Though Brandy’s voice remains a beautiful, resonant instrument, her songwriting here is so often functional and humdrum, and her performances rarely sparkle with personality or feeling. It’s obvious she has many stories to tell; what’s less clear is what compels her to tell them, what makes her want to sing.

Skullcrusher is just a sketch. The EP is less than 15 minutes long; you could grab a glass of water and make your bed and have made it most of the way through these four songs. But “Trace,” a song that feels like the final embrace at the end of a relationship far past its sell-by date, shows Ballentine inching towards something more fleshed out.

Even if his latest offering is considerably dimmer than his most golden works, it’s still a confident assertion that, even at 77 years old, his pursuit of the sun’s life-affirming light shows no signs of wavering.

Blumberg asserts that even for the creator, a song can be whatever you need it to be in the moment, a vessel for self-exploration. On&On shows that he’s wholly enmeshed his songwriting and improvisation in a way that feels unique to him.

Built mainly from Powell’s knotty acoustic guitar explorations and lyrical musings that feel like fragments from an exceptionally perceptive diary, it’s the most satisfying Land of Talk album yet.

For all its wow factor, No Horizon has less replay value than most Wye Oak releases. Because of those choral arrangements, it burns bright but fast—a little bit of coloratura goes a long way, and these songs don’t skimp on it.

These sweetly sad songs are the ones that linger, and they’re served well by their earliest incarnations as home recordings and demos that serve as bonus tracks on both the double-disc reissue and companion 5-CD/2-DVD edition.

Unburdened by nostalgia, accepting the world as is while avoiding complacency, Made of Rain isn’t a comeback—it’s a new road.

Memorable tunes and unforgettable phrases erupt like brush fire over the course of 47 minutes, the mood migrating at a moment’s notice from insouciant nihilism to full-blown rage to radical empathy.

Transmutation is the enduring lesson of Kenney’s small catalogue so far: Turn life’s impasses into empathetic rock songs, little anthems for overcoming self-renewing heartache and exhaustion and anxiety. On Sucker’s Lunch, Kenney gets closer to the core of that idea than ever before thanks to sharper writing, stronger hooks, a versatile voice, and a continued partnership with friends who allow her to try new approaches.

Like Vile, Polizze writes lyrics as if he’s muttering them to himself, even when he’s gesturing toward something universal. And if his language rarely feels bold on its own, it does establish an undeniable mood paired with such laid-back music.

Telas is not a culmination for Jaar, even if it brings his ambient strains closer than ever to the more crowd-pleasing facets of his work.

Garbers Days Revisited transcends novelty status here, reconnecting not only to Inter Arma’s past but to our present.

At its best, folklore asserts something that has been true from the start of Swift’s career: Her biggest strength is her storytelling, her well-honed songwriting craft meeting the vivid whimsy of her imagination; the music these stories are set to is subject to change, so long as it can be rooted in these traditions.

Her respect for her craft shines throughout the record, a surprisingly joyful release ostensibly about a bad business deal.

All the Time is sincere so it doesn’t have to be deep—merely an invitation to look beneath the surface.

Williams’ music emphasizes the malleability and evolution of sound across styles and eras, even drifting into an R&B track voiced by the up-and-coming Lauren Faith stashed away near the album’s end. But the continual stylistic shifts make stretches of Wu Hen feel fidgety, hurriedly racing off to somewhere different rather than lingering and deepening its focus.

Life on Earth can be a joy to listen to— smooth, sexy, and bright—but it’s missing the searing songwriting Walker is capable of.

Lianne La Havas streamlines her impulse to blend styles, while still taking the time to nod toward pioneers.

While Blue is thoughtful and beautiful, it’s a drag to sit through. The interludes have more personality than the full-length songs.

Hynde responds to the drummer’s studio return not just by writing the band’s tightest rock record in ages but by thrusting the group’s interplay to the forefront. By doing so, she makes an effective case that the Pretenders are indeed a rock’n’roll band, not a singer-songwriter in disguise.

Much of the album charms. What’s missing, despite a team that includes some of pop’s most sought-after collaborators, are memorable songs that stand up to the sky-high bar the Chicks set for themselves all those years ago. Without a clear target, their formerly devastating blows just don’t quite land the same way.

With their documentarian dispatches from the meanest streets, Crack Cloud could never be accused of faking it. But the strange beauty of Pain Olympics is that it fills your heart even as it’s kicking you in the kidneys.

Trading the timbral menagerie of an expanded chamber ensemble for something more barren and monochromatic, Moore is occasionally forced out of his comfort zone into abstraction and dissonance. These forays can feel like a significant artistic leap, but complacency flattens some of this music.

There’s a nagging instinct that pop songs are supposed to have more pieces to them, or that drummer Eric McGrady is supposed to be using more than half of a drum set. Stick with it, though, and something even better emerges from those gaps. By leaving their songs exposed, Dehd show how much they believe in them, and rightfully so. Their confidence in their concision is the best part.

Even as it soothes, Violence in a Quiet Mind is more concerned with demonstrating how it feels to get better. It takes patience, attention, and self-awareness, qualities Black’s music amply displays.

XOXO is a battle-scarred but unbroken collection, worthy of being filed alongside venerable mid-career milestones like Wildflowers and Time Out of Mind.

Casey, having already plumbed the depths of sorrow, still has room to go deeper as Protomartyr’s sound continues to become much richer and more rewarding.

Beyond the Pale contains plenty of sharp songwriting, but despite the intrigue of its premise, it may have benefitted from a more thorough commitment to making a proper album.

Though Younge and Shaheed Muhammad may enjoy casting themselves as career revivalists, Roy Ayers JID 002, as pleasant and groovy as it is, never quite feels like a true Roy Ayers work.

The gripping parts of Legends Never Die come when Juice is speaking from the heart.

Reading his explanations for choosing the guest rappers, it’s clear they moved him, but he might’ve been better off simply ceding them the space and stepping away. With this new tape, the Streets are officially back, but Skinner never convinces us why they should stay.

As ever, MacKaye shrewdly distills macro calamities to personal, almost prosaic vignettes.

On Healing Is a Miracle, she’s never been further from the category of background music. Sincerity this pure draws attention to itself. It’s a genuine revelation.

Rumors buffs away some of the rougher edges that made her so much more compelling than so many of Nashville’s aspiring singer-songwriters. Those albums made the fight sound worthwhile, but there’s too little fight in these songs.

The 35-song soundtrack runs to nearly two hours, and the very elements that make it work as a score—the repeating melodic motifs and moments of lingering disquiet—make it a difficult listening experience. Much like the film’s demonic dress, it feels at times like In Fabric owns you, more than you own it. Still, scattered throughout are numerous examples of the melodic dexterity, genre agnosticism, and rhythmic poise that made records like Hormone Lemonade and Emperor Tomato Ketchup such shape-shifting delights.

The Avalanche wallows, but the realization rather than the anticipation of karmic retribution lends it emotional urgency even as Kinsella works in his familiar modes of meandering melodies, exquisite acoustic arpeggios, and the occasional lapse into cringe-posting that threatens to break the whole spell.

The guests skillfully mold the originals into creations of their own, while still preserving some of the songs’ initial ideas.

Their debut feels ragged in all the right places, a testament from a band that shoulders the weight of disappointment, lost years, and heartbreak without allowing it to become a burden.

Tidbits keep the sense of fun in The Beths’ music, they aren’t enough to fully invigorate their second album among the more sluggish songs. They’re mostly a reminder of what’s missing.

The best moments here are the most direct, the least demonstrative.

The Post-Nothing cuts fare best; they had fewer moving parts and thus didn’t suffer from being played sloppily or off-key.

The album’s sound is sleek and full of grand, sweeping climaxes that occasionally oversell the songwriting. But if Unfollow the Rules is sometimes in want of a unifying idea or theme, Wainwright’s dreamy voice provides a throughline.

6lack’s great instinct is knowing when to do a little less, and on 6pc Hot it pays off sublimely. He no longer sounds like a replacement-level R&B singer. He's starting to sound like a master.

Buried under the fluff somewhere is a good album.

This isn’t escapism, but a meditative retreat—give it an hour of your time and return to the material world more grounded than ever.

Frequently the sharpest Chloe x Halle songs are the ones where the sisters are the most hands-on.

Payten’s writing is strong enough that she pulls off worthwhile takes on familiar themes. ... Her lyrics only falter when Payten sounds aware of her audience, becoming self-consciously clever.

Ellis seems to have inadvertently wound up splitting the difference between nostalgia and innovation. What’s left is a scattered effort, and one can only wonder what Reality Tunnels might have sounded like if Ellis hadn’t followed so many of them down such sentimental pathways.

A record that takes bolder swings than its predecessor while falling even flatter.

Arca joins a long line of musical chameleons. The emancipatory promise of Arca’s project—a world beyond binaries, categories, and convention itself—remains thrilling, even when her tottering steps don’t quite reach that wished-for horizon.

A New Found Relaxation suggests a New Mexico healing experience that’s both IRL and online. The samples move quickly, spiking the ambience with appropriate doses of anxiety.

It has less of the soul-searching of Ware’s previous album Glasshouse, yet zooms in on a lighter facet of her personality, and is threaded with a camp sense of humor that reflects disco’s frivolity as well as the cheekiness that is all over Ware’s Table Manners podcast but has been largely missing from her recorded music. ... It is a joy to hear Ware sounding so relaxed.

Mordechai doesn’t quite commit to delivering fleshed-out songs, or to synthesizing Khruangbin’s influences into something new. It’s too busy to settle fully into your subconscious like the intercontinental ambience of Khruangbin’s 2018 breakout Con Todo El Mundo, but not substantial enough to satisfy more active listening.

Mia Gargaret’s patient pace and contemplative tone encapsulate these questions of existence, dissociation, and introspection.

She colors her songs with vibrant shades, drawing out tragicomic absurdities with sly panache. The result is direct but disorienting, like a grim domestic scene painted by Matisse.

It’s Haim as we haven’t quite heard them before: not just eminently proficient musicians, entertainers, and “women in music,” but full of flaws and contradictions, becoming something much greater.

This band is at its best operating at the edge of kitsch and excess, as with the “Monster Mash” voice inexplicably mumbling over “Bobby’s Forecast.”

Mostly, though, the Young we get here resembles the Young we already know: the one who we first met on his rootsy-yet-metaphysical 1972 breakout album, Harvest, then again later on Comes a Time, in 1978. ... When all is said and done, we’re left wanting more.

Bigger Love is rife with this feel-good energy, buoyed by his stately voice and easygoing charm, but beneath its positive exterior is an emptiness that’s hard to ignore.

Somewhere is as its best when Garvin bares her teeth and uses her sense of humor to talk about what is haunting her, be it spending far too much time alone, or trying to find your place on new ground.

It sags in the fourth section, where Taylor perhaps overcompensates for the brevity of K.T.S.E. with one too many ballads. Still, for an album that lives mostly in the slow- and mid-tempo, it frisks and frolics.

Confinement prevents the EP from reaching GREY Area’s heights, but Drop 6 still contains deeply affecting moments.

Where Another Life felt bright and alert, shimmying towards oblivion like lemmings in a conga line, Tearless is burned out and overwhelmed. This is ugly music, even at its most melodic.

Planet’s Mad careens through its bungled cyber narrative, tingling and whirring, daring you not to take it seriously. The planet warms, the pop stars reel, and we’re still trying to dance.

The band’s effusiveness often feels torrential, which makes its more inane moments come off as collateral damage. On Shadow Offering, Braids isn’t afraid to steer dangerously close to the eye of the storm.

Her music never sounds alone. The record glows with this strange self-sufficiency, an instinct to push forward against bad odds.

It results in a gorgeous and meticulous record. The lyrics are striking—dense enough to inspire a curriculum, clever enough to quote like proverbs.

Unlike other Bowie live albums, this doesn’t document a specific tour or phase. It’s just a quiet, pleasant footnote to a busy era.

With the closing “You Make Your Own Luck,” Watson effectively distills GUM’s whole essence into a two-part mini-suite: one half nocturnal cosmic ballad, one half sunrise-summoning soul-jazz groove, the song reaffirms Watson’s ongoing mission to find the elation in isolation.

Alongside a cast of musicians who help bring her kaleidoscopic world to life, NV emerges with a visionary avant-pop record that offers an escape from gloom.

Ellery and Skye are in their fourth year of music school—and they are still finding their way. But when they nail it, as on “The City,” their first-thought-best-thought creative bursts sound not just thrilling but genuinely new. For a group so steeped in retro modes, that’s no small thing.

Despite its misfires, the ambitious scale of Annual’s song suite is another step forward for a young group evolving at an unnaturally fast rate.

While they may have shed some of the quirks that made them unique, Invisible People is far and away Chicano Batman’s most accessible record, with big, clean hooks to match definitive statements. A decade into writing songs together, they sound stronger than ever.

Wares are ultimately less concerned with craft than catharsis, no matter how messy it gets. Hardy’s irrepressible personality abounds even in the album’s more delicate moments.

At 22 tracks, it’s a little bloated—but with most songs barely scratching the three-minute mark, it zips along at a pace reminiscent of the radio sets and stage shows that the sound incubated in almost two decades ago.

This is an imperfect, imprecise project—but that’s the beauty of it.

This album is more for Naeem himself than any listener. And when it hits a sweet spot, drifting somewhere between manic experimentation and somber fury, Startisha shines.

The Liam-written songs are largely a drag. ... But a few of Liam’s clunkers are elevated in the live format, helped greatly by the Hull crowd, recorded high in the mix.

Martsch misses the opportunity to commune with Johnston’s music, or to do anything with it, really. On the 11 songs here, he resists the urge to plug in his distortion pedals and sail away.

What makes Nomad instantly compelling is the way it both reflects and celebrates the feeling of a peaceful morning walk.

With the help of Nathan Jenkins, aka producer Bullion, Westerman achieves a synthesis of these previous experiments, fusing together whimsical curiosity and technical proficiency. Over a backdrop made of the sounds of the past, his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present.

Though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.

While the loops and beats of 1988 are as hypnotic and outre as ever, other than the cleared samples and elevated sense of personality, there’s not enough about 1988 that distinguishes it from, say, WT15.8_, released a week before, or that rises to the devil-may-care attitude of Knxwledge’s Vimeo page.

It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.

The record plays quick and dirty, with uncharacteristically crunchy production value and lo-fi aesthetics. ... Lyrically, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR mostly sticks to Bad Bunny’s trademark sex flexes and party jams. But even in tossed-off mixtape verses, he retains a goofy charm.

Acquiesce always goes deeper rather than bigger. TALsounds has always been an inwardly focused project by nature, but these songs feel uniquely designed to pull you into them. The album grows darker in its second half, but there’s a warmth and safety there just like the dimly lit shot of the bedside table on its cover.

It’s both solipsistic and psychedelic, urging listeners to travel into their own depths and welcome the joy and despair they might find there.

They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. [Grades for seven discs: 86, 90, 63, 50, 74, 72, & 63]

Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious [than 2018's Parts], and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song.

Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast. ... RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration.

Hit to Hit’s final quarter, which the band recorded as an ensemble, takes a more grounded approach. But after a record of instant gratification, these gentler tracks have a tendency to melt together.

RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential.

Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power.

There are some obvious flaws. The uniformity of mood, melody, and texture means the album can drag, and while the spontaneity of the recordings is largely vindicated by the results, it also leaves some loose threads dangling. ... At her best, however, Power lives up to her name.

Whether Muzz wind up being a lasting band or a one-off diversion, this is a promising debut from three old friends who have an instinctive grasp of each other’s talents.