Illusion of Time is a confidently relaxed listen: Created in a pressure-free situation by two artists with no road map and nothing in particular to prove, it is expansive in scope, charmingly rough around the edges, and brimming with possibility.

Saint Cloud is something far bigger. It isn’t just talking to Lucinda Williams’ 1998 album Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, it pulls up right beside it, a vivid modern classic of folk and Americana.

The thrill of Future Nostalgia—the title itself a claim to modern classic status—is in hearing her tailor the retro-funk form to suit her commanding attitude.

From a production standpoint, the record is nearly flawless. The bulk of YHLQMDLG strikes a balance between reggaetón’s dembow riddim and an island-influenced Latin trap palette.

Let It All In feels lived-in and newly cut from his core.

At its best, 3.15.20 Trojan horses some of that terror into happy surroundings. ... Glover is not always successful at adding dimension to these songs.

Through Water refines her sound: heavy piano chords; wistful, solipsistic duets with her own pitched-down voice; high, ethereal backing vocals; and low, mournful synth pads like artfully arranged clouds.

In form and in practice, Pramuk’s debut album generously looks inward to illuminate the multiplicity of the self. Fountain is too rich in scope and meaning to be reduced to just a salve, but there’s no doubt it’s an oh-so-timely reminder that the body is a site of infinite possibility.

They are making it resonate now, emphasizing it as a music of ritual, much like Ayewa’s other loves, like gospel and blues. It conveys all of the urgency of her raw, earlier work now across a greater vista, untethered by time yet wholly in the present.

As with all documents by obsessives fixated on their targets, the album can be frequently ridiculous, mildly captivating, and occasionally repetitive, pocked by moments of goofiness that come from the runoff of a man eager to chase old miseries and find new ones to berate.

They’re effortlessly in sync, belying their limited experience collaborating with each other.

It’s hard to tell where the universe of listeners fixated on filling spiritual voids through sex, drugs, and romance ends and the universe of the Weeknd’s tortured, empty melancholy and drunken, devastating love begins. That’s the beautiful blur of After Hours.

If Birthmarks is Woods’ restless attempt at self-birth, her true emergence feels yet to come.

It’s a leisurely paced album with a lot of repetition. Each piece is full of slowly sighing synth passages and languorous piano melodies that mimic the strange way time dilates when you remove yourself from the rhythms of the city, the way an afternoon alone at the beach can feel like a beautiful eternity.

The album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. ... The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.

It’s too bad the rest of the record can’t match its ["Madonna"] energy. Still, even as a series of sketches and fragments, Ricky Music captures the essence of a breakup album.

On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.

Oh Wonder’s musical project works when the simplicity of the writing matches the simplicity of the sound. When the former element tilts out of sync—gaudy, cliché lyrics about holding cards to chests and feeling “blindsided by love”—the record caves in on itself.

Even when an experiment comes up short, mistakes and failed attempts allow us to see others as the messy, raw, difficult humans we know ourselves to be. Truth or Consequences is more like a Valentine’s Day card—pleasantly sentimental, at times gratifying, and all too easy to forget.

Throughout, Satin Doll warps these standards delectably, leaving you pleasantly dizzy.

His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

It is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper.

The Garden sound best at their most upbeat. ... At times, the album can feel erratic. ... However uneven, Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is proudly defiant.

The Common Task doesn’t scan as a political message. But even apart from its real-world context, the album succeeds as an abstraction. Given even a little bit of time, space, and intention, these compositions are an uncommonly rewarding experience.

Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits.

Using words and noise to create mantras and blow them up, Every Bad is the inspired result of a rock band finding itself in 2020, inhabiting many ways of being.

Lil Uzi Vert made an event album, where the main attraction is flex raps and production that builds on its roots. Not even two years (an eternity in rap) was able to hold back Eternal Atake, an album that will be chased for years to come.

This is heavy stuff, but Ahmed’s wry wit and laser-focused delivery ensures that it doesn’t feel overwrought.

The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside.

Unhinged as it is, it’s a cathartic expression of the way the world is: messy, ugly, and real.

Smith’s work here is more lucid than anything he did on the last few Fall albums or his guest appearance on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach.

The band sound thoroughly comfortable. ... It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.

There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike.

Suga may not be remembered as a keystone in Megan Thee Stallion’s catalog, but it’s a fine portrait of an artist embracing her full self as her world changes drastically.

When Weber’s composition is led by a sense of density—multiple musical voices all intertwining to create a sense of vibrant dialogue—it is at its most engrossing. ... Where Conference of Trees falls down is when its electronic elements talk over its organic ones.

Just as Tejada’s meticulous productions are a boon to Watts’ voice, the comedian-singer’s unique character and energy give Don’t Let Get You Down an ebullience. They might not be innovating the form, but their shared creative spirit has its own irresistible charm.

Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.

Everything Sucks was made primarily in the span of one intense week in New York, with friend and producer Chris Lare (aka owwwls), and that tight turnaround is evident. Its 10 songs are a locust swarm of angst, restless and frantic.

Nokia finds more success on Everything is Beautiful, which, in comparison [to Everything Sucks], is warm and expansive. Made over a span of two years, including some time in Puerto Rico, it has the optimism and groundedness of being in a place where you can occasionally look up and see a wide sky.

Personal-feeling moments are the album’s strongest, and Superstar could use more of them. By clinging to the never-ending blank page of the bit, Rose winds up in shallower waters.

Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another. So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall.

From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss.

It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. ... The best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again.

While Traditional Techniques easily succeeds as a curiosity, its songs continue to delight after the novelty wears off. The most surprising thing about the album isn’t how far Malkmus has strayed from his comfort zone. It’s how at home he sounds there.

If self*care showed someone in youthful fluctuation, searching for his identity, Salvador is a self-portrait of an artist in turmoil. What makes the record click is that it feels relatable, yet entirely on Sega Bodega’s terms: ambitious, lonely, and aching for intimacy.

He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life.

Real Estate doesn’t upend their own foundation; they instead find beauty in filling in its empty spaces.

Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”

The Storm Sessions’ improvisation has the spirit of adventure, but the album winds up feeling stuck at home.

Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.

Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages.

These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.

Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.

It’s easy to miss Krauter’s compelling and complicated arrangements; the record is subdued almost to a fault. You have to put in work to feel drawn into Krauter’s world.

Represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.

Steiner fills Printer’s Devil with half-remembered snapshots of adolescence—sprints down hills in the summertime, a ride on an airplane simulator at the mall—juxtaposed with images of overgrown grass, vacated lots and other innocuous signifiers of the passage of time that carry weight only in the rare moments we pause to consider them. The effect is comforting and sobering all at once.

The album is full of nebulous renderings like this, where we’re left to interpret Dare’s personal mythology. It makes Milkteeth feel suspended in time, more dream than recollection.

Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer.

The writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart.

Because the album’s scale and ambitions are modest, some of its songs blend together. ... Still, the individual songs are strong enough that obsessing over their similarity feels like nitpicking.

If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional.

When Hughes tries out more rote pop songs, Cape God can get a little dry. ... Still, the sad world of Cape God is an alluring one, and Hughes’ vocal range is its unequivocal linchpin.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.

The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning.

Persona lacked the natural fluidity and chicness of their best music. Those problems aren’t exactly mitigated here, since most of those songs appear on this album too, but within this new context, they feel like a flashback before the saga continues. Many of the new songs are better about balancing Easter eggs for day-ones with new entry points for more casual listeners.

Expect improvisation and Live at the Royal Albert Hall, 1974 will disappoint. Novelty, though, it’s got—Ferry sounded like no singer in rock.

It’s Cosentino’s musicianship and knack for melody that prevents these songs from turning to fluff.

What Parker tapped into on The New Breed, he blows wide open on Suite for Max Brown, a mesmerizing follow-up and informal companion piece. While his electric guitar remains a highlight, Parker builds out a fast-slashing range of ideas using dozens of other sounds and instruments, most of which he plays himself.

As much as it draws from Dulli’s dog-eared little black book, Random Desire features its share of inspired tangents, when he forgoes the elaborate full-band effect to embrace the mad-scientist possibilities of his solo set-up.

Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals a refined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world.

Swimmer is mostly sweet and personable. Any listener who’s followed Moore and Riley for five albums running is probably somewhat invested in their relationship, and once again, they’ve rewarded that interest.

Meet the Woo 2, provides more gritty drill music you can clench your jaw to. It all sort of sounds like “Party,” but it gets over on sheer maximalism like its predecessor did, with just enough deft touches to keep things exciting.

Holding to Marshall’s wavelength requires a little more investment than the dingy music asks for, but that’s not to say his shadowland of the heart lacks nuance.

If the Men’s earlier output showed how noisy garage-punk could be molded into accessible anthems, now they’re demonstrating how slick, ’80s-styled corporate rock can be repackaged as an underground DIY oddity.

Moreland’s songs have long dwelled in the contested middle ground between doing the right thing and not being able to figure out what the right thing is. On LP5, he articulates what it feels like to get it, however briefly, and let go. And he doesn’t always need words to do so.

With the Night Sweats, he’s elevated with grit and muscle, but strumming solo on And’s Still Alright, he gets bogged down in a melancholy murk.

Scattered bright spots come from guests—on “Forever,” Post Malone injects his destabilizing energy, singing with the urgency of someone in dire need of a bathroom. Kehlani’s appearance on “Get Me” enlivens the muted, Noah “40” Shebib-type beat. Otherwise, the only appealing moments appear in the last third, when Bieber sings over minimal accompaniment.

Loom feels like the first time that Gateley’s technical prowess and songwriting are fully on the same page. The album may be rooted in loss, but Loom’s success lies in the clarity of vision that she has found.

The Slow Rush is an extraordinarily detailed opus whose influences reach into specific corners of the past six decades, from Philly soul and early prog to acid house, adult-contemporary R&B, and Late Registration.

It’s good, sure. Curry is rapping his ass off. But Kenny Beats’ production isn’t anything new. There are no imperfections, no colors outside of the lines, and with that, it misses some of the heart that makes regional rap special.

Like Crazy For You before it, Honeymoon isn’t especially singular or groundbreaking—but Beach Bunny’s raucous spirit means it never goes stale, either. Trifilio excels in straightforward, recognizable experiences of heartache, while still leaving space for listeners to attach their own nuance.

Mogadisco is one small but essential step toward reclaiming that legacy for a global listenership.

This is her most ambitious record yet.

Laughing Gas suffers from the same issues as its predecessor without introducing any new ideas. Even Tatum’s usually enjoyable melodies feel bloodless.

The result is an album that tries to be all things to all people, a sonic overload that bludgeons the listener with bastardized “empowerment” for 15 songs. Treat Myself is clogged with oozing ballads, contaminated funk, and garish shudders of EDM.

2017 - 2019 has been rendered more purposefully than its predecessor, each track flowing into the next. It presents an identity for Against All Logic that transcends the previous mid-tempo crowd-pleasers, one that’s unafraid to draw from various club subgenres while injecting Jaar’s customary washed-out tape atmospheres.

The album is beautifully and judiciously arranged, but a collection of bonus tracks on the expanded edition show how Countless Branches might have sounded with more instruments and more people.

The Unraveling takes meticulous care with each mix.

If anything, the four songs leave you wanting more from this collaboration, offering up brief, blurry glimpses of their Texas landscape rather than the expansive vistas that they might arrive at should they ride together a little longer.

For all their wiry energy and staccato sloganeering, Shopping have always embraced pop melody and absurdist humor, and All or Nothing’s more polished production pushes those qualities to the fore.

The ability to live with such contradictions and give them life with his words is part of what made Scott-Heron’s work special, and McCraven’s music inhabits that complicated space and keeps its sharp edges intact.

That Campbell gets away with this broad palette is thanks to her empathetic arrangements and clever songwriting—the pocket chorus of “Ant Life” has the kind of understatement that only experienced writers would dare. She has a knack for making everything sound utterly effortless, as if the songs came to her during an afternoon nap.