Because she can sound mournful even on upbeat songs, ballads tend to slip into melodrama. But when Andrews finds solid grooves to express her bittersweet optimism, Valentine rocks.

Don’t Be Dumb is not a blockbuster, and it’s all the better for it.

An undeniably sad record, but one of understated beauty: a lonely, faithful votive flickering brightly against the odds.

Tragic Magic grows more involving with each track. When two artists this distinctive and identifiable come together, you want to hear them make a third thing that wouldn’t exist without the collaboration, and the progression of the record finds them steadily feeling out that place.

The shimmering, rapturous hook of the title track, for example, packs a euphoric punch, though the song slightly overworks the objects-as-organs imagery. She has a lighter lyrical touch on opening track “Good Intentions,” a would-be John Hughes movie outro, and the pulsating “Every Ounce of Me,” an I-don't-want-to-fall-in-love banger with synths brighter than the sun. After the opening flush of these songs, the record’s remainder doesn’t quite reach the same highs.

It’s the sound of Zach Bryan figuring out how to paint on a larger canvas, how to sound like the superstar he has become.

Fenced in by the demands of the film, Fussell and Elkington make modesty both a virtue and shortcoming.

On Secret Love, their first album in three and a half years, Dry Cleaning are operating in a more intuitive, integrated way, investing the songs with pronounced dramatic cues, properly sung choruses, and playful call-and-response.

Decent enough—and certainly the strongest project Nas has released in his current era—yet seldom amounting to more than nostalgia bait for the 40-plus contingent. It’s meant to be a celebration of these two rap titans’ respective careers, a goal the album modestly achieves, but it spends so much time dwelling on the past that it’s hard to know precisely what Nas and Primo wanted from the experience.

On a record whose lyrics can be unintelligible, I normally wouldn’t spend so much time dissecting the words, but Agriculture so often directs us toward closer analysis, deeper listening, fuller understanding.

Implosion brings out the best in each artist by highlighting their differences: Martin’s music comes off heavier than ever, while Fiedler’s fidgety rhythms are all the more dynamic.

The moments of direct storytelling feel more tantalizing considering how little we know about the writer.

Holo Boy doesn’t go out of its way to experiment or provoke, but its emphasis on reinterpretation is strangely moving, particularly at this point in Amos’ career.

Vesper Sparrow, Ellis’ follow-up, is more focused but just as deep, a prose poem rather than a dissertation.

While these melodies often feel familiar, Toral puts a mysterious spin on them, warping them enough to make them feel otherworldly. His instrument wavers; his drones have a sparkling, celestial sheen. In the process, the poignant songs start to feel less like themselves and more like a dream.

Changes in Air neatly inverts the structure of its predecessor: where A Series of Actions strewed a sparing few twinkles across a vast empty space, here Coverdale throws open the blinds and floods every nook with light.

Unclouded may not push her in a new direction, but it’s marked by a newfound grit and a palpable confidence.

On paper this may sound like a man making a mockery of his feelings. But once you’re used to our delirious narrator and his disarming hairpin turns, the gentleness of Fendrix’s heart overpowers everything, even the teeth-grinding thrash that concludes “Princess.”

Per usual, the group’s love for mini-narratives can sometimes clutter the music and cause an interesting idea to outstay its welcome. .... But the overall mood is agreeably potluck, a diverse spread of beats and rhymes to nourish the soul.

Even as its canvas stretches wide enough to accommodate the aggressive and experimental extremities of the Sharp Pins sound, Balloon Balloon Balloon is ultimately a showcase of Slater doing what he does best: filtering Beatles-‘65 joy through Beatles-‘66 drugs to hit the sweet spot between winsome and whimsical.

There’s electricity in this music—literally coursing through guitar pedals, samplers, Eurorack modules, and the DAWs used in post-production, but also between the five musicians themselves.

His most distinctive release to date. While he initially garnered attention for his pastiches of ’80s art-rock, he’s channeled his influences into a record that’s both more expansive and more intimate.

So much of Daylight Daylight feels this way: majestic enough to fill a theater but contained and domestic.

Her provocations are tamed, her rasp is sanded down, the limits of her range more strictly enforced. At times, though, Walker herself takes cover in plain sight.

Minnesota Miracle is your time-machine ticket to experience the band at peak ferocity; from the moment Hart unloads the carpet-bombing backbeat of New Day Rising’s mantric opening track, the legend of Hüsker Dü starts to feel a lot more real. .... The piecemeal nature of More Miracles makes it less an all-consuming, sensory-obliterating experience than the Minnesota Miracle disc, with some selections bearing the hiss of a bootleg cassette. But we do get to hear a lot more audience reaction and interaction.

An unusually linear Mountain Goats record full of powerful moments that not even the eternally moving Darnielle can scrape into the whole it deserves.

Chin Up Buttercup is certainly an evolutionary leap for Austra, but it’s not a total departure.

While the two new records don't match up to the original’s mastery, scattered throughout both are glimmering moments of this carefree abandon and commitment to the bit. It's clear that twigs has never had quite so much fun.

Tranquilizer is the most immediately pleasurable Oneohtrix Point Never album in some time.

The intimate yet anthemic closer “Price of a Man” sounds like a full realization of the resonance the band reaches for throughout the album, but most of the preceding songs lack the tension or texture needed to make the payoff feel earned.

Unpredictable, sensuous, and slightly spooky, COSPLAY captures the disquieting sounds of a foregone future.

In its best moments, Small Talk is pleasant background noise. .... The good news is that the songs don’t get worse from there. The bad news is that they stay almost exactly the same. Each track sways into the next at a similar tempo and with similar intensity, which is to say none.

Years in the making, a little death is rousay’s most polished and straightforward work, one that seeks to take her from collagist to capital-C Composer.

It’s a love letter to rap and the people who made him excited about creating again. It’s saccharine, maybe a little pat, but the emotion in his voice makes it hard not to feel fuzzy.

Hooke’s Law is an accelerant. Over staggering tracks overrun with rhythms, melodies, and voices, keiyaA hurtles through the abyss and dares you to keep up.

Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony. But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting.

Through the Open Window reveals an artist trying to find his voice and then convincing others to listen to it.

It’s not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI, but it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk.

If Haram was the Alchemist’s entry to Armand Hammer’s world, Mercy is a shared vision. There’s a greater understanding of what they can create together, and a willingness to add other sounds into their combined vocabulary.

Von Hausswolff and her ensemble are patient with these songs. They linger over them, giving them time and space to develop, even when they’re nearly at the boiling point.

That sort of state-of-society demonstration, which has always distinguished Dave from his peers in UK rap, is hardly present on his newest album. And it doesn’t help that The Boy Who Plays the Harp is considerably less dynamic when it comes to production.

The shared characteristic that unites all four releases, though, is McCraven’s uncanny ability to alchemize hip-hop from jazz, structure from freedom, a collective effort into a singular vision.

On an album full of infernos, “One of the Greats” is one of the few songs to stand apart: Its ambition and vulnerability come closest to fulfilling Everybody Scream’s mission to let it all out.

There are no moments in the same area code of The Infamous or Hell on Earth. But Infinite is a decent stab at giving one of the greatest rap duos of all time one last trip around the block.

When Tremor holds your attention, it works—but sometimes Avery gets lost in his own trance, drifting away from the album’s rough pulse just as it begins to take hold.

It’s in these songs—softer and sweeter than anything in Chat Pile’s catalog, gloomier and more foreboding than anything in Pedigo’s—that their mutual empathy radiates strongest.

CAOS, title notwithstanding, is elegant and poised.

Snocaps is a return to form, its sound landing closer to the ramshackle pop-punk of P.S. Eliot than Saint Cloud’s twilit majesty.

“Promenade à deux” finally eases into something like a classic Tortoise chill-out space, albeit with a more widescreen approach, uncharacteristically graced by viola and cello. From there, beginning with “A Title Comes,” the LP’s second half finds perfect balance between signal noise and cinematic sweep, with signature vibraphone pulses and swooning guitar progressions rubbing against blissed-out Terry Riley organ tones and motorik chug.

Unlike those records [Lemonade and 30], Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust.

In a concise package, you get a fuller portrait of one of Springsteen’s greatest and most mysterious albums—and to this day, the one he’s proudest of—as well as candid insight into his creative process.

The slow, sorrowful material rarely summons the urgency this subject demands, nor the emotional catharsis that rippled through Silberman’s best work.

On Belong, Duterte’s re-emergence as Jay Som, she exudes the confidence of those six years quietly but well spent. What the album loses in raw shaggy experimentalism of her last records, it gains in understated poise.

Lotto gambles on TAGABOW’s ability to craft songs more compelling in their simplicity and vulnerability than their technical capabilities. By trading in their plastic sheen for a more ragged sense of real-life urgency, TAGABOW expose the tenderness at their music’s core: a refusal to anesthetize, an avowal to meet the bone where it breaks.

For the majority of the record, she sings alone, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. This elemental soundscape pushes Diaz’s finely crafted melodies and brutal lyrical observations to the forefront more bluntly than ever.

It ["Heat Sink"] feels both longer and shorter than its 14 minutes, a trick that Palladino and Mills pull off on every track on the album; each lyrical passage is an instruction manual for experiencing nonlinear time. That Wasn’t a Dream is music as quantum theory, using the expanse between speakers to pass through dimensions.

The ultimate compliment for Life Under the Gun wasn’t “catchy,” but “punchy,” their songs direct and delivered with a stiff jaw and clenched fist. The exact opposite is true on God Save the Gun; half the time, if a song reaches two minutes, it might as well add a bridge that gets it to three.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

Ironically, in its militaristic pursuit of fun, Some Like It Hot often winds up feeling deeply rigid—stripped of the spunk and nuance that once made Bar Italia so enchanting.

Nested in Tangles is so powerful because it’s about what comes after those mommy-and-daddy issues—about enduring, as she puts it in that prelude, “fault lines that were never my fault” to become something better.

This dense, claustrophobic album is discomfitingly of the moment: Sudan’s characters sprint through these songs as though movement is a survival tactic, a way to push forward as the world presses down harder than ever.

Frontloading Power to the People with the One To One performances—the two sets are here, along with a hybrid highlights disc—illustrates how Lennon spent the early ’70s wallowing in the pleasures of old-time rock’n’roll. .... These "Studio Jam" passages are loose, maybe even to a fault, but they’re charming, capturing one of the greatest rock vocalists singing unencumbered by an audience. These two discs of informal jams are the ideal coda to Power to the People, which chronicles the era when Lennon was keenly aware that he was performing at all times.

There’s rarely any stylistic flair to his vocals anymore; so often, he’s doing a milquetoast rap-sing that makes him sound like everyone else in the Atlanta mainstream rap circuit.

Only lead single “My Full Name” keeps things a little too simple, lacking the complex sentiments and intricate arrangements that make this album special. Ace rewards close listening; from a stately chamber-folk album, something quietly unrelenting emerges.

Her precision never feels overly technical or stiff. Tether is as intuitive and loose as it is intentional.

Stripping it all back, she leaves nowhere to hide, relinquishing her self-protective grip on control on a gentle-sounding record that is anything but.

Worldwide fortifies Snooper’s sound by forcing the stiff loops of a drum machine to warp under the weight of their ricocheting guitars. Studio time didn’t kill the punk band. It granted them space to play faster and looser without losing any of the fun.

Seven years on, the leering, all-encompassing grime of SickElixir melds dozens of Roberts’ subsequent discoveries and revelations into a brutish, unhinged gestalt; its clamorous swagger makes “Tasser” look like a curio.

For perhaps the first time in the Bajas’ catalog, there are parts of Inland See that can get stuck in your head.

The emotions are big and the choruses are bigger, but the production is too washed-out to risk actual vulnerability. It’s music to sink into, an electronic dreamy mush that’s somehow equal parts Foster the People and Mazzy Star.

Whatever vision Martin and Shellback set out to realize here is not really serving her strengths and, intentionally or not, appears to signal a disinterest in evolution.

Through the Wall makes its case without grandstanding, proof that command can be quiet.

he Art of Loving reminds me of Leslie Feist’s exemplary pivot to coffeeshop pop and lounge jazz on her albums Let It Die and The Reminder, but Feist also had her wild youth as a Broken Social Scenester behind her by then. Dean’s meticulous replicas are nearly impeccable; it’s high time she starts throwing some paint around.

What makes it work so well is that this anarchy is not an anything-goes anarchy: These songs are so carefully composed, so intentional, that every cyborgian burp and steel snare fits perfectly. Everything and nothing tramples each other.

Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them.

The result is at once all-encompassing and strikingly intimate.

Le Bon fills her music with ornately carved oddities, but she’s always had an ear for pop melodies, even within her most ambitiously arranged songs.

Nobody’s Girl deals mainly in ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes earthy, often mournful—but that form grows stale even while it suits the personal upheaval she writes her way through. When she breaks the pattern on the surprisingly psychedelic “Lose It for a While” and the driving “Strange Dreams,” where her voice skitters with nervous energy, there’s a flash of what her emotional candor paired with more compelling arrangements could achieve.

The time between albums (seven years, in this case) gives Here for It All a certain weight that its songs don’t quite bear. In the scheme of her smash-packed discography, this is a minor work. But if only all minor works were so consistently enjoyable. The air of meh palpable during many of Carey’s recent public appearances is mostly replaced with gusto and wit (though the way lead single “Type Dangerous” flatlines in the hook is just meh again).

Twilight Override is comprised of only strange, beautiful, and threadbare originals, but the sense of glorious indulgence is straight 1970 Dylan.

Their strangest and strongest work. .... Geese’s most singularly idiosyncratic music arrives to their largest audience yet.

Real Warmth makes it easy to believe that music can be that lifeline out of the darkness, or at least a roadmap to home.

The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to.

Time and again in these five tracks, it sounds as if Orcutt has reached the end of potential variations for whatever theme he’s playing, like an outlaw outrunning the cops only to reach the edge of a towering cliff. But he finds unexpected ways to extend the thought, with Miller and Shelley always maneuvering to give him room to do so.

Cardi maintains a respectful distance from the prevailing trends. Instead, she plays with bursts of experimentation, adopting new flows without sacrificing legibility. .... That work [editing the track list down], when offloaded to the listener under the guise of generosity, lands instead as risk aversion.

Blurrr, Robertson’s sixth solo album and her undisputed masterpiece, is at points so beautiful—53 seconds into “Always Were,” to be exact, or four minutes, 31 seconds into “Peaceful”—that it feels difficult to breathe alongside it.

The duo’s mutual respect, selfless skills, and tender chemistry have delivered an album that is among both artists’ best.

THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! is a romp of a record, even if it feels front-loaded with bangers—like Addison Rae earlier this year, the album is slightly overshadowed by its hot streak of singles.

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

Here, her cut-up vocals ground both the album’s tighter tracks and looser moments—the same timbre that seduces on one song is, elsewhere, exasperated or desperate.

Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation.

The best songs on Pain to Power capture that electric, instantaneous energy, where everything collides in delightful chaos. Maruja only lose that alchemic touch when they overthink the process.

You can hear that weariness all throughout Play, which often finds him going back to his two favourite wells—wedding songs and “global” bangers—without much of the energy or good humor that made him so popular to begin with.

Though the band more or less commits to replicating their studio arrangements, their attention to detail (the whining synth harmonies on “Where I End and You Begin,” the melodramatic backing chords of “Sail to the Moon”) feels grandly ambitious, rather than stodgily clinical. At least several songs feel greater than the sum of their already formidable parts.

The one new track is “Devotion,” a showstopping slab of new-wave twinkle. Outside of a killer opening punchline (“I don’t feel emotion/It completely takes over me”), it’s uncomplicated and blissful, a portrait of codependence that begs to be read as a you’re-the-real-stars diva move. It’s a victory lap, and I don’t begrudge it. But Hot Chip are far more compelling when they’re navigating the course.

My nervous system just can’t endure 17 tracks of uncut Jens at once; it’s a giddy squee! sustained for 80 minutes. But it has variety and inspiration throughout, and it works great when taken in two chunks, one spinning a relationship together and the other gently tugging it apart.

Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over.