These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.

Hovvdy are still craning their necks back to the past, but on True Love they cruise the open road, porous and wide-eyed in the face of new beginnings.

BADBADNOTGOOD are known for turning tradition inside out, but Talk Memory is not just their finest album—it’s evidence of the historic appreciation that roots their reverence.

The compositions on Luminol are precarious balancing acts, perched somewhere between the locating sensation of pain and the dislocation of trauma.

Even if the music remains more ambitious than that aspiration, perhaps the most groundbreaking thing about Friends That Break Your Heart is that James Blake has never sounded so safe.

Levy is at her best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.

Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world.

Let Me Do One More is full of high highs and low lows, but thanks to Tudzin’s extensive experience as an engineer and producer (Pom Pom Squad, Weyes Blood), the two extremes—and they are often extreme—are meticulously balanced.

These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.

As Colourgrade highlights, love, family, intimacy are central to her everyday. Luckily, she allows us to partake in these familial affairs, and the outcome is spellbinding.

Thanks to their gently intertwined voices, most name-drops or direct references, like the shout-out to stop-motion animator Ray Harryhausen on “Olympus,” don’t feel forced.

Music has always been just one aspect of the Poppy multimedia experience, but Flux makes it finally feel like the most important one.

The themes Cara explores here are moving and mature, but she dilutes them when she relies too much on metaphor and conceit.

And Then Life Was Beautiful expands her musical range while deepening its emotional impact.

While it’s hard to imagine how anyone involved with the VU’s album would feel about this tasteful tribute, its very existence still speaks to the force of the original vision. After all this time, artists are still peeling back layers of the banana.

At its best, Remember Her Name captures her steadfastness and grace in equal measure.

Just as this band once broke the rules of hardcore, they have also reinvented the concept album, transforming the most indulgent exercise in the classic-rock playbook into an egalitarian, community endeavor.

On By the Time I Get to Phoenix, they reintroduce themselves as wide-eyed explorers, a rep that suits their fascination with rap’s mechanics, its margins, and its future.

The most memorable revisions on Dawn of Chromatica create new links to other standout moments in the Gaga discography. ... A few other highlights tilt in the other direction, teleporting Gaga into established worlds of sound with satisfying results.

There’s a thrill in watching a talented artist reach beyond her comfort zone, but the result is disappointingly flat. When she’s in her element, though, she’s singular and sparkling.

Black Encyclopedia of the Air is another withering salvo in Moor Mother’s lifelong war of attrition, expertly disguised behind the shadow of a white flag.

A Beautiful Life is her best album as a vocalist, as she finds new ways to bend her voice to different styles and sounds.

Dispensing with the irony and bombast that always seemed essential to Hot Chip’s work, this solemn collection places the onus on Taylor’s singing.

Even with occasional missteps, the album fulfills the promise of a new kind of pop star: an out, Black rapper and singer who combines his omnivorous, genre-hopping music, forthright lyrics, and social media savvy to triumph in an industry that threatened his authenticity from the jump.

While The Melodic Blue is indeed flecked with more intimate writing than usual, it isn’t exactly a confessional. Instead, Keem uses the opportunity to expand his well-established fascination with trap and melody to feature-length—with mixed results.

No matter how much command and charisma Krauss brings to Texis, it still sounds quaint, not necessarily catchier than any number of contemporary bands who don’t face the same hang-ups from indie listeners.

Lindsey Buckingham manages to be his best solo effort since 1992’s Out of the Cradle. No dilution of his composing or his production sorcery here: Buckingham, all by his lonesome, has recorded an album whose insistent, almost irritating knack for melody suggests a resurgent talent for making his insularity accessible.

Throughout Antiphonals, Davachi smooths out recognizable elements until they blur into the sonic landscape. Compared to the orchestral ensemble recordings of earlier albums like 2018’s Gave in Rest, these eight songs sound subdued and solitary. However, there are moments when individual instruments receive a moment in the spotlight.

The sound of K Bay is so good—so plump, so crisp, so tapered and whooshed—that White can seem like a studio hermit whose talent keeps thwarting his solitude.

At its best, the album explores the contours of an emotional journey in space and time. Occasionally, though, scattered moods and unfocused songwriting blunt the record’s impact.

Comfort to Me transports us to a familiar, paradoxical world: uncertain, harsh, and magnetic.

I’ve Been Trying to Tell You feels passive, lost in nostalgia for an age it hasn’t fully reckoned with. Bet it sounds gorgeous on the radio.

The Black Album launched Metallica to superstardom because of its approachability, but in its attempts to offer something for everyone, Blacklist spreads itself too thin.

If Double Negative was a thrilling and uncertain expedition, bringing an alien landscape into focus for the first time, HEY WHAT demonstrates Low’s newfound mastery of the terrain.

Its seams show at every moment, in ways that feel artful—spoken interludes, thematic callbacks, a disorienting cover of Violeta Parra’s eternal “Gracias a la Vida” that shifts between settings like the grand finale of an Oscar-bait drama—and others that feel forced.

She makes even the most immovable feelings open up with just a little time and space.

What Jakobsson has always tried to accomplish with DJ Seinfeld was to try to tap into some grand universal emotion, a sense of want inside us all. This time, he finds it in joy instead of grief.

Everything is a beautiful record from wall to wall, comfort food for heartbroken insomniacs. But it also arrives with a tragic background that casts an entirely different kind of shadow over the evocation of an empty bedroom.

The Witness unlocks a parallel universe for the band, and though Suuns are still sculpting monoliths to paranoia, to hear them chipping away with such steady hands is a welcome treat.

With much of Certified Lover Boy, Drake seems to be doing what he thinks Drake would do, and ticking the box is taking its toll.

While The Mutt’s Nuts was never going to slot perfectly into place for anyone looking for Speed Kills 2, a suite of three songs on the B-side scratch that itch. All under two minutes long, they implement the same wildness and breakneck pace that defined their first album.

At this stage, they sound both comfortable and ambitious, settling into their familiar chemistry while adding new chapters to a story only they can write.

This is the sound of Simz reconciling with Simbi. And it sounds great. Cue the ovation.

At its best, Only Up evokes a communal feeling of watching a band utterly locked-in, their intertwining parts echoing across a large, open space. Korody never quite conjures the chemistry necessary to transcend his influences, but, like a teenager decorating his bedroom wall with torn-out tabloid photos, he creates a messy, lovable collage.

As on previous albums from the Trio, the overarching vibe remains murky and muddled, like a strong joint on top of a hangover on a humid, overcast day. But they cover more range than ever before.

On Any Shape You Take, De Souza commits herself to being undone, to experiencing the terrible feelings and the beautiful ones. Even when she’s fucked-up, there is something ecstatic in her attempts at loving, her hunger to absorb all she can from life.

The group could have delivered 10 variations on “Clearest Blue” and made (relative) bank. Instead, they let their influences sprawl widely. ... Better yet, they finally build on the darker parts of 2013’s The Bones of What You Believe as they excavate their own career.

Thirty years ago, indie rock was rife with records that sounded like Moot!, and the bands of that era inspired successive waves of followers. But today, an album like this, coming from a context like Moin’s, feels radical.

How Long is frequently gorgeous, but even on a deliberately messy side project, Dessner and Vernon still feel like they’re holding back.

For all the omnipresent menace, it’s often a wildly fun listen.

With each member given ample room for individual showcases, and each coming up with indelible songs and melodies, Feel Flows offers new insight into a creative peak.

Kanye’s tenth album arrives barely finished and with a lot of baggage. Its 27 tracks include euphoric highs that lack connective tissue, a data dump of songs searching for a higher calling.

It maintains a simultaneously sleek and sludgy quality across its 35 minutes, like a cornstarch slurry gluing the whole thing together.

Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity.

Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.

These songs don’t have the same mythical grandeur as Tyler’s best work, or the same unfurling experimentalism of Anderson’s. Instead, they play like a wandering search for peace, with both artists turning to their guitars—and to each other—as a respite against a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart.

The album is her most accomplished, arresting work yet.

Glow On is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility.

For all the struggle that inspired the record, Shannon and the Clams embrace the change with grace.

The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet. ... Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction.

McMurtry sounds more engaged here, more focused, and more generous to his hard-luck characters.

The most striking element of Long Time Coming is the one that made Ferrell go viral in the first place—her voice.

The sentiments are never cryptic or coded; the duo simply express what’s top of mind. That face-value approach to lyrics is well-suited for a subject as universal as a global pandemic. There’s comfort in hearing somebody sing what we’re all thinking, and comfort has always been what Damon & Naomi do best.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

Aisles is most endearing when it leans into frivolity, largely because there’s little else with such relaxed stakes in Olsen’s discography.

Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums.

If Infinite Granite was a debut by a band with no backstory, it’d be impressive as hell. But knowing Deafheaven’s singular ability to pull off thrilling highwire acts, their latest subversion of expectations feel less like a bold statement and more like a predictable move to gentler pastures.

Dood and Juanita works so well because Simpson sounds comfortable within this form and just beyond it.

No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

GUMBO’! is an ambitious sprawl that doesn’t always work perfectly. But when it does, there’s nothing else like it.

Although The Baby flirted with electronic elements, it mostly stuck to an intimate indie-rock sound; in comparison, Scout sounds big.

Though the album is staid and formulaic by design, it doesn’t always color inside the lines: It feels more like background music failing up than ambient music failing down.

Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.

Rarely is electronic music so utterly human as on Still Slipping, its emotional draw as reassuringly complex as a grand family reunion.

Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes.

Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.

Nas’ kingship goes down easy over Hit-Boy’s clean drums and neat arrangements, which indulge Nas’ nostalgia without kowtowing to it. ... When Nas’ rhymes aren’t clumsy, his storytelling is.

Apart from splicing “Bluebird” and “For What It’s Worth” into a Buffalo Springfield medley, Los Lobos stay faithful to these original arrangements, which doesn’t mean they’re replicating records. They’re relying on their collective strengths as a rock’n’roll band.

It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.

The resulting project is dimmed down and diluted.

It is slightly bizarre to hear aging punks perform the songs of their youth, music that would become foundational to scenes that produced the likes of Blink-182 and Weezer. But as the missing link that connects Descendents’ humble beginnings to their most iconic sounds, it’s essential.

The rare box set that’s actually more than the sum of its parts. The highs on here are higher than the lows are low, and, more significantly, the warts-and-all approach creates a compelling context for Dick Jensen and the O’Jays alike.

Stand for Myself, with its themes of inner fortitude only brightening the white-hot star at its center, vaults Yola to another place in the pop world, with her boundless curiosity and vocal brawn establishing her as a knowing, honest voice for those who need help summoning their own strength from within.

King Woman’s ability to outdo themselves continues apace, and the bar continues to rise each time Esfandiari sheds her skin anew.

Burning projects newfound poise and even joy through a sophisticated collage. Rashad’s collection of references and phrases plays like the inside of a jumbled but vibrant brain.

It was and is a spotty album from a time when Prince was making a lot of those.

It is an album of quiet delights, but at times it feels like the songs are simply stretched too thin: three-star meals served with five-star service.

It’s a confused album that sounds like it wants to sit on the shelf next to do-it-all pop savants like Jeff Lynne or Todd Rundgren, yet retreats to the safety of Antonoff’s alt-pop impulses before anything spectacular really develops.

Some of Happier Than Ever’s quieter tracks drag—“Everybody Dies”’s dreary grasps at existentialism barely leave an impression. That said, as the beat change on “My Future” shows, Happier Than Ever’s best songs are the ones where Eilish and Finneas allow one small idea to mutate into two or three bigger ones.

Thirstier is exuberant and unguarded—the kind of music you make when you’re no longer testing out a new skin and instead reveling in the fervent joy that it brings you. At their best, these songs ride the contact high of a love so consuming that it shifts your worldview and makes you write songs loaded with screamable choruses and conventional hooks.

MIKE’s rhythmic passion manifests in a firm self-awareness absent from his earlier work. He hasn’t exactly outrun his demons, but his place in the vanguard of New York’s underground rap scene has invigorated him.

He mostly manages to boil down the macho bloat of his sources to graceful essences without underplaying the pomp.

Change is pleasant and breezy, a cozy place where she can explore the outer limits of her voice. Listening can feel like walking into one of those gallery shows with just three sculptures, where everyone is wearing a tweed jacket and a pair of mustard-colored slacks. It sounds cool, and you feel cool listening to it—but that’s about as much as you feel.

We’re All Alone in This Together isn’t Dave’s magnum opus. But the best thing is, he’s just getting started. We’re barely past the opening credits.

Few people would dream up an album as endearingly obtuse and gleefully dysfunctional as Yellow, let alone have the skill to realize it.

Banned is stronger when the pair sound more invested, when the songs feel more composed and can unspool without as many distractions.