Algiers’ audio zines, the last of which invoked the Algerian revolution to explore angst and uncertainty using thickets of drone, show that they are capable of more nuanced writing. But they haven’t yet learned to translate the political into the personal, to turn abstract ideas into matters of the gut.

Swimming hinted at an artist who’d finally cleared his mind and found his footing. Circles provides some resolution and helps finish Miller’s final thoughts.

There’s a familiar, overriding sense of a couple of guys reading something about history and having a lot to report. If you don’t mind the idea of These New Puritans as your dad after a Ken Burns binge, you’ll find signs of life and creativity within Making a New World’s overall confusion. If not, no one could blame you for moving on.

The Circus is measured, soothing, and a suitable accompaniment to brandy and a cigar in a comfortable chair.

No single passage lasts very long, which gives even the prettier moments an unstable feeling, like everything might at any moment crumble into a void of distortion and noise. Throughout, her lyrics are venomous and apocalyptic.

While none of these 13 songs attempt the subtle weirdness of “Bad Liar” and the emotional thesis—self-love!—can be a bit one-note, Rare is the 27-year-old’s most cohesive record to date. ... But it’s difficult to come away from Rare with any real perspective on who Gomez is other than that she doesn’t want to be the person she was, whoever that similarly mysterious shadow was.

The Deadbeat Bang of Heartbreak City is too harmless to hate, but it’s hard to feel much of anything about it—which is a fatal flaw for a band that leverages an uncanny ability to rid people of inhibitions against their better judgment.

Even when it’s clumsy, Seeking Thrills never feels manufactured. It’s a passion project, a result of trial and error, the singular product of someone learning to write for her own voice.

Heavy Rain is a surprisingly inspired piece of late-period dabbling from a dub master.

To stick with the digital-age-anxiety theme, Networker feels not unlike a dating app meetup that went fine, but not great—just entertaining enough to hold your interest for a round or two of drinks until you’ve decided you probably wouldn’t see them again.

Walking Like We Do has moments of thoughtless escapism—and a couple of earnest bum notes—but it comes into its own when it blends humor with darkness, suffusing everything with gentle, sarcastic nihilism.

Their careful pace and refusal to succumb to instant gratification is a tonic against chaos, a reminder that otherworldly idylls exist within terrestrial grasp. The Ground Our Sky encourages sensuality in the most literal sense: an awareness of one’s senses and taking deliberate pleasure in them.

There is very little club to be found on Jesus Is Born—it is a pure gospel album. One of the most radical elements of the album is what’s absent: Kanye’s voice. Instead, he’s assembled a massive choir to channel his Christian message in a joyous, all-consuming wave of sound.

It’s Toliver who sounds like he’s rallying, his voice less like a piece of software and more an instrument of feeling. His singsong verse is one of the few moments on JACKBOYS that isn’t just product.

Vollebekk laces his capacious, meandering music with a ’60s folk-jazz sensibility. As with Twin Solitude, he recorded New Ways directly to tape, allowing each song’s mood to dictate its direction.

Each track is its own study in loneliness, yet each is in communication with the others, like spirit mediums.

Masseduction Rewired is by no means indispensable, but as a distraction it has the frustrating charm of a good crossword puzzle.

Most rappers would sell their soul for his ability to shape his melody to latch onto any relevant sound, but everything here feels so safe.

There are isolated moments here and there, but even when when they strike an appealing note or two, the Free Nationals never come across as more than a backing band missing its leader.

Their new, self-titled album bears all the hallmarks of classic Duster records: plodding drums, skeletal basslines, and guitar work that sparkles in the darkness like dew on a cobweb.

What distinguishes the recordings on The Time for Peace Is Now is how the passion of the singers is tempered by the professionalism of their supporting players. Everybody involved was attempting to appeal to a broad audience: They were converting doubters into believers by playing gospel that could masquerade as pop.

Occulting Disk is somehow mesmerizing and terrifying—motivational for those who need it, a nuisance to those who don’t want it.

The versatility on show gives a sheen of adventurousness that isn’t quite backed up by the beat selections—the majority of which feel like safe choices for an artist otherwise known for his accelerated ambitions.

Despite such extraordinary highs, Ballet Slippers is not essential. If you’re not a zealot, chances are that these recordings—as with most live records, a tad distant and dependent on the power of suggestion—won’t convert you.

Manic as the source material may be, Lopatin’s score remains entirely surprising, which doesn’t mean shocking, per se. It’s more that it has a large blast radius in the movie, itself a funny character in an ensemble of unintentionally funny characters. Lopatin is brazenly and consistently there.

Bubba is another set of coherent, well-sequenced set of tracks without any major drop-offs, all the more impressive as the album runs more than 50 minutes. It’s flexible, ever-moving, a dance record that could have come from no one else.

These feel less like songs than experiments in pushing Stott’s habitual techniques to the breaking point.

Ultimately, the songs XXXTentacion has left behind are insubstantial and narrow, and Bad Vibes Forever only weakens the case that his view of himself was ever a worthwhile lens with which to process his art.

He relies on inane songwriting concepts, rote misogyny, and feelingless flexing. The lyrics are puerile and half-baked.

Cabello’s willingness to assist in [the music industry’s embrace of the “Latin” sound] caricature elsewhere distracts from the otherwise interesting Spanish-classical and Santana-esque riffs on Romance.

The actual sound of Fine Line is incredible, and most songs have at least one great moment to grab hold of. ... While the music wades into the mystic, his songwriting, pointedly, does not. ... Styles doesn’t have the imagination of Bowie or another pop-rock touchpoint here, Fleetwood Mac, who took their lives and transfigured them through cosmic fantasia or Victorian grandeur.

Ism reflects its many homes and the many sounds that feed into the music of the Windy City. Which might sound restless, except Paul exudes such confidence that no matter the session, his bass makes it all hang together.

She inhales and exhales life into memory so as to make it new—or, maybe more accurately, she affords history the brief freedom to breathe.

We Are Beat Happening, a new vinyl box set that collects all of the bands’ records in one place for the first time since 2002, is a crucial step in recognizing the trio’s seismic influence. Though Beat Happening are frequently written off as cloyingly twee (which, to be clear, should not be an insult), in truth, the band created a crucial link between the minimalist experimentations of post-punk and Riot Grrrls’ demystification of perfection.

What mostly comes through on Dusty is what he’s already communicated, over and over again—he’s a technically accomplished rapper, and...well, that’s about it. If you’re looking for someone who will cram words like “hypotenuse” into verses, this is the album for you.

While his lush harmonies are occasionally quite striking (as on the slow-motion Fleet Foxes pastiche “Butterflies From Monaco”), this tendency leaves lethargic material like “Somerville Demo” feeling especially listless. On an album as rich with the spirit of teenage discovery as Jules, these are forgivable sins.

The first half of CD2 is the apex of Burial’s dancefloor material, truly as good as it gets.

Over the course of its thirteen tracks, Labyrinth loosely chronicles growing anxiety and its dissolution, peaking at “Mino” before settling into a level of serenity at “Bunny.” Kanda is most successful when he interrupts the album’s emotional arc.

P’s vast catalog could have accommodated a more balanced mix. Despite these issues, the compilation stands as a grand monument to the dancehall era and the triumphant efforts of an enterprising family to share Jamaican music with the world.

It’s one of their most contented and effusive albums, and as a result one of their most immediately accessible.

It isn’t the strongest work from either artist, but the white EDM DJ turned rap producer and the face-tatted trap rapper from Watts make a good odd couple. ... The vibe is more couch potato than cinephile, and the tape works because it doesn’t take itself too seriously.

Her striking lyrics take aim at present-day bigots who clamor for closed borders—“Look how these brown hands cook all your meals/But mama says you want us all to disappear”—but she’s more concerned with the persistence of this foundational hatred, and with the people she loves, who have thrived “through so many moons” and continue to thrive in spite of racist brutality.

It isn’t fair that it took years of label mishandling to get here, but Tinashe has finally found equilibrium.

The 12 compositions that make up Information have evolved his sensual, liquid style into one that distills the contradictory logics of the digital age—it’s tense, airless, and paranoid without losing an inch of his comic swagger or mischievous irony, a sensibility cultivated by bone-deep cultural exhaustion.

For all its surface simplicity, Cotillions is saddled with its own peculiar Corganian paradox: the lightest, breeziest songs of his career add up to a demanding slog of a record.

Sometimes he hits pure signal, and sometimes it’s just background noise as he gets to wherever he’s going next.

At every point, you hear a band going somewhere new, hurtling towards a forever-receding spot in the consciousness.

If you hate PC Music, you will continue to; if you love them, Reflections will not change that. But producer A. G. Cook’s done a lot since 2013, so inevitably, these tracks register less as individual Cook songs than as types of Cook song.

The rare record that has come to define its era while also existing outside of it, a masterpiece that immediately precedes the albums Prince fashioned, conspicuously, as masterpieces.

At over an hour long, the album suffers from sag and bloat. Each song loses momentum after the first minute, despite the endless parade of guest stars – Lil Wayne, Ludacris, Mario — popping by. Still, there are moments where the experiment almost works.

There’s something in the way the Comet Is Coming skewers the typical jazz trio that stands apart from his other projects. Its surface speaks to the cosmic sounds of Sun Ra, but there’s something raw and earthy at the core.

Our Pathetic Age reflects the way much of Shadow’s post-Endtroducing material has lacked structure, with the producer happy to throw ideas at the page, even if many of them don’t stick.

Despite its sprawling architecture, the album is one of the band’s most consistent, unified works.

At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her.

It is the work of a kid still determining his creative identity, and the best part of EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING is how it shows him figuring himself out through his work with others.

Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. ... The merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.

The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.

It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring.

The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention.

Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.

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.