While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.

Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it.

There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances.

SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades.

I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world.

Landwerk No. 3 never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to his records. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room. Listening to Landwerk is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s séance, but luckily, these spirits have a lot to tell us.

Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. ... And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof.

Each of the Whisky shows is dotted with extended between-song pauses that are long enough to necessitate their own track designations. But these sorts of gaffes are small prices to pay for the illicit thrill of hearing the Trick in their primordial prime, rampaging through the darkest and most deranged songs in their repertoire.

The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.

Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline.

The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.

Changes is the most subdued and modest record of the Gizzard’s October harvest.

Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record.

On his latest album, Almanac Behind, nature takes center stage, sometimes overwhelming the music completely.

Deep Fantasy captured the ferocity of an absurdly tight band playing together in a room, thrashing against the walls and playing off each other’s anger. That ferocity has faded. By contrast, Premonition sounds like talented professionals working remotely.

There’s a lightness to Simz’ tender explorations of Black fatherhood, the failure of her community to help those struggling with mental crises, and the slippery loss of solidarity across economic divides on “Broken.” Sometimes the production’s soft edges can belie the bite of the words, but overall it’s a pairing that brims with possibility.

Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves.

For a box set focused on a single album, it doesn’t feel as self-indulgent as it might have; the multiple versions of songs are perhaps excessive for a passive listen, but the collection represents an invaluable document of his artistic growth.

SOS is a clear document of how extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, how she’s become an even more exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé about genre tropes.

Metro is great when he makes Metro-type beats, shaky when he ventures outside of his comfort zone. On Heroes & Villains, he surpasses his standard quota of bangers while also taking a few fun risks.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

Still impossible to pigeonhole, his hybrid of classical, chamber pop, baroque, and jazz is as thrilling as ever, while the newly stripped-back arrangements heighten the intimacy of a songwriter seeing himself clearly.

Often, the band feels like they’re deliberately avoiding their old tricks, finding new ways to arrive at the same destination. Generally, the proceedings have a light touch, a gentleness that is readily apparent on the opening shuffle “Love Earth” but also on the thicker rock’n’roll of “The World (Is in Trouble Now).”

If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer.

Inspired by a dream and grounded in no concrete narrative, the magic is in the satiny vocals and paisley compositions, a world unto itself.

Wrangling together dozens of technical ideas and arranging them with idiosyncratic flair, NNAMDÏ enters this challenging middle zone without compromising his priorities. It’s what makes Please Have a Seat the best he’s ever sounded.

A frustrating listen from a brilliantly talented artist. For all of its angels and prophecies and mid-century decadence, what we are left with is a very quiet collection of songs with all the weight of ephemera.

Dijon is in her element here, eager to expand house music’s limits. For every pulse-racing dance breakdown, there’s a surprise.

With Both, it was exciting to see an underground lifer finally getting his due; Through a Room confirms Nace’s inquisitive spirit and formidable skills.

The record has a calculated fishbowl quality, chronicling the group’s rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. It’s a victory lap with a slightly bitter aftertaste, like champagne left uncorked in a trashed hotel suite.

Her pursuits on softCORE prove that it’s possible for pop-punk and R&B to exist in the same space, which adds a fresh take on the nostalgia train steering the former’s resurgence. While the endeavor is admirable and audacious, its execution isn’t as seamless as the fluidity of Fousheé’s own voice.

Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind.

KD3’s most effective songs are the ones pulled toward opposite poles:.

It’s the sound of an artist drawing from his repertoire while demonstrating that he is still looking to the future.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon.

The rhythms are stately and unsyncopated. The arrangements are lushly orchestral. The songs are mostly around six minutes long, proceeding at the unhurried pace of guided meditations. And, perhaps owing to the sense of communion-via-solitude espoused in the first track, the lyrics are concerned with “we” nearly as often as they are with “I”.

My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band.

Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room.

Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized.

Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be.

Listeners who have struggled to appreciate previous releases will hear more of the same in Comradely Objects. Those who are attuned, who find that the band’s smallest pivots can induce a feeling approaching euphoria, will encounter the album as a carnival of delights.

It’s got character, and more than that, it’s got energy: Springsteen has never sounded quite so lighthearted, so unburdened, on record.

Written and recorded during an extended stay on Ireland’s windswept west coast, the follow-up to Land of No Junction reaps lucidity from family bonding and fleeing the city in search of peace. With it, Frances’ psych-folk soliloquies arrive like postcards from a friend who’s just beginning to open up.

After a while, the songs on Alpha Zulu begin to mimic the experience of observing objects in a museum—you can admire all you want, but please don’t touch.

They each bring out some of each other’s best work. ... The tracks where Richard takes a back seat spotlight Zahn’s remarkable maturation as a composer; overcoming the slightly somnolent pleasantness of his previous work, he creates rich, mesmerizing arrangements that subtly shift the mood from piece to piece.

There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.

Back Home provides heart-rending moments alongside its punk grit, expanding on Big Joanie’s sound without loosening their bite.

He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim.

The band’s daring pays off when vocalist Julian Cashwan Pratt breaks his voice wide open on tracks that dig into sounds that are firsts for the band, and consummate what were previously flirtations with dance music.

More than a side project or a solo moniker now, Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? joyfully cements the Soft Pink Truth’s era as a band—and one that throws a hell of a party.

Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.

Across Endure, Special Interest embellish the cornerstones they established on 2018’s Spiralling and 2020’s The Passion Of with gestures that wouldn’t sound out of place on ’90s radio.

There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them.

Svengali feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years—a smooth balance of anxiety and aggression, love and lust, confidence and vulnerability. Whether he’s pleading for love or manipulating it in the shadows, Cakes’s decisive presence ties it all together.

ILYSM isn’t a brilliant album, but it shines bright and it soothes an aching soul. In this case, that’s more than enough.

It’s unfortunate that she appears to have doubled down on this habit on her debut album. Often, songs sound more like tributes to her influences than reinventions.

Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself.

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.

These songs bend and stretch like they’re toying with psych pop, even though the music is still delivered through Frankie Cosmos’ now-trademark minimalism.

Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.

Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. ... But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity.

There’s still plenty of pop culture shoutouts and nods to modern mundanity delivered in a deadpan voice, but at their best they feel less like provocations and more like world-building details—observations of a messy world contextualized with messy anxieties about growing up.

The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.

On Building Something Beautiful, she appears more interested in weightless washes of tone, often drifting and beat-free, which is a curious approach for Eastman‘s work, particularly because it fails to illuminate much about what James found in it.

A YG album should have a higher success rate, which just isn’t the case on I Got Issues. It’s frustrating because the worthwhile moments are obvious.

On Steady, they accept their position as indie-rock elder statesmen. Without Murphy’s sardonic humor, Ferguson’s power-pop wimpiness, Scott’s psychedelic odysseys, and Pentland’s rock anthems, they wouldn’t be Sloan—and thankfully, they’re not trying to be anything else.

Shaw’s real strength lies not in her surrealism but in the way her best lines reach toward eternal truths about the small ways humans survive, like the arrival of a shoe organizer in the mail distracting her from the dysfunction of late-capitalist rot.

Although a talented songwriter, Legend is not a memorable lyricist, and he can falter when attempting to write a catchy pop hook.

Built around vocal effects and vintage synths, it’s an understated sound more interested in setting atmosphere than chasing trends.

There’s no question that Jepsen can write songs that transport you—to the heat of the moment, the late-night neon glow, the driver’s seat on the way out of town. With a more defined roadmap, the whole album might have led somewhere worth sticking around for a while.

For the duo to finally meet in the middle for a full-length project after all these years—and for that project to be as warm, gutter, and satisfying as The Elephant Man’s Bones—is remarkable.

What’s here, across 30 minutes, is a worthy and incomplete document that contains some of the most unrestrained live Can moments yet available. What it’s missing are the doldrums, the drawn-out experiments, and that feeling that Schmidt hopes to convey.

Though they haven’t solved all their curation and sequencing issues, Quavo and Takeoff’s compatibility grants Infinity Links an easygoing energy that’s hard to resist.

Ballentine’s strengths are most apparent in the feel of this album, which is consistently rich and gauzy. Even the clearest acoustic guitar licks are somehow buried beneath a persistent field of sustain and mild distortion.

With regularity on The Car, Turner will begin an idea that he does not finish, or he’ll introduce something totally different just when you start following along. He has become a master of turns of phrases that don’t necessarily cohere but still feel right.

Nothing sounds belabored, nothing overthought. Sheff even allows himself to understate like never before..

The nuts and bolts of the singsongy rhythms matter. Lil Baby is at his best when he’s using those tricks to switch between moods, but there’s just one on It’s Only Me, and it’s indifference: not in the too-cool-to-care kind of way, but in the way when words have no weight behind them.

While some of these songs can feel regressive or at least undercooked on their own, they’re reframed by the open-hearted sadness that takes over the album’s second half.

Like all albums birthed out of a particular music fascination, the influences on I Walked With You a Ways are widespread and a joy to uncover with each listen.

The smooth, radiant production doesn’t amount to commercial pandering: It’s assured, exploratory, and warm music that mirrors Andrews’ newly opened heart.

Eno’s written statement and the gravity of the subject indicate a grand departure, but FOREVERANDEVERNOMORE feels nonetheless like a continuation of his work since the mid to late 2000s.

If 2020’s Anime, Trauma, and Divorce was an unflinching examination of all that he’d lost, this album answers the question of what remains. ... By looking even further in the rear view, through all the years, all the bars, and all the trauma, he seems to have returned to his original sense of self. Even as he grows, he’s always been exactly who he is supposed to be.

You get the impression those songs aren’t in his wheelhouse anymore; that instead, Callahan’s purpose, in this vivid season of his career, is to divine more nuanced shades of happiness, try to act as a conduit to that kind of connection, and leave a gap for us to fill in. It suits him.

Mitchell, Johnson, and Kaufman may have started with a fascination for certain traditions, but it’s their collaboration—and the potent exchange of those talents—that makes Rolling Golden Holy gleam.

Being Funny is as sincere as the 1975 have ever sounded, and also as hopeful. Without the thematic discursions and stylistic detours of past records, Healy’s glamorous love songs finally take center stage, their message as convincing as ever.

The music is poignant and meticulously arranged, and all you have to do is surrender to it. It helps that the engineering of ¡Ay! is pristine, often evoking a smoky, afterhours lounge, the kind you might find in a spy film from the 1940s. At times, it is so vivid and immersive that it feels as if Dalt is singing directly in your ear.

<COPINGMECHANISM> asks us to accept a grungier and more mature Willow, but this maturity feels formulaic and the intimacy feels manufactured, relying on universal tropes of angst instead of her own. Even if the album is generic at times, Willow’s limber vocals surely enchant as she trapezes across pop, punk, metal, and screamo never fully landing on a signature sound.

Where 925 was thrillingly inventive, but often kept the listener at a cautious remove, Anywhere But Here uses deeply felt storytelling and intimate vocals to usher us much closer.

The mix-friendly extended intros and lengthy instrumental passages that dominate many dance albums are replaced here by songs that make their mark in four glorious minutes, then leave triumphantly. This relentless buoyancy ends up a little overwhelming, occasionally spilling into blandness over the album’s 12 songs. But this is easily overlooked among the spell of familiarity that TSHA has spun.

At 14 tracks, Hysteria is a longer album than Echo, and it doesn’t always maintain its intensity. The push and pull between ballads and bolder songs sometimes sacrifices the momentum. But the wider lens, which allows Sparke to dial up both her indie-rock sound and sweeping songwriting, is still impressive.

Most Normal is a direct attack that hits like chugging gas from the nozzle. It’s not only thanks to its mauling noise, but the antic and insistent cadence of Kiely’s delivery.

The music is breathtakingly simple but also sneakily and refreshingly adventurous. Listening to the carefully wrought songs on Suddenly, I wished that Snaith had given freer rein to his experimental instincts. On Cherry, he cuts loose.

Mostly, En Är För Mycket och Tusen Aldrig Nog offers driving, instantly catchy songs that would sound excellent blaring from beneath a laser show, some ferris wheel spinning in the background. The destination is almost too familiar; before, Dungen often led listeners down a thornier, less trodden path. The preferable voyage will depend on who’s listening.

If they can’t quite recapture the full force or stark originality that characterized their lodestar during his lifetime (who could?) they can and do evoke his broad range of moods and colors, which seem to befit this moment. And they get us to lean in and listen, with just the right tilt.

Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan.

There’s nothing reserved, nothing toned-down about this record. Though she seldom sings above her speaking register, it’s the proverbial strength of Shygirl’s voice that gives Nymph its undeniable power.