closing “Asking for a Friend” is a lumbering, melodramatic power ballad better suited to a latter-day Metallica album. However, Your Favorite Toy strikes a harmonious balance between the Foos’ punk-muckraker and arena-crowd-pleaser sides on “Unconditional.”

Though its songs are simple and occasionally repetitive, the incisive lyrics cut through the clear country air, enough to turn heads a few times.

Something Worth Waiting For is the sound of a band not tripping into place but clawing its way to the heights of its potential.

Fidelity is more wistful and weightless than either Ten Fold or do it afraid. She raps less; she sings more. She leans into the breathier end of her fantastically versatile voice, pairing it with sun-soaked keyboard sounds reminiscent of mid-’90s R&B groups like SWV or Kut Klose.

Like the band’s classic LPs, Sanctions locates a strange beauty in plaintive sadness and offers no easy answers, just the feeling of being let into a secret world you don’t entirely understand.

Songs like “Automatic” and “Mon Amour,” meant to feel airy and perfumed, wind up coughing on their own musk. Ware’s adherence to such rigid disco blueprints also has the knock-on effect of making her voice sound less remarkable than it actually is.

Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics.

WU LYF’s ambitions have not abated in the slightest since Go Tell Fire to the Mountain, an album that eased its path towards the rafters with cathedral reverb sourced from an actual abandoned church. They’ve just become more clarified, stripping away the booming echo that once obscured that group’s limber musicianship, while Roberts has sheared the most jagged nodes from his trachea and, with them, a language of completely unprecedented vowel sounds.

Despite the outward sameness of the music, there’s a wealth of detail to be discovered.

Evaporator satisfies in a low-stakes way, providing an oasis of chill in a world on fire; it’s an episode of Friends with a spoonful of vanilla ice cream, a familiar joy that won’t trouble the palate.

The two reunite on Dying Is the Internet, striking an even more idiosyncratic fusion of their respective talents while their music remains as heavy as ever.

At times, it sounds like either the most tenderhearted prog album you’ve ever heard or the most fearless, cold-blooded mutation of folk music. Sometimes, it’s just plain stunning.

His corralling results in several glimpses at individual members in their element, but you’ve heard just about everyone here do better on their own. Fun moments aside, sheer force of will isn’t enough to help The Scythe fully cohere as a unit.

On her latest LP, No Need to Be Lonely, she reconnects with the punchy hooks and confidence of her previous work while taking bigger creative risks.

The three best songs here—“Another Lifetime Floats Away,” “It’s Here,” and “Will You Dare”—are the most unguarded statements Eisenberg has ever made. Each one, at its core, is a paean, a devotional—a love song.

The drums are the most overt scaling-up device throughout the album. Carey often slowly brings songs to a crescendo and then proceeds to play around or against them with all his strength. As captured in Whitesel’s immaculate recordings, unburied in the studio haze that cloaks most of Bon Iver’s records, this approach is arresting: something like Glenn Kotche drumming for Def Leppard. Vernon’s voice, too, comes into sharper focus. .... The greatest foil to Vernon’s voice, though, is Wasner’s electric guitar.

It’s ELO and ELP and the Cars on lithium. Roxy Music is another ingredient in the strange, gauzy casserole. It’s stylish in an uncomfortable way, like a Stereolab record by way of a hostage crisis.

Distracted works so well because it resembles a pop blowout at first, only to pull the shag rug out from under our feet.

Sunn O))) is a behemoth, a leviathan, a statement of purpose worthy of the late-career self-titling gamble. Despite that, maybe because of it, I can’t imagine wanting to listen to it more than once every few years.

That this isn’t a more ornate, Watch the Throne-type album is a bit deflating; the two collab tracks between the duo–“Leadbelly” and “Kirkland”–display how much of their synergy is left untapped across the 31 other tracks. It took some living with this record for it not to feel like a homogeneous, just-decent meld of MIKE and Earl throwing shots up in an empty gym.

All but one of the mesmerizing puzzles on Vol. II strut across the six-minute mark, and the songs never lose steam because they contain so many variations and plot twists.

While the record delivers on joyful bass drops and club life vignettes, it occasionally leaves you longing for just a bit more unchoreographed chaos.

It’s classic Hornsby: both squirrely and crowd-pleasing, weirder than you’d expect but as traditionally, autobiographically confessional as he’s ever allowed himself.

When it works, it’s revelatory in the way peaking in a big rolling crowd at the club can be, or in the way of a little hand on your shoulder. .... Idehen is onto something here. And listen, maybe you’ve heard it before. But maybe we all need to hear it again.

The back half of the album drags a bit, with the organ lines of “Heatwaves” and the martial figurations in “Solid Light” never quite catching spark. .... Still, the band deserves credit for being confident enough to release all this material as a single gesture, rather than back-ending the leftovers into a “deluxe edition” a few months later. Ladytron arrived full-formed all those years ago, but they keep flowering into strange, vibrant forms.

The frequent spoken-word interludes would feel less performative at a live show, but often take you out of the moment on the record. It seems RAYE is unwilling to leave anything on the cutting room floor, even if dialing back the razzle-dazzle could forge closer connection to the music. But the peaks often justify the adventure.

WOR$T GIRL is most successful as an argument for Slayyyter’s abrasive style, but the record also contains some of her most painfully and finely rendered human emotion to date.

Auder’s music pulls in multiple directions at once, until the most emotionally authentic presentation wins out.

Across 10 country-tinged tracks, Cornfield also broadens her view as a storyteller, but proves that her boot heels are still dug into terra firma.

What’s remarkable about It’s the Long Goodbye is that even in these moments of consuming anguish, the album doesn’t feel oppressive. The musicians’ interplay and MacFarlane’s exquisitely sculpted production balance Graham’s grief with consolation.

If Ö sometimes sounds bored with itself anyway, it’s probably because Fcukers’ instincts are ultimately a variation on the nostalgia-baiting Y2K and bloghouse revivalism that surrounds them. It’s a simulacra of a simpler, grungier, more innocent time before high-speed internet, now wearing a tracksuit. Still: The fun is dumb and the night is young.

To make the personal sound universal is no small feat, but there’s a fine line between universality and sounding like your songs could be anybody’s.

It’s a mature and compositionally sophisticated collection of songs whose only real unifying thread is that Flea is very excited to be playing all of them.

On I Guess U Had to Be There, Elucid and Bash dial back the experimentation in favor of a more controlled approach. But even in this restrained mode, they still get busy.

The sprawling, bittersweet atmosphere—shaped by those repetitive guitars and a perpetual search for meaning—at times recalls Barnett’s collaboration with Kurt Vile.

If there’s anything bad to say about Sexistential, it’s that it’s too damn short.

Undying Love is Neurosis’ best album in two decades and maybe even a quarter-century.

The lust, greed, excess, and anxiety that they grappled with on PAPOTA are still there, but this time, the atmosphere doesn’t feel as friendly or accessible. Splayed out across Bulgarian folk music, trance beats, bruxaria atmospheres, samba, and even bits of nueva ola, Free Spirits feels dialed all the way up.

Half the fun is in discovering where Grey takes them from there. “Innuendo” and “Lovefield” both get blasted into trance hyperspace. .... Beneath its high-gloss surface, every detail on U rewards close scrutiny—even its one-letter title.

These songs are bright and bold, and although they essentially iterate on the misty dream pop of her previous album, 2023’s & the Charm, the difference feels stark when you return to that album; it sounds positively miniscule in comparison.

Although their distorted punk pairs well with Midwestern bands they’ve opened for, like the Armed or Angry Blackmen, Prostitute are no imitators.

Every song here could be a single, but taken together, they add up to a sum greater than its parts.

Spilling out over the course of 73 minutes, the album drags, even if it has no specific slow spots. .... Any random song on The Way I Am is sharply crafted and unpretentious in a way that carries on the best Nashville traditions. If it’s not quite a comeback, it is, at least, a satisfying demonstration of Combs’ strengths.

By some miracle, the 24-track behemoth works on its own. It’s frequently beautiful and shockingly consistent, given the range of artists involved, and almost every artist brings their best efforts.

Whether experienced alongside the film or on its own, Halo’s Midnight Zone is an object of bleak, almost terrifying beauty: a snapshot of a forbidden world, and perhaps a warning that some treasures are best left buried.

n its refusal to adhere to a particular theme or sound, Paris in the Spring comes across as a little diffuse, but when everything locks in, the results are transcendent.

No single instrument dominates, nor do they act as strict counterpoints to one another. Sounds from opposite ends of the spectrum—felted resonances and sharp twangs—move in the same direction, drifting in parallel. While she rides these contrasts, Cogan sings with a smoky steadiness.

Her third album, Cloud 9, solidifies her as a mainstream country star who hasn’t entirely submitted to the machine.

On every level, PLAY ME is the most populist and literalist music Gordon has ever made. There are fewer jagged ruptures than on her previous solo records, more clearly demarcated beats, hooks that resemble hooks. The loops recur and aren’t so violently flayed open.

Most of these pieces have a lot going on, designed for listeners who take pleasure in guiding their ear through each successive layer.

These detours feel slightly random up against some of the most unadventurous tracks in his catalog, like the smoky ballad “Didn’t Come to Argue.” Like most of his albums, Trying Times could use a little editing, but that’s part-and-parcel of the James Blake package these days.

With a short history of decay, Nothing have begun to build something fresh and exciting; it’s a shame they didn’t finish clearing the rot first.

Musically and lyrically, Mutiny plays like he’s expanded 2016’s “Call to Arms” to album length. .... The best songs here are lean and sinewy showcases for his backing band, the Dark Clouds.

If the band’s homespun and deliriously catchy 2014 compilation record Sunchokes captured the kinetic energy of a sweaty college party, The Refrigerator is the sound of a 10-year reunion, subdued and sentimental, reflective and a little restless.

Make-Up is a Lie shows signs of progress and signs of regression; artful touches and clunking gaffs; soaring tunes and leaden lyrics.

Their identity isn’t as sharply defined here, but the hooks and surprises on S.W.A.G. are strong enough to fuel their soul-searching.

Somewhere between fight, flight, and acceptance, these songs squint at great cosmic mysteries through a tiny pair of sunglasses.

It’s not necessary to know the originals to enjoy his interpretations, but it allows you to appreciate them more.

It’s sentimental, wry, curious, and highly synergistic: Even if the dialogue has its lulls, the silences never feel awkward.

Gives the impression of an overwhelming fullness, a life force captured in a riot of barely controlled waveforms.

The shifts within and between tracks lend Deface the Currency a sense of perpetual surprise: Even after its contours become familiar, the particulars of the improvisation remain lively and kinetic.

It’s clear that the pleasure isn’t in the novelty of these two forces aligning. The pleasure is in the groove, in the quiet confidence of Liv.e and Riggins making such a curious record, in the way it sneaks up on you and commands your attention.

COLD 2 THE TOUCH honors Angel Du$t’s tradition of fast songs and feisty spirit, but it also affirms that they’ll never settle for retreading ground they’ve already stomped on.

Highway to Heavenly is a worthy addition to one of indie pop’s most consistent discographies. Thirty years on, their music is as fresh, creative, and catchy as ever.

Marathon is an unequivocally beautiful album. But it’s beautiful in the same way as the colors kicked into the sunset by a refinery—it’s unnatural, uncomfortable, a byproduct of labor.

Maybe he’s lost the spartan immediacy of his earliest records, but he’s gained a sense of camaraderie that makes his music feel nourishing.

My Days of 58 is a weird Bill Callahan album, and a good one.

The Mirror is more about fresh adornments than drastic reinvention. And that’s OK because the album still showcases many of the best qualities Meek has been pursuing outside of his main band.

Where “Damascus,” “The Manifesto,” and Sparks-assisted pinger “The Happy Dictator” play to their unlikely collaborators’ strengths, the bombast of songs like “The Plastic Guru” and “The Shadowy Light” teeters into folly.

Fancy Some More? feels like a rowdy, well-earned celebration and reaffirms the main ideas PinkPantheress has gestured toward for much of the year: Heavy reference doesn’t inherently go hand-in-hand with a lack of ingenuity.

The music is skilfully marshalled: sober and lucid even while hallucinogenic and deranged.

A quarter century later, her same old razzle-dazzle feels a little repetitive, yes. But it’s also an insistence that the room we found can swell even bigger, that even in these dark times there’s humanity and humor at the heart of it all. Can’t hear that enough.

On her new record, luck…or something, she’s as familiar as ever. That’s largely because this is music you’ve heard before: fizzy, centrist pop, precisely positioned at the crossroads of autobiography and universality.

Charli is one of the definitive pop artists of our time, but in soundtracking a classic story, she never fully transcends our moment.

Despite underwhelming stretches, the album retains enough moments of personality to breathe life into even ordinary lines.

To Whom This May Concern might feel scattered to those wanting her more characteristic, sensuous R&B. But the album does a good job of flaring in different directions while keeping close to Scott’s artistic core.

You’d have to be in a particularly loose frame of mind to listen to it top to tail; but there is enough of the Beach Boys’ singular genius—perhaps the expression in pop of a musical mind pulled to and fro by the heavy weathers of psychological torment—to deliver. This is the Beach Boys at their best, their worst, and most frustratingly human—just like we want them to be.

Laughter in Summer serves as a summary of Copeland’s career, but it’s also a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.

Love Is Not Enough is never not invigorating (save for “Beyond Repair”), but its more vicious songs are such refreshing evidence of Converge’s vitality that every departure from that energy feels like a pulled punch.

Caroline Polachek fares best of all Harle’s features; in both “Azimuth” and “On and On,” she iterates a dancefloor diva more at home at Camelot than, say, either the Paradise Garage or Pacha, and Harle really sounds like he’s having fun honoring her commitment to the bit. Other vocals fail to emulsify.

The record gets interesting when it lets ugliness in. .... Butterfly comes up short because it mistakes scale for character. Its drops and hooks have been engineered for maximum lift instead of maximum surprise.