Molina's songwriting here is much stronger than on last year's Axxess and Ace, but he's abandoned some of the guests who helped make the album so affecting when he opted to record in Scotland, rather than the U.S. ... making The Lioness a decidedly more resigned and less passionate affair.

Though there are moments where a new tone or inflection runs the risk that Doja might be mistaken for someone else, the album’s anchor in her R&B and soul background creates a tender space for her to stack and reveal her layers. Hot Pink doesn’t demand that Doja figure out the totality of her sound right now.

One of Oldham’s most complicated albums. ... If you’re left confused or disoriented, that’s exactly Oldham’s point. Welcome, he seems to say, we’ve been waiting for you.

A large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.

Dacus intended 2019 EP as something of a diversion from her usual work, a series of stand-alones intended to flex new musical muscles. Perfect as these songs are for our moment, there’s an unmistakable staying power to them, too.

Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.

Sonically, the album backs away from the dirge-rock rave-ups that defined the group’s last four albums. That’s a welcome development.

However exquisitely rendered they may be, and however strange their circumstances may seem, these are breakup songs. ... Doiron’s presence, though, is a welcome balm, warming these cold realizations and offering Elverum a steadying hand for some of the most difficult moments.

In comparison to 2016’s Fetish Bones, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a refinement. ... Her lyrics seethe with revelatory clarity.

Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results.

Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating.

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint.

Having developed a sound so distinctly her own, Parks has liberated herself from any preset expectations of genre or style.

Myths 004 has a woolier charm [than Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?], running on antic, inventive rhythms that suggest a Rube Goldberg device.

Chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe.

This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing. ... They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins.

Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.

It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record. ... But the 1994 Monster as-released tends to outright reject R.E.M.’s past.

Opener “Lily” falls into this liminal ground, as does “Blue Spring,” and while these tracks don’t seem pointed towards anything particularly urgent, their instrumentation (like the rest of Spring) remains rich and resonant, each component part augmenting the others.

Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot.

Lambert balances her high-spirited romps with more contemplative numbers, cooling off long enough to reflect without flagging Wildcard’s momentum.

Lindstrøm may have timed these tracks to fit on a vinyl record, another sign of putting material concerns over creative vision, but there’s a good 15 minutes of so of beauty within those grooves that just might make a believer out of you.

Hello, I’m Doing My Best often reads as a guidebook for young adults learning to navigate the world, and in that light, Barter’s no-bullshit lyricism is punkish and endearing.

Like the Luddite lover pining for old-school communication in a digital world, GUV II is the sound of a pop classicist forging his own singular path in a post-everything era.

Though he sticks closely to the conservative R&B, blues, and jazz modes that have defined his ’00s discography, the LP’s 14 songs showcase his determination to wring profundity out of even the most common language.

Cronin’s music has always been ingratiating, but that quality works against his material here, which yearns for something deeper or darker. There are clear limits to the affability that makes some of his previous singles so winsome.

On tracks like “Olden Days” and “Rainbow of Colors,” Young’s basic folk melodies are rendered grittier and heavier by the band, if no less tender.

Four of Arrows’ best songs are ones Menne co-wrote, ones that keep the energy up and the ideas simple.

Pyroclasts feels about as close to that completeness as a metal album by a druid-robed group named after their amplifiers can get.

Yes, the bassline on “Water” is one of the best I’ve heard in a long time, but a moment like this feels like a consolation, not a highlight. Kanye albums used to stretch our perspectives and imaginations. Now they illuminate the contours of his increasingly shrunken world.

The album on the whole is a solid, self-aware addition to Jimmy Eat World’s catalog, and if the band’s modest strivers’ outlook has proved anything, it’s that there will be another. A band whose biggest song is against writing oneself off always has work to do.

She isn’t breaking ground in pop by disregarding its supposed borders. But where post-genre stream-baiters pull their numbers by anesthetizing distinctive sounds, King Princess pulls hers by playing up their contrasts.

Cry is a soulless and Styrofoam record as hollow as a booty-call text at 3 a.m. “Hey sexy, you up?” the record seems to beckon. It’s hardly an inviting proposition.

Like most of his recent records, it’s another collection of mostly very good Gucci Mane songs, marred by occasional awkward bits.

Rex Orange County isn’t Frank Ocean; he stacks vast emotional weight on predictable, inoffensive songs until they buckle like wire shelving. Pony is simplistic, clueless, subtlety-free.

There’s constant movement here, and while everything is lovely, nothing lingers too long or lends itself to stasis.

Bigger Than Life takes Black Marble aboveground, where some songs bloom, while others struggle to adjust to the daylight after so long in the shadows.

Rather than forming the second half of a complete statement, Part 2 struggles to differentiate itself.

All Encores takes a step backward [from 208's All Melody], toward a simpler, sparer sound. In essence, it represents a set of rough drafts, avenues abandoned as All Melody assumed its final form.

It’s wish fulfillment as transportative as any of the prog fantasies White Reaper’s idols put to tape. On You Deserve Love, the risk and rewards are lower: White Reaper aspire to be a very good American band.

Dawn Chorus is most compelling when the production does the bulk of the talking.

Occasionally she steers into blander territory, like the well-written but sleepy “Fun Girl,” but a rotating collection of R&B’s most toxic crooners keeps the energy level high.

The point of horrorcore is to both piss off church moms and find a language and vehicle for rage and misery. But there is no aching, tortured self at the center of clipping., just three fanboys’ overworked hearts palpitating into the abyss. While you can’t deny the imagination, you also can’t fathom the point.

Vagabon concludes as a work of not only personal self-discovery, but evolution in real time.

Crush offers proof that Shepherd has quickly learned to harness its noise and power. In a live setting, this material might have the potential to blossom into something unruly, but on the LP it comes across as more mischievous than deranged.

Juice B Crypts is an act of overcompensation from a duo trying to make too much happen with less.

Shattuck’s voice feels raspier and more raw on some of the album’s 18 tracks, a little less energetic, but the musical chemistry between her, McDonald, and bassist Ronnie Barnett remains untouched by time.

The album’s open-door policy helps keep things fresh, and the band sounds more comfortable in their skin than they have since the ’90s. ... Jenkins’ swaggering vocals remain an acquired taste.

What distinguishes this record from any number of other nostalgic indie-pop ruminations on suburban teenhood is the sparkling optimism Hovvdy carry with them.

Pang is such a coherent musical statement that when something doesn’t fit, it stands out. Polachek restructured the album somewhat late, swapping out five songs; what’s left is a sweeping, delicately latticed album with a few odd pop songs. They’re not bad pop songs.

On 2020, the arrangements are proudly inorganic as they lurch and blast, sputter and break. The long-form structure of the record feels more like a short story collection, and taking it in front-to-back can have an overwhelming, exhausting effect. But unlike the sometimes hopeless characters in his songs, Dawson can wield this glut of information in his favor.

Babymetal are still at their best when they hover around their initial idea—harnessing the energy of metal and J-Pop into high-flying hybrids. ... Otherwise, Metal Galaxy teems with embarrassing gimmickry.

Old LP works because its growth doesn’t pander to modern notions of “cool.” But the way the band re-balances the grime-vs.-grandiosity equation with each song demonstrates that when it comes to musical math, the proof matters as much as the outcome.

Their most modest record to date. Think of Closer to Grey as an auteur’s niche art project—satisfying to the superfans, though not necessarily winning over new ones.

Underneath all the fuzz, there’s always been pop sensibility at work; Lightning Bolt riffs have been catchy in their own warped way since Ride the Skies. But at points, they allow those instincts to come into startling focus.

Even longtime fans may find themselves thunderstruck by some of the turns she takes here. But the record also confirms the essence of her creative identity; it’s shot through with sounds and concepts that have defined her work over the years, just presented in a way we’ve never heard them before. ... No Home Record offers something radically new and, in places, almost shockingly contemporary.

On Odds Against Tomorrow he has found a way to settle down without settling into complacency. The album retains the core elements of his best work, and his restless, postmodern exploration of the American lexicon, while refining what makes those qualities potent. Refusing to repeat himself, he takes tradition as a living thing, blazing new trails to familiar vistas.

The more Big Thief zoom in, the more magical they sound.

Their musical progressions are incremental and headed towards predictable outcomes. The slower songs are a little bit more country, the more uptempo ones a bit more rootsy, and all of it is bolstered by typically brawny Will Yip production that cuts through the chatter of any barroom or basement.

Things improve on the second half of the album, when, to follow his metaphor, Jidenna arrives in Africa. The melodies and breezy rhythms of songs like “Zodi” and “Vaporiza” are a welcome shift from his barrel-chested rapping.

You don’t need to be an expert in Cave’s wider cosmology to be swept inside of Ghosteen, to be devastated by its despair and lifted higher by its humanity. You only need the ability to suffer and the desire to survive.

Ode to Joy’s beguiling folk songs are direct and generous, quiet sounds coming from a big room.

It plays like the last record’s darker shadow. As with every DIIV album, it sounds timestamped from the year that punk broke, but the mood is heavier, louder, queasier. The guitars jangle less and brood more.

Look Up Sharp, dal Forno’s second album and her first on her own Kallista Records, doesn’t depart from her past work so much as coalesce the haze into more of a shape.

Kaputt excel at making complicated songs sound fun.

There is no moment where Brown grabs your lapels and demands you to feel what he’s feeling, whatever it may be. He has called uknowhatimsayin¿ his “standup comedy album,” and the mastery on display is that of the comic going out there and killing. But the best-loved and most enduring comedians left their own blood out on the stage, too.

These seven anemic songs find Boris becoming something new yet again—self-satisfied.

Even as the record is steeped in the long history of British folk music, that balance of the tactile and the spiritual anchors these songs in the present moment.

Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.

His best songs put his ruminations on spirituality, family, loneliness, and humanity at the center, but here he sounds like the only thing he’s surrendered is his spotlight.

Eustis dances between revealing and concealing, admission and denial, and that tension animates the record from within: emotional whiplash as the engine of life. In this, the album plays out very much like the sweep of grief itself.

Nothing on Active Listening feels quite so urgent or alive as that one gem of a track [“The Eye”], but Empath set themselves a ludicrously high bar. The same destabilizing dopamine rush behind last year’s Liberating Guilt and Fear EP courses through this album.

KIRK is DaBaby in his sweet spot: alone and rapping with the untamed aggression of a tasmanian devil, on a beat that could destroy a 2001 Toyota Corolla from the inside out if played too loud. Change is overrated.

Case and Newman trade lines, finish each other’s thoughts, reveal the unspoken meanings of the songs; they’re old friends who find sustenance in each other’s presence. The essential humanity at the heart of this relationship offsets the dread that flows throughout In the Morse Code of Brake Lights, and gently leads the record toward something resembling hope.

Ghostface Killahs is marred by too many tracks that are either curdled by casual cruelty or just tired retreads.

SOUND & FURY is miles down the road from any of his previous albums.

Blue World falls just off-center—not a major addition to the Coltrane canon, but certainly an addition to a major part of it. ... But the strongest moments on this offhanded, unintended artifact are remarkable even by the standards of this band at this juncture, and the historical record will reflect that. Finally, the cat’s out of the bag.

It’s surprising how well the new sound works, though the voice of Skiba doesn’t always mesh comfortably with the production. As always, angst and unrequited affections are aplenty, but it all feels far too tame.

While based on a text to help the recently deceased reach rebirth, Songs of the Bardo is very much an album about life; a salve as much as a guide.

There’s nothing wrong with creating a club LP, but when you stack it up against TJM’s other, more adventurous albums, the consistency can’t help but drag.

Chastity Belt is largely confessional; her words are the focus here, and these simple, serene landscapes are a fitting backdrop to hear her loud and clear.

Memories of the very real pain and passion we felt as teenagers become cool enough to touch when we’re older. In Tegan and Sara’s hands, they become mantras, glimmering and hopeful and full of sparkle.

While Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.

Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics.

Temples are clearly skilled technicians; they probably could’ve produced this record in their sleep. What’s frustrating is that the project begins and ends at talent. These songs are hollow; you could listen to Hot Motion half a dozen times and feel nothing.

The common thread [of the new mix] is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface. ... Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” ... For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. ... The [live] setlist is stunning.

On Memory, there’s a clarity and intensity to Ramone’s songwriting that leaves little room for gimmicks, employing the earnestness that made the Brooklyn DIY scene such a refreshing break from the coy art rock of early 2000s Manhattan.

Nothing on the album sounds exactly like Oasis—it’s all too controlled and studio-sculpted—but not a song here would’ve been imaginable without the Gallaghers’ enthusiastic embrace of classic rock tropes.

ove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original. At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities.

Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.

Bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk.

The band’s fourth album, Of the Sun, doesn’t so much directly address the state of the world as vividly conjure the day-to-day sensation of existing within it, forever teetering on the tightrope walk between luminous ugliness and awful bliss.

Running 78 minutes, The Return is a dynamic suite of a record, touching on multiple genres without losing focus. ... The Return occasionally feels like it’s beating you over the head. But that’s also part of its charm.

With DSVII, the series evolves into a space for tinkering, where Gonzalez can embrace different influences. With neither someone else’s vision nor any cohesive album statement to fulfill, he reverts to maximalism, melding his two musical identities—synth-pop showman, serious composer for other mediums—to become the director of his own electronic daydreams.

With these highly capable ringers driving the arrangements, Howard pushes the boundaries of sound and space in search of fulfillment and decency. In a world that requires so much fixing, the music works effortlessly. Armed with a deeper understanding of self, Jaime becomes her gospel of empathy.

Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground.

On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings.

Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.”