With his careful needlework, Mazurek stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music, setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of how each of these components is necessary to the whole. It rises up to gesture toward the cosmos, then returns us to life on Earth, tracing a single great parabolic arc.

Throughout Time Makes Nothing Happen, Gengras toys with the tropes of electronic dance music (repetition, meter, gridded quantization), only to gradually veer off into unkempt wilderness.

Its mellow sway is alluring but it also can drift ever so slightly into the realm of mood music, perhaps an inevitable result for a gently restless musician who seems to favor feel over feeling.

Musical twists and spasms aside, Origin is the most approachable Liturgy album yet.

Shygirl’s voice carries a bit more over the muck; the production is bolder and more focused, like throwing a sharpened knife at a wall rather than a smattering of darts.

There are more than a few moments of brilliance, but as a whole, the album lacks cohesion, feeling less exploratory and unbound than simply unfocused.

Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.”

These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.

Sigur Rós’s music has always felt panoramic, and Odin’s Raven Magic is no different; its sweeping melodies harken back to landmark albums like Ágætis byrjun, but this time, the music foregrounds orchestra and choir. When the sprawling sound becomes overwhelming, it’s the hidden details that prove most tantalizing.

Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and specificity that make them compelling.

Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife.

It’s exciting seeing how they’ve learned to play off of each other’s energy. It’d be easy for Uzi to coast and phone in verses after the year he’s had so far, but he’s shown no signs of slowing down.

The album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.

The soft edges of Roped In make it both a sublime record in its own right as well as a pleasant, inviting portal into a wider world of simpatico artists. The album feels like the aural equivalent of gazing into a massive and well-appointed aquarium, a vessel for color and movement that quietly soothes as it shuttles along.

The non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying.

Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

As a sit-down listening experience, the album frequently feels too repetitive to remain consistently engaging. Still, taken as a microdosed jolt of electronic psychedelia, a song or two at a time, Translate has the potential to lift you up, out, and beyond, to a better, stranger place.

Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.

The first set boasts slightly better clarity, the second set coming across more muffled. But the wider canvas of these two sets offers him a freedom he didn’t always have on that tour. Rather than frontload the hits, the trio gets to take their time, folding in a dozen new songs that had yet to appear on any album.

As is typical when Lindstrøm and Prins Thomas join forces, some of the project’s most exciting moments are snuck in the back door, laced into a dazzling breakdown or deep, hypnotic groove.

None of Corgan’s definitive qualities as a musician—symphonic grandeur, needling immediacy—translate to his production, which burdens CYR with out-of-the-box anonymity; a Smashing Pumpkins album that sounds like it was handed off to a guy at the Genius Bar. The production’s clinical competency only highlights the assembly-line songwriting of CYR’s back half.

The eight songs on the new record are all original compositions written and developed over the past six years, yet there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a Cabaret Voltaire album. While not as pulverizing as the group’s early recordings nor as sleek as the techno and house-inspired work found on 1993’s International Language, it blends the various eras of the group into a mostly satisfying whole.

Bridgers’ songs are so devastating because she plays both hero and villain, creating a Möbius strip of virtues (like selflessness) that twist into flaws (like savior complexes). Rarely is there a feeling of catharsis or righteousness, especially on Copycat Killer, where the paralyzing angst and introspection feels so stark. Yet the EP ends on a quietly hopeful note.

Music, Trial & Trauma is several albums at once: drill bangers, party tunes, and a series of reflections on Black tragedy. It doesn’t always cohere, but the effect is still rather startling. Loski illuminates the darkened corners of his mind in order to reveal the society that gives power to the demons inside.

The album projects a firm sense of place, and it’s not just because Charles’ accent is prevalent whether he’s talking, singing, or shouting. This is an English band, with English influences singing about English places—specifically, London.

Fittingly, on Sin Miedo, Uchis dares to trust herself more. She pares down the guest list, opting for feature production by Puerto Rican hitmaker Tainy and a smattering of artists. Her voice, still thick and sultry, looms larger in the mix.

They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet.

While Coates favors simple, stately toplines, the record’s underbelly suggests fathomless depths; instead of sprawling outward, like Shelley’s on Zenn-La, the songs pirouette before plunging into the abyss. The album’s splicing of beauty and horror invokes the morbid logic of Greek mythology, where stirrings of triumph tend to foreshadow nasty surprises.

This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.

Granduciel is a much different vocalist in the live setting than he is on record: more punctuated, less delicate, and even a little less melodic. His soloing, meanwhile, consistently sounds more articulated as he rips into these songs on a tailwind of spontaneous inspiration.

BENEE gets better results by dropping the cutesy affectations. When the pace slows down, Hey u x strikes a balance between whimsy and moodiness, particularly on “A Little While” or the Frankie Valli-alluding ballad “All the Time,” a duet with New Zealand newcomer Muroki.

The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

The record is more interesting when the Herculean feats of lyricism take a back seat to introspection.

They still occasionally bury vocals in a haze of effects, but their instrumentals are crushing now by design, their synth lines starker, the distortion more piercing. They’ve always been capable of expressing harsh feelings, but they seem now more able than ever to echo such sentiments in their music. Fires in Heaven is a more alluring invitation than ever to join them down in the depths.

Though they don’t bridge new worlds or sounds here, they confirm the implicit connections between their formative muses, threading the outré time signatures of J Dilla and Madlib, the spiritualism of Dungeon Family, and the flair of Dipset into a cozy tapestry. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is home.

The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis.

This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be.

As on her debut, Roxanne’s cool, clear soprano provides the centerpiece of most of these songs.

Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes.

Paradise may forever be lost, but this elegant elegy is worth many returns.

The record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown.

Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality.

Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods.

Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.

However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself.

He skillfully synthesizes his influences, hitting sweet spots that feel purely of his own creation.

The thrill of Monarch Season is in how she collapses these roles, offering her music as something both thoughtful and unfinished. The result is an inventive and subtly visceral record.

Fading feints from Hannah Peel’s empathy and refuses to devastate (or stunt) like the Caretaker. Yet it’s full of Betke’s own version of love. If older Pole was a weighted blanket, these are throws to toss and turn under, offering temporary comfort but no escape.

Love Goes, Smith’s third album, unfortunately fails to deliver on the promise of “How Do You Sleep?” The album is clumsily split in two, with no regard to sequencing; it begins with a collection of bubbling, at times electric songs spanning melodic funk, pulsing deep-house, and mid-tempo pop, before abruptly veering to five messy ballads that would be better delivered via Hallmark card.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

The selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either.

The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.

Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album.

The album has all the hallmarks of the era that Frusciante apes, but offers thoughtful, intriguing embellishments at every turn.

Positions doesn’t broaden Grande’s sound the way her past few albums have, and it isn’t buoyed by a heroic anthem, like “no tears left to cry,” or guided by a specific mission, like how “thank u, next” honored her relationship history. The record resonates partly because it doesn’t weld grand statements out of living with trauma; it narrows in on the wobbly path of pleading with yourself, the begging and bargaining of healing.

The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.

These eight songs grapple candidly with [family loss], but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.”

Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath.

It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.

While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

Even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle.

All of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it.

The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.

clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological.

He made an album as bleak—and funny—as anything he’s ever done, digging deep into his sense of self with the same sardonic wit that made his breakout LP Dark Comedy so impressive. It helps that he’s not entirely alone.

Some of these songs are as lovely as any Lenker has ever written: lush and verdant, chords fanning out like ferns, their major-key tonalities at odds with the heartbreak at the album’s core.. ... A collage of these recordings comprises instrumentals’ two songs, “music for indigo” and “mostly chimes,” which together run more than 37 minutes. They are not showy pieces, but the depth of her relationship with her instrument is clear.

He has every right to experiment and try on sounds as he sees fit. Hit-Boy attempts to balance this out by heading in the opposite direction so fully that it occasionally overwhelms Benny’s personality. ... Burden of Proof is undoubtedly the next step in Benny’s evolution, even if the music doesn’t always match the vision.

The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation.

The result is a kind of precise imprecision, as if the band had captured the abandon of their early recordings and then pored over the detail with manic industriousness—tweaking rather than polishing, the better to accentuate the unevenness. Shades is lightning captured in a meticulously painted bottle, and a hell of a good time, to boot.

Her songs are like islands: self-contained, gorgeous little worlds where nothing is obvious—especially the genesis of love and its unsteady first steps.

The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.

Only For Dolphins may not be vintage Bronsolino, but it’s still a display of why so many entities outside of music want a piece of him.

Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.

Too often, she jumps to John Hughes-isan climaxes without laying the foundation that would grant them the proper emotional heft. But Kristi shines as a guitarist and a composer; even the sternest skeptics might be forced to headbang once the power chords crash in on a particularly distorted chorus. Beabadoobee needs to punch up her script, but the set is perfectly lit.

Instead of the modern Stardust, Serpentine Prison is merely a prolific musician’s stopgap.

As bizarre as LANY’s pivot to country pop is, they still manage to infuse it with enough charm where it doesn’t fall flat.

Sundowner is sharper, more in sync with his previous records. It’s certainly referential, but it’s hardly completely retro.

Despite the length (70 songs across 5 hours, in its longest version), it feels designed to be played from front-to-back. For casual fans, all you need is the standard set, which pairs Wildflowers with the 10 outtakes on All the Rest. But there’s no element that feels superfluous, and the very essence of the album is palpable through each part.

It’s a testament to the strength of Clarke’s compositional gifts and his command of mood that even 14 or 15 tracks in, in an album pitched at a consistent campfire glow and midtempo stroll, songs like “The Golden Sky” sound just as fresh as the record’s first notes.

With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.

The album showcases her curatorial skills—honed from years of DJ sets, streaming playlists, and recently virtual shows as Aluna’s Room—and her range. Maybe as a challenge, Renaissance neither starts nor ends with dance music.

Every Replacements record is extraordinary in its way, but none exemplifies their garbage-to-grandeur alchemy like Pleased To Meet Me, which rocks like early Kinks, swaggers like T. Rex, and pays tribute to their spiritual godfather Alex Chilton.

Dark Hearts is best at its most artificial. The moments that aim for “realness” seem less so.

Throughout Couldn’t Wait to Tell You, Liv.e is becoming an unmistakable and singular artist. Even when it feels like we’re merely privy to what’s inside her head, her thoughts resonate outward.

The record feels like standing water, Herring is so entrenched in the past it’s hard to tell who he really is on so much of this record. There are, however, moments when the light shines in with the vibrancy of stained glass.

There’s no denying METZ’s ability to summon a white-knuckled, visceral disgust where tension and release are indistinguishable. It slaps, but it doesn’t leave much of a mark.

Silver Ladders is energetic yet also deeply calming.

For a band spooked by their status as role models, Touché Amoré still can’t help but lead by example.

Firmly bound to themes of renewal and rebirth, Phoenix: Flames Are Dew Upon My Skin is a winning experiment in economy and earthiness from an artist previously known for ornament and excess.

It’s a raw performance and a gleaming example of the album’s ethos: There’s no element Shamir isn’t willing to try on. By collapsing genre boundaries and molding them into his own homespun image, he’s made an unconventional pop album entirely on his own terms.

Sumac are at their most compelling on tracks that occupy an LP’s entire side, where disparate elements can clash at length.

Perhaps grimmer—songwriting, like therapy, has its limits. Loveless understands. With a sober approach to its less-than-sober characters, Daughter takes life one song at a time. She can’t do more but prepare to accept less.