Small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary.

In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music.

While Neon Cross highlights the versatility of Wyatt’s gorgeous, commanding voice, she finds her comfort zone in singalong anthems like “Goodbye Queen.”

You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch.

This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense. ... For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off.

WUNNA is more than an endless barrage of boasts about his designer clothes and foreign whips; the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine.

Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.

While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible.

It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.

Introduction, Presence doesn’t offer any great reinventions. ... But their understanding of the genre they’re working in—its workings, tropes, and trappings—is so refined that they are able to boil it down to its barest essence, saving catharsis for just the right moment.

The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.

Except for the previously released singles that pad the end of the record in keeping with industry norms, High Off Life is better-paced and sequenced than most of Future’s recent releases—the whole thing seems to glide by frictionlessly.

Von Schleicher doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent; more often than not, teasing out the hidden messages that lie beneath her impressionistic songwriting is genuinely enjoyable. Calling one’s pain by name can be terrifying, and she has a great talent for subtlety. Still, Consummation is at its most transfixing when it is at its most legible.

It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.

These songs tend towards fuzzy sentiments—the words “love,” “life,” “light,” and “feel” are staples. Many of the musical ideas—tinkling pianos, plasticky strings and emotion-squeezing chord progression—have been part of Moby’s toolkit since the word “Go.”

Flowing between formal tonality and structural dissolution, Lee reconciles her traditional musical upbringing with her subsequent expansion into free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and she finds an unusual beauty in juxtaposing the familiar character of popular and traditional music with experimental sound-making’s leap into the cosmic unknown.

Psalms like Smith’s are more than acceptable at face value as restorative, pure-of-heart acts of grace, yet your threshold for bearing this attitude of exceeding amiability may vary.

All That Glue’s unearthed tracks easily punch as hard as their better-known counterparts, and each showcases Williamson’s bottomless reservoir of ways to vent spleen.

To listen to any free improvised music is to hear another world, speaking its own spontaneous language. The Quickening comes from a place very nearby our own, now lost, but recoverable by listening.

As with other Magnetic Fields projects, some deeper cuts succeed more than others. Still, any lows aren’t particularly low.

More than just an autobiographical document or a manifestation of Charli’s impressive work ethic, How I’m Feeling Now is her answer to questions about the viability of music in a crisis. It works better than anyone could have anticipated.

Sorceress is a mature and freeing record, one that celebrates meager triumphs of womanhood even as it mourns a loss of innocence.

WILL THIS MAKE ME GOOD has plenty of gorgeous moments. Those moments will inspire the most generous listeners to wonder what this record could have been, if Hakim had given it more time to gestate, and maybe edited himself more.

Set My Heart on Fire Immediately is both vast and packed with detail. The songs expand and contract, one minute blasting open with the melodrama of a Roy Orbison ballad, the next zooming in with surgical detail as Hadreas describes ribs that fold like fabric, a tear-streaked face, an instance of post-coital petty theft.

Where Aromanticism was intimate and sleek, græ is rangy, sprawling, a riot of moods from lustful to angry to broken-hearted. ... The most powerful moments on græ examine the distance between this wariness and the loneliness it produces.

On her follow-up, Paradise Gardens, these clouds clear to reveal her most immediate, adventurous music to date and the always razor-sharp songwriting that lurked behind them.

His candor can sometimes obscure this essential fact, but his forthrightness underscores the emotional clarity of Reunions.

Regresa maintains their brand of tropical synth pop, but while their first records could be cheeky, poking fun at Latino machismo, this LP probes deeper questions of life and identity.

As an album, PITH begins to drag towards the end, closing with a track rightfully called “Flatness.” But as a series of singles, its meld of ’90s grunge and early-’00s noise is delightfully strange.

ALPHABETLAND is a return to the X of the early 1980s.

Despite What’s New, Tomboy?’s enlivened arrangements, the most interesting element is his lyrics, packed with fragments of daily life and ruminations on death.

Though the strength of Petals for Armor is derived from the complexities inherent in self-actualization, it is, at times, weakened by its musical and lyrical scope.

She’s becoming an increasingly agile performer, rapping, singing, and everything in between. It Was Good Until It Wasn’t channels all those skills into sterling R&B that feels like a homecoming of sorts.

A hushed collection that floats through the subconscious like a tender dream.

It is a brief but thoughtful collection marked by old-school production, deep allusions to his songbook, and performances that could be placed among those early pillars. Yet it doesn’t feel like pandering. Despite the familiar sound and old-world setting (4th and 5th century, to be exact), these songs never look back for too long. They feel like another step forward.

The most dynamic of Austra’s albums, HiRUDiN cultivates the raw pleasure of pop hooks without shying from the strangeness and discordance that has lit up the project since its 2011 debut.

Caleb Landry Jones’ music inspires a reaction somewhere in the middle: It’s interesting, even fun while it lasts, but you probably won’t return.

Demo Tapes contains moments of precise delivery, sticky flows, and hooks primed to be enjoyed in the context of an arena show, but there’s a fair amount of well-tread material, too.

The resulting Shall We Go On Sinning carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield.

Harkin is most alive when it sprints with that sense of speed and purpose, surging with adrenaline and sparking with twilit excitement. The one or two songs that stumble into a medium-paced chug.

Kirby’s competent home production, and his economic arrangements, amount to a rich product that still manages to sound one-dimensional on repeat listenings, with little sonic depth. And his predilection for the occasional bright melody line works at cross purposes with his atmospheric tendencies. The album can never fully let itself recede into pure ambience.

Making a Door Less Open would inevitably benefit from a willingness to risk spectacular failure—this isn’t the hard left-turn “Can’t Cool Me Down” hinted at.

The basic material remains familiar—gated synth tones arranged in taut melodies and spindly arpeggios—but Senni has found a new flamboyance in these astoundingly ornate, often song-like pieces.

On Wahre Liebe Roedelius is able to conjure many different moods without deviating from the round, bell-like tones of the Farfisa, an instrument he returns to after years of primarily working with acoustic piano and digital processing.

Not only do Dayes and Misch offer an alluring marriage of virtuosity and pop, the album feels like the best recent example of Brian Eno’s theory of scenius as opposed to genius: the theory that it takes community and collaboration to spark something incredible, rather than the work of one gifted individual.

While her recent records have used their sprawl to navigate a wide array of styles and moods, she now finds a range that pulls her into focus. It is roots music, bursting from the ground, changing form in the light of day.

Across Hunted’s seven tracks, Calvi contorts her dance along the spectrum of gender and sexuality into something more of a march, stomping between tenderness and brutality.

Yes, Bishop takes the guitar on a few mesmerizing turns, alternately embracing frenetic strums and pleasant licks familiar from his past. But on an album inspired by the sounds and scenes of his dreams, Bishop finally seems tired of being confined to one instrument.

Like all the best shoegaze records, Agitprop Alterna is a heady, inward-looking listen. But if you’re able to zone out, or simply to begin walking with no destination in mind, its oversized and introspective ideas make welcome company.

Though Antarctica positions itself as an assessment of worldly chaos and isolation, it’s never clear whether the stance is earnest or apathetic. Even Albini-tier fidelity can’t make this formula sound fresh.

The album’s most interesting stretch is a risky three-track run that begins with the playful outro of “Outlandish,” builds into the Baltimore club-referencing “Keep It Going” and crests with the lusty “‘Flawless’ Do It Well, Pt. 3,” featuring Summer Walker in the role of an unflappable stripper. ... Even though there are songs with infinite replay value, the album doesn’t quite have the depth, either.

Tasteful, tentatively adventurous post-Britpop record that would’ve gotten sandwiched between Elbow and South on a “next Radiohead” listicle 20 years ago.

DaBaby’s charm gets diluted; he sounds measured and restrained, not words typically associated with DaBaby. This is music to bob your head at, not lose your shit to. Ever the savvy marketer, DaBaby does manage a few highlights that seem packaged to go viral.

Full of charm, panache, and eccentric raw power, Knuckleball Express makes good on his promise to make something real.

Though still self-produced and recorded in Stoitsiadis’ house, Melee levels up like Dogleg are clutching some kind of glowing orb that allows them to jump the gap between their rowdy live shows and 2015’s scrappy Remember Alderaan? EP.

Pimienta has ably realized her potential and silenced those who doubted her deservingness.

By stripping away everything extraneous, Piñeyro has further refined the sound of his invented genre. Deep reggaeton has never sounded deeper.

For years now, Shabazz Palaces have oozed a kind of creative wisdom, the type that can only come with age and years of lived experience, but The Don of Diamond Dreams demonstrates a sign of even deeper wisdom: living an entire life of your own, and realizing that there’s still value in learning and listening from the youth.

Most of the album, though, is absolutely irony-free, and better for it.

Fiona Apple’s fifth record is unbound, a wildstyle symphony of the everyday, an unyielding masterpiece. No music has ever sounded quite like it.

Uniformly and unashamedly sentimental, Born Again leaves too little to remember her by.

On the one hand, it is an empowering statement of wholeness and self-sufficiency; and yet, in Fohr’s resonant voice, it is weighted with sadness.

These new songs savor a wider variety of sounds, like the prismatic strings and woodwinds that flutter just under the surface of “Tempering Moon,” or the pile-up of voices on the psychedelic title track. Even Elkington’s vocals, which don’t have the range or the texture of his playing, sound more commanding here.

Musically and emotionally, Lost in the Country is a decisive step forward.

The Loves of Your Life feels like a neighborhood that’s deeply familiar, yet so packed with life that new details emerge on each stroll.

Migration Stories simply drifts along at its own lazy pace, letting its pretty textures become the connective tissue. Sometimes, Ward’s words break through the haze.

Song for Our Daughter brims with peaceful reflections that, even though Marling herself is just grazing her 30s, could seem like the work of an artist in their twilight years.

Mergia’s power to transfix seems to grow with the more collaborators he has, and their addition does not detract from his resolute sound.

For a man who’s lived and breathed rave culture, his album about the experience is strangely lacking in highs.

For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Southside’s experiments are made with enviable effortlessness: It’s a little rough around the edges, not self-consciously provocative. Hunt doubled down on his initial mission—making hip-hop and R&B in country sound hip instead of hokey—and it paid off with this collection of songs that are, more than anything else, fun.

The record often leans on familiar garage-rock tropes, so much so that it often dips into homogeneity and predictability. But the band also leaves plenty of room for McKechnie’s booming vocals, by far the band’s most impactful instrument.

With unexpected production and left-field samples, Rodriguez’s album is powered by a heady rawness that bucks the trend for theatrical concepts in today’s electronic pop nonconformists, producing epiphanies like hot stones spat from a fire. You could say it is as addictive as modern love.

TOPS are at their best when they keep digging. Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark.

Bruner is still getting tipsy and pondering what waits for us in the beyond. There’s growth and acceptance in that wonder—the title suggests as much— but not necessarily in the songwriting. The album lacks the anchoring power of a full-bodied jam like “Them Changes,” “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” or even his 2011 George Duke cover “For Love I Come,” leaving us lost inside Bruner’s mind. hat isn’t always a bad place to be.

In Burch’s minimalist musical landscape, each lyric she pushes to the foreground becomes loaded with meaning. It’s as though she’s smiling knowingly as she sings, while also feeling every word.

On 925, Sorry lovingly poke fun at themselves and at rock history—but they also prove they’ve got the talent to go further than their gags.

While What We Drew is more internalized than past releases, it is not conflicted; rather, Yaeji finds clarity in vulnerability, in the pendulum swing of her humanity. Crucially, the mixtape doesn’t turn its back on one of Yaeji’s strongest traits as an artist: Her music has always been deeply social, and now it is more gregarious than ever in its gratitude for those around her.

Purity Ring, by placing the mature perspective of an adult woman in the throat of an adolescent girl, confer upon children a maturity and sophistication that most don’t possess, and shouldn’t have to. Still, WOMB is some of Purity Ring’s strongest work, a confident and singular statement from a band often imitated over the past decade.

It is slow, winding, and meditative, composed almost entirely of piano, bass, and drums, and builds outwards from minimal meanderings to overgrown thickets of instrumentation.

For the most part, they sound like they’re having more fun than ever.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force. ... Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above.

Though it’s as comforting as the whistle of a teapot, the music captures the feeling of storms—the atmospheric charge and churning motion—without resorting to volume or force. Being ordinary seldom seemed so wonderfully strange.

These are tightly-wound songs that highlight the band member’s obvious gifts. Sister is never anything less than adroit, but it’s also never anything more.

The rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.

Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions.

These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume five (Together) has a more hopeful sound. ... Maybe it’s because the tone better matches the animating spirit of the project, or maybe it’s simply because the pair have better ideas in a major key at the moment, but Ghosts V: Together is solidly the stronger of the two.

These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume six (Locusts) is where the dread creeps in. ... Yet without Together’s relatively rousing melodic template and pacing to propel it, Locusts often feels like its titular swarm, devouring itself for 80-plus minutes until there’s not much left by the end.

Given all the technical ground Cenizas covers, Jarr is an impressively meticulous guide. Every pluck, ping, buzz, scratch, and whistle is intentional, a bump in the tunnel as you slide down the rabbit hole. Once you’re there, he makes even the most discomfiting sounds—a frantic glissando after a tirade of keys, the squawk of a bow dragged across muted cello strings—feel natural.

It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent.

Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math.

Walking Proof winds through moments of incandescent joy, gentleness, cathartic noise, and even unease (“Scream” ends the hopeful album with an eerie crawl). It’s as if Hiatt has emerged from a dark, uncertain period as a stronger, bolder artist, winding up with an album that encompasses a full spectrum of feeling as it rocks with abandon.

It’s a reminder that any redemption must first reconcile the lessons of our history, to learn from the mistakes that led to misfortune. It’s also a testament to the beauty of resilience; as an indictment of power, it elicits inspiration rather than depression. This is music that makes you feel less alone in your rage, a chorus to join with your anger and frustration, a funnel to channel that energy.

There is something profoundly lovely about seeing Stevens safe in such a strange, adventurous effort, supported by Brams and the rest of his found family.