Live Forever argues that life is not some march toward a peak, but a closed loop—one that’s tighter if you’re Black. The brilliance of Bartees’ debut is in how it carves out an expansive space within that loop.

Whereas their earlier material veered towards melodic art-rock, the music on Giver Taker sounds radically gentle and confident.

Free Humans is a passionate rebuke to both fatalism and futurism. It’s the sound of four cosmic souls resolutely staying put—not wanderers but wonderers, still in love with their own bizarre planet, and baffled by the senselessness of leaving it behind.

Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one.

It’s an overwhelming amount of material. ... The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering.

It seems unlikely that Monk and his quartet would have known about what was happening in East Palo Alto, but they’ve clearly been buoyed by the crowd’s youthful energy, and they deliver some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of their core repertoire in response.

They’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.

Thematically, Tickets to My Downfall is hardly a departure from MGK’s past work, but the new surroundings lightens his music up considerably even amidst the hormones and histrionics. With Travis Barker on his side, he might win over skeptics accusing him of trend-hopping, but the best part of Downfall is that he doesn’t take the whole endeavor too seriously.

Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.

An album so profusely inventive, so alive to the possibilities of sound itself.

It’s a record that justifies and even demands the extra space to explore; Moore and co. take their sweet time to sculpt squalls into riffs and lure extended meditations into melodic focus, like a roving crosshair that finally locks on its target.

The new deluxe edition of New York contains live versions of every track, glizted-up arrangements of the Reed standards “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” one non-album instrumental, a long-out-of-print concert film, and a number of demos and rough mixes. These works in progress largely serve to show that Reed got it right with the album’s final version.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.

Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.

Most songs are stuffed with diverging melodies and dense instrumentation. But Dupuis is such an adept songwriter and accomplished singer that the excesses are part of the appeal.

The Ascension is, by design, kind of a drag: a dark and emotionally distant mood piece whose lyrics rarely touch on the specifics necessary to anchor the music, and whose music is rarely exciting enough to elevate his words. ... The Ascension fares best when Stevens looks inward.

Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.

A staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.

The resulting sense of chaos redoubles Boris’ wrath and gives it a welcome depth, the sense that it’s here to stay because it’s been here all along.

Recorded with a full band, Western Swing moves away from Wall’s unvarnished veneration of the Wild West and swings wide the barn doors. This here’s a party.

The Times feels genuine and unforced—an organic expression of whatever he was feeling at the time, in all its weirdness and contradiction. In other words, it’s prime Neil Young.

Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.

It’s the rare box set where the rarities feel integral to the compilation’s impact, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.

There’s no question that van den Broek is an energetic and capable musician, but those qualities feel irrelevant when they show up in songs that might appear on a bad Shuggie Otis covers album. Anyone can make music that sounds like soul, but not all music has one.

BREACH, Lily’s first album for Dead Oceans, is a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties.

Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble.

The best songs give Arrington the room to sprawl out and flex those ever-charismatic vocals, nearly untarnished by the sands of time.

Dapperton’s potential shines when he pushes himself, when it sounds like he’s making music for self-expression and fun, expanding his vocal range and messing around with reverb. He loses it inside of self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism.

With Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.

Even before “Drugged Vinegar” breaks down into a round of rapturous applause, How Ill has already succumbed to and recovered from its own cleverness many times. But the album is never just clever.

If these Goats Heads Soup rarities betray the album’s indecisive, scatterbrained origins, the reissue’s third disc—an oft-bootlegged but greatly enhanced recording of a Brussels show from October ’73—finds the Stones still very much at the top of their game as a live act. ... Ultimately, Goats Head Soup remains fascinating for how it makes the Stones seem a little less mythical and a lot more real.

Braxton has evoked the spirit of ’90s R&B without ever sounding like she’s simply throwing out nostalgia bait.

Despite its heavy conceptual burden, No era sólida never crumples under its own weight. It shows rather than tells, guiding you through its prickly, unstable moods with a mystical sort of grace.

From King to a God would be considered a solid effort from most MCs, but it's clear Conway has his aim set higher.

The Universal Want troubleshoots wisely—keep the tempos at a brisk jog, dabble in Afrobeat, Motown, and cinematic soul rather than prog, and watch the clock. Whereas Kingdom of Rust felt like twice its hourlong runtime, Universal Want is Doves’ first filler-free album, floating by like a warm breeze.

It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

Though Emotion is refined, it also isn’t different from Dessner’s other production work—it’s still musically reticent, covered in fog. Its clarity originates in Georgas’ ability to process what she’s feeling, and spending 40 minutes in her head as she figures things out doesn’t feel suffocating.

American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm.

Re-Animator still holds its own against their other music; at their most traditional, they remain smart songwriters, and even their weaker lyrical moments are more thought-provoking than their peers.

There are moments on Detroit 2 that feel special, but Big Sean himself rarely has anything to do with them.

On Help, his latest album, Timothy works with a number of collaborators from the London scene—Mr. Mitch, Vegyn, and Lil Silva to name a few—to create a piece of music that takes equally from modern jazz and UK bass. With their help, Timothy sings the song of a community that he carries within him, voicing their past oppressions even in his most abstract pieces. Timothy constructs a vast castle out of his reference points making music that feels filled with the spectres of the past.

Despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.

For the most part, Gilberto’s voice finds the pocket, and when she’s front and center, the arrangements expertly draped around her, Agora is a rapturous listen. It’s not the star’s finest work—for newcomers, 2000’s Tanto Tempo remains her most engaging set—but in a time of personal distress, Gilberto embraces the familiar comforts of her graceful sound.

Awake in the Brain Chamber is best when Curtis is at his most vulnerable—giving himself a pep talk in the call-and-response chorus of “Everything Starts,” muttering “I want to give up” all too believably throughout the chorus of “Talos’ Corpse,” before amending himself—“I want to give up, but don’t.” They sound like they have much more to give.

The album oscillates between emotional registers, balancing profound quiet with strummy, emphatic pleas about how we might better comport ourselves in the world; there’s a sense that even at their most gentle, these songs are transmitting something deeply earnest and hard-won. This is as true of Read’s lyrics as of her arrangements, which are newly rich and rewarding.

Bar the rare moments of clunky electronics, almost every sound, touch, and shade on Fall to Pieces feels like it had to be there, in blessed contrast to the rambling dead ends, failed experiments, and misjudged covers of Tricky’s recent records. Fall to Pieces is an audacious cri de coeur that ultimately finds strength in adversity where others might fall apart.

Loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet.

Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.

From the driving blues line in “The Cowrie Waltz,” the lush soundscapes heard on “Ancestral Duckets” and “Bop for Aneho,” and the celestial soul claps that emanate from “Zane, The Scribe,” Georgia Anne Muldrow, once again, engenders her own Afrofuturistic realm, one that is heard, seen, and felt in the here and now.

Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.

It may not rival his classic albums—and it never deludes itself into thinking it does—but Got To Be Tough captures Hibbert as committed as always, still giving it all he’s got.

Fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Whole New Mess has a singular power. The songs are spare but still feel electric, and despite their lower volume compared to All Mirrors, you couldn’t necessarily call them quiet. Their slow-strummed chords and finger-picked patterns are at times deliberately brittle and blown-out. Whole New Mess amplifies a different source of loudness.

The album suffers from the same primary problem that plagued the original S&M: Metallica’s best songs, intricate and ambitious though they may be, are not actually well suited for the additional orchestrating they get here, precisely because they are plenty symphonic already.

For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.

ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.

Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.

A shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.

The new album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone—one which suits Nas, even as it yields diminishing returns.

Eno Axis is both a wonderful album and a handy instruction manual for our times: Follow the simple suggestions tucked within McEntire’s songs and you may just feel your weariness begin to lift like morning mist burning off a river.

It is one of the most intimate records in her catalog, and the entire band seems locked into the introspective intensity that marks her best songwriting.

Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.

Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.

Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.

Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease.

Freeze, Melt nods to the conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose death at the start of 2020 might have warned us of the waves of bullshit to come. Its own concept is unimpeachable: Climate change does suck. Ice is a memory. Mostly, though, Freeze, Melt just feels like a nice warm bath.

On Source, she weaves together so many threads so masterfully that she instantly establishes herself as a foundational voice in the larger, ongoing story of the London jazz scene. Her debut is a stunning introduction.

Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion. ... But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation.

It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.

Though Bent Arcana can sag in its less propulsive moments, the band generally hits the right ratio between eerie investigation and chunky jams.

The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

The original songs on Peck’s latest Show Pony EP are more vague [than Pony}.

Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.

If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill.

More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way.

The production has become knottier and more entangled, layering staccato notes with glimpses of field recordings, flourishes of breakbeats, and sweeping effects. At times, Articulation’s grandiose ideas are deflated by an overwrought execution. ... The magnetism of Rival Consoles lies in the chaotic warmth created through an intrepid play on rising and falling, conjuring a sense of turmoil that seems to become louder and more definite with each release.

The album doesn’t have enough blemishes, stumbles, or flourishes like this to give it extra excitement and curiosity. The risk level stays relatively comfortable; the payoff never really shoots up.

Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.

Each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness.

For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

He’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.

Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”).

As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction.

The maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer. Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure.

Regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.

The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments.

These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.

Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.

Over a decade into his career, Greene is more than capable of producing technically interesting music that comes across as deceptively simple. Unfortunately, Purple Noon falters and feels too safe and lacking in substance.

He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. ... Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance.

The relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here.

Jaguar is a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) is the far warmer of the two works, despite titles that allude to Iceland and Saturn’s frozen moons. In its most mesmerizing moments, Hassell slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.

By Morissette’s standards, Pretty Forks is a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. Most of those ballads are unobtrusive, with songwriting-template piano and strings plush and regular as amphitheater seats.