Hit Parade is the kind of highly original pop assemblage that the Irish singer has seemingly always wanted to make, a record of peerless highs whose best and worst quality is how alienating it just so happens to be.

Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here.

The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital.

As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically.

It’s bolder and more intentional than her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which felt like a sketchbook compiling the artist’s assumptions and hesitations on the topic. Here, Laufey doesn’t simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality.

A collection of bratty rocker-chick anthems and soul-searching ballads that could slot into the soundtrack of any classic high school flick, from 10 Things I Hate About You to this year’s ludicrous queer sex comedy Bottoms.

The results make for an inspired evolution of his sound, with Blake occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror as he moves in a new direction.

Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific.

trip9love…??? is tender as a bruise, the kind of bruise you press down on now and again, just to confirm that it still hurts—and to take secret pleasure in the ache.

Journey is a carefully curated sampling of Garson’s talents as a composer, arranger, synthesist, and sound designer. It adds to his mystique as a channeler of otherworldly frequencies, a grinning virtuoso tapping into the beyond one patch cable at a time.

He went big on HELLMODE by going smaller. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made, but it still gets you riled up. That level-up is most audible in HELLMODE’s punk-rock tracks, which offer a dialed-in but not dialed-back tone.

The smarts and spritz of Dupuis’ writing, and the way her mates fuss up the arrangements, make Rabbit Rabbit one of those albums whose complications provide as much pleasure as hooks-hooks-hooks.

The Window’s great gambit is to lean into them anyway, and it pays off spectacularly, heightening the thrills without sacrificing the amiability. What a pleasure it is hearing this charming little band show off.

The chemistry between Earl and Alchemist comes from how naturally their styles blend together, as if VOIR DIRE is some kind of prophecy being fulfilled by the universe. It’s a record that was meant to be: simple, elegant, and always true.

Burna Boy has more than established himself; I Told Them is an adventurous promise that he won’t become complacent.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent.

Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album.

Despite the occasional misstep, Mystery School overall succeeds in enhancing the most spellbinding aspects of Cabral’s music: her winding, changeable voice and unpredictable melodic left turns.

Perfect Saviors excels in a more conventional sport of measure, expanding the physical capabilities of radio rock just a few degrees beyond the previously acceptable standard.

Hozier calls the album’s sound “eclectic,” but disjointed is more apt.

Everyone Else Is a Stranger is all that an old fan could want. The four songs are long, expressive strings of supple lines and curves, twisting like silvery roller-coaster tracks.

It’s an album that feels less like a roving party than a backyard BBQ, and the music seems designed to fade pleasingly into its surroundings. Such an anodyne approach has its appeal yet it’s strange that a record from a singer/songwriter as ambitious as M.C. Taylor equates optimism with simplicity.

Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.

For anyone who enjoys a thoughtful singer-songwriter record with adept, minimalist instrumental backing and a powerhouse vocalist, Echo the Diamond is a worthy listen.

Haunted Mountain is his fullest and most structured album. He and his band amble through these songs with… well, not more purpose or focus, which are anathema to getting lost. But listen to the coda of “Didn’t Know You Then,” which stretches out before losing its way.

Barring a few notable exceptions, World Music Radio is so beholden to its premise—so enfeebled by Batiste’s insistence on universality—that it offers up few opportunities to get to know Batiste himself: his stories, his struggles, his euphoric victories and devastating losses. That absence leaves the record feeling hollow, like a pretty house where no one lives.

Where career-spanning setlists from most veteran bands will inevitably succumb to wild variances in tone if not quality, Live in Brooklyn 2011 dissolves three decades into a holistic 17-track noise opera that enshrines Sonic Youth’s greatest attributes and contradictions.

She’s often ventured from the shores of American folk to touch the waters of blues, soul, and gospel, but this time the shifting itself seems to be the point as Giddens stretches her reach further. Even so, You’re the One never coalesces with the clear vision or poignancy of her previous work.

Chrome Dreams carries a dream logic that's bewitching in a way the individual moments simply aren’t, a testament to how a good album sequence can almost be a magic trick.

Deliverance might work best as something else entirely, perhaps as a beat tape filled with reference vocals for the sort of stadium-status UK indie stars that know how to squeeze the maximum amount of drama out of the minimum amount of wordplay.

Even as life interferes, you can imagine the album as a flight of whiskey: subtle variations on one recipe, pure fun to consume, liable to intensify one’s desire to punch cops. Very occasionally, the production is countryfied to achieve a spaghetti western vibe, or larded with Halloween pedal effects.

Connection is the first time that Ceramic Dog has made dissent sound like just a collection of recordings, instead of a prickly, teeming world of its own.

Oldham long sounded like he had wisdom to share, and he sometimes did. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You overflows with it.

The one slight drag of Sundial: In contrast to Noname constantly barring out, her hooks sound a little weak, as on “Hold Me Down,” where her plain melodies are backed by the type of full-throated choir that sounded better on Chance’s Coloring Book. The features, however, are explosive.

End of World is hellishly inconsistent, its mid section adrift in ’80s funk-rock sheen, like INXS being harassed by an angry wasp. But when it works, End of World, more than any other recent PiL album, offers the winning combination of instrumental oddity and vocal drama.

On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.

Central City is a distillation of Freedia’s pump-up talents and endless charm.

Ooh Rap I Ya plays it entirely too safe, feeling less like a biting subversion of nostalgia than a straight-up “remember when.” This could have been saved by meatier hooks, a more realized emotional arc, or production choices that didn’t feel as if they were well and fully covered by Neon Indian and Washed Out over a decade ago.

If They Live in My Head lacks the woozy danceability of vintage Tetras, it doesn’t skimp on the political bite.

When, on “The Same Again,” she sings, “Move slow when you speak, so you really get to say what you’re meaning,” sounding as if her face is scrunched into a grimace, she turns a fairly oblique phrase into a razor-sharp barb. These moments, although far between, suggest that A New Reality Mind could have been a more dynamic record if it had zeroed in on Kenney’s intentional, suggestive performances.

For the first time in a while, it sounds like they’re listening to what’s happening in clubland and asking themselves not what they can poach for the charts, but what they can bring to the table.

The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss.

“True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.

Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.

Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.

Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders.

It’s tempting to speculate that there are more versions like that out there, just waiting to be discovered. Blackbox Life Recorder, the EP, might seem relatively modest, but the black box that is Aphex Twin’s extended universe remains delightfully unfathomable.

The Loveliest Time is a solid counterpart to its sister album, trading quiet, introspective power for brassy, headlong joy.

Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.

The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial.

None of these songs sound like demos or leftovers, but Flying High doesn’t reach for the stars, either. This is an exhibition bout for the MCs—the pairings are solid but unsurprising—and, like most Alchemist solo projects, it concludes with instrumental versions of each song.

It [Mike Dean's "The Lure"], too, deserved a better show, and sets the tone for the songs to come, all sexual synth tracks that deploy dramatic minor chords to hint at a seamy undertone.

It’s the textbook definition of a low-stakes mid-career rap album, a place for one of the genre’s icons to show he’s still in decent fighting shape.

A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs.

It’s a remarkably assured statement of purpose.

Steeped in the careening energy of surf-rock and mid-’60s Jazzmaster tones but open to any stylistic fancy that crosses Falcon Bitch and Gumball’s radar, When Horses Would Run is an unusually raucous and idea-stuffed debut.

The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date. Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project.

True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.

Albarn plays the part of heartbroken confessor, but these meticulously polished songs conjure something more real than anguish: the dulling of losses, the warm aura of midlife decline, and the fading belief, with advancing years, that crisis serves to raise the curtain on your next act.

They say you have to see egg punk live to really get it. But the goofy, revved-up glory of Super Snõõper comes pretty close.

At its best, i care so much that i dont care at all captures the ecstatic, uncomfortable intensity of the joy and turmoil of being young. And if it ever feels awkward or fumbling, well, that’s an essential part of being a teenager too.

Classic rock is a genre that’s endured through its mythology. With Western Cum, Cory Hanson gives us some new myths to believe in.

Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads.

Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.

He delivers these lines like a seasoned storyteller, reminding himself of the timeless feelings that drive us to keep the music playing, whether it’s old or new.

Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox.

Combining post-punk’s propulsive rhythms with progressive rock’s winding melodies, Lifeguard channel the verve and manic energy of making art with like-minded peers and the rush of sharing your bespoke musical world.

Rain Before Seven… is designed to feel hopeful and positive, reassuring rather than challenging: music for the world that should or could be, rather than the grim reality. But it’s ultimately a vision of a heaven where nothing much happens.

Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.

A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.

Throughout Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift sometimes mutes the messy adolescent impulses that gave these songs their spark. But elsewhere, she divests from fantasy archetypes—the knight on a white horse, the helpless child—that once limited her. Think of the new Speak Now as a call and response between who she was and who she is.

Occasionally, Slugs of Love meanders off course. .... But the album rebounds on its celestial closing track, “Easy Falling,” a plush comedown that breezes by on gentle guitar and Nagano’s leisurely melodies. Like the album’s best songs, it offers a worthwhile escape with understated grace.

The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.

At 26 tracks, Pink Tape is bloated and messy, with occasional flashes of excellence between grating screamo misfires and unremarkable songs that feel like retreads of Playboi Carti or Trippie Redd hits.

It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.

For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.

Even as she’s lost some of her range, Williams’ voice remains sui generis. She’s never sounded more tender or unguarded as she does on “Where the Song Will Find Me,” leaning into her vibrato, letting the holes and pockmarks in her voice tell their own stories.

Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.

The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting.

Myuthafoo, however, dispenses with vocals entirely, and is better for it. The absence of singing brings Barbieri’s synths to the fore. Part of the wonderment of Myuthafoo isn’t just how she sequences; it’s what.

The initial, gut-level response to Systemic’s crust-punk take on doom metal is more than enough to hold it aloft. But in engaging with its themes, then contemplating them on repeat listens, Systemic gains a depth that’s rare for a largely instrumental record.

Sternberg’s deep compassion radiates across I’ve Got Me. By album’s end, they come to feel like a friend—one who’s trying their best not to repeat the same mistakes, but still texts you from their ex’s place in the middle of the night.

Nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past.

Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it. There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again.

An expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece.

Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.

Life Under the Gun explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. The noise of their earlier EPs has become rich and lush, their rhythm section tight and crisp.

On Purge, Godflesh strike a balance between communal vulnerability and seething hostility that makes for the most inviting entry in their late career.

Some tracks are more compelling than others, but that’s to be expected when an artist writes by throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The melodies on Hammond’s album are in ample supply; it’s the urge to self-edit that’s taken a breather.

Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond.

Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was.

Michael is an origin story that works best when it examines how worshiping at the altars of sex, money, and Jesus created the man we know today. But when he petulantly doubles down on critiques of his public persona and status as a Black multi-millionaire, the album is harder to stomach.