Precipice is not without excellent hooks, and the ones on “Crying Over Nothing,” “Not Afraid,” and “Heartthrob” let De Souza’s star power shine through. But when a record’s great moments are just that—moments—waiting on them is tedious.

He’s still what everyone says he is: an Appalachian man with a penchant for storytelling. Snipe Hunter is his first record to capture and celebrate the depth behind that.

Arriving at a particularly abundant time for lyric-driven indie rock drawing on folk and country, New Threats From the Soul stands proudly on its own.

The songs are defined less by sounds or ideas than by their sanded-down edges: plodding beats from Nottz and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, histrionic Marsha Ambrosius hooks, putative passings of the torch.

Despite its big tent and low stakes, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is a record only Tyler could make: retro but not nostalgic; tender but steely; jangly yet slick.

It’s austere, formidable music, but by fitting within a tight 40-minute package, it endears itself to listeners who might not know much about drone music.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The dizzying list of production credits somehow results in a flattened terrain where stock, hyper-efficient rage and trap beats drone in the background, helping to ensure that the few opportunities for Sheck Wes and SoFaygo to do Opium-karaoke are wholly unremarkable.

Beside Myself is dramatic and daring, the agreeably messy sound of the kind of radical freedom that might not change our sinking world but can liberate the willing mind.

It’s hard to point to any weak points on black british music, but a few songs feel less distinct: the breezy Afropop of “S.O.S.” sounds a bit anonymous next to the rest of these songs (admittedly, it also sounds like a potential hit), while the submerged sound of “Tiger Driver ’91” veers uncomfortably close to Drake territory.

Whether it be for a lazy day under the shade or a muggy evening of shared, muted physicality, Tuff Times Never Last welcomingly meets you in the moment.

Lyrically, the songs cling to familiar themes of loyalty, betrayal, and soured romance, but the writing feels hollow. Repetition, once a rhythmic weapon in his songwriting, becomes a crutch and registers as filler.

Alex G is playing with new toys that make records sound both more organic and expensive—banjo, accordion, mandolin, actual string sections. This puts Headlights right where it should be, in conversation with major-label debuts from the likes of R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse.

For most of its 50-plus-minute runtime, Bieber appears, finally, entirely unencumbered. .... When Bieber dissociates into safe territory, alongside rappers Gunna, Sexyy Red, and Cash Cobain, on a trio of totally adequate but otherwise impersonal, paint-by-numbers R&B love songs, the specter of an algorithmic Spotify playlist looms. .... SWAG’s riskiest and most unexpected, are its most rewarding.

Different Rooms’ greatest coup—and what sets it apart from Honer and Chiu’s previous collaborations—is its command of form. The whole album speaks in parallel.

There’s no separating Wet Leg from the brazen humor that gave them their breakthrough. But this record is as dazzlingly earnest as it is wry, displaying the staying power of a band that will outlast a sense of novelty.

Let God Sort Em Out coasts on the history they share with each other and with us, settling for good enough.

In opener “Freedom.” Kesha fugues over twinkling piano and synths, singing “I’ve been waiting for you/Everything’s changed now.” But the simmering disco bass and house-gleaned aesthetics suggest a much more powerful mission statement, and the song devolves into middling party-pop.

Yowzers is a tighter, more intimate affair, an invitation into the inner circle.

It would have been far easier to ignore these complications, play the lovable oddball, and put together an entertaining tour of his home city for outsiders. Instead, Wauters seems to have gone searching for his hometown and found his own reflection.

This album is less obvious in its social critique and more traditional in its instrumentation—for every nitrous oxide canister or cheese grater, there are several more gongs, steel tongue drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, and tubular bells.

Different Talking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for short songs—only two tracks of its 17 pass the two-and-a-half-minute mark—but Kline and the band make each feel like a universe in miniature.

That ecstatic sense of possibility—of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time—is the animating force of Virgin.

Even at its most outrageous, Princess of Power suffers less from silliness than from safeness.

While do it afraid doesn’t have the snap and verve of the more structured Ten Fold, there’s a charming coziness to its loose sound. These open-aired songs evoke backyards and block parties, the rhythms gentle as breezes.

On Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.

Scratch It buzzes with a chattering methamphetamine sleaziness, as much Vegas as it is Nashville. The TNN studio lights that frame this record are so hot, they make the music sweat.

Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs.

Instead of a musical or narrative point of view, Boone relies on speaking his truth, a songwriting axiom that doesn’t take into account whether someone’s truth is fundamentally boring or has been rendered in pop music countless times before.

A six-track, 51-minute album that feels bigger and more consequential in every way, folding more ideas, intensities, moods, and dimensions into its freeform sprawl.

Not only are the dimensions bigger than ever, but the songwriting’s more varied.

The record’s strongest moments originate in its audacity rather than precision: Desert Window opens up the ambient ideas she’s perfected in the past into riskier, roomier territory.

I quit starts so strong. .... A brutally honest edit might have reconsidered the more stylistically anonymous or lyrically thin concepts.

Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that seems even more habitable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a permanent May and June.

A collection of balmy dream-pop ballads centering Wolfe’s feathery voice, soft and slow guitar melodies, and spacey synths. It’s striking how conventional it frequently sounds, reminiscent of canonical acts like Beach House.

Phantom Island is freewheeling and ambitious, and mostly admirable for it. Pared back slightly, it might have been truly absorbing.

Though Eno and Beatie’s music often feels simplistic, by the end of Lateral, they’ve inched closer to the center of the heart.

The highs are high and the lows are subterranean at best. And that’s that. .... Luckily, Neil Young is so damn good at what he does that even his most hurried material leaves room for some genius.

Ripped and Torn is the sound of a band making music with the care and attention of a kid standing over a Risograph, printing up the interviews his friends have typed up for their zine, leaving fingerprints on every page.

Largely forgoing the cinematic flair of Simz’s previous records, James surrounds her voice with unfussy arrangements that draw from jazz, Afrobeat, and rock. It’s a difficult balance but they manage, more or less.

Songs feel simultaneously tossed off and over-considered; there are perhaps two passages across C6’s 67 minutes that scan as anything other than the product of a hyper-competent professional in need of serious creative guidance. It would be a disaster if any of it mattered.

These songs contain a newfound lushness, an O’Rourke-ian vibrancy that allows each instrument to express its particular tonalities to the fullest.

More goes big and mature with lusher, sometimes even baroque arrangements to surround Cocker’s voice—a voice that’s huskier, more leaden by time and gravity.

Rae is at her most delightful balancing camp and sincerity on starry-eyed numbers in which all the world’s a stage.

Turnstile experiment more freely than ever on Never Enough.

Their career arc since 2001’s Beautiful Garbage suggests that wobbly songwriting is as much a tic as their masterful studio expertise. The cult still thrives, and we’ll happily settle for Let All We Imagine Be the Light—until the next album.

Alternately atmospheric and gut-punching, Demilitarize embodies these contradictions for a record even more searing—but also touching—than its civil war-inspired predecessor.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

It would have been fascinating to see him apply those gifts more fully to writing about life as he searches for peace in middle age and refinds his voice after falling silent. Instead, Get Sunk feels like a missed opportunity.

It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

The album is at its strongest when it leans into its own mysticality, sounding old-fashioned and contemporary simultaneously.

With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

While I Got Too Sad’s emotional tenor can occasionally feel one-note, its warm, lush sound offers a counterbalance to its gloomy lyrics.

caroline 2 offers a profound listening experience. But it also offers a reminder that walking through the English coastline, chatting on Zoom, jamming with your mates for hours on end—these experiences can all be equally profound if you just pay attention.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

Fabulous and melancholy.

The album is full of familiar moves—but comfortingly so.

Crooked Wing promises to be a career highlight, then doesn’t quite deliver. Its first half is consistently astonishing, but its final third dips a little too far into the cryptic and lugubrious.

Garbus continues to examine our political landscape—and her own position in it—with her usual unflinching lyrical style, but this time it’s been metabolized into something more outward-facing and hopeful: songs you can really dance to.

LETHAL is, in spirit, a passion project: Rico Nasty sounds like she’s having a blast. Yet certain moments seem dropped in, as if to meet a rebellion quota. .... The album has highlights if you know where to look.

These are angry, sad, hopeful songs that offer catharsis and solidarity. This mixture—of pulsating brains and jangling nerves, beating hearts and open minds—may be the closest we get to the essence of Stereolab; and in this, Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a laudable comeback.

Delete two-thirds of I’m the Problem, whose back-end filler tracks are not even worth noting (save for the bizarre “Miami,” which sounds like a The-Dream song for the Don’t Tread on Me set), and a more interesting album emerges.

They have to be heard as part of a larger experiment, an inquiry into what happens when you reject the careerism at the heart of the pop machine and decide to go a quieter, less goal-oriented way.

Sincerely plays better as a whole rather than as tracks excerpted for a playlist, which is fine, though “Sugar! Honey! Love!” and “Daggers!” rank among Uchis’ most lived-in tracks.

Was it really his idea to add the distorted microphones and insectoid buzzing into the overstuffed “Alien Nation” or the lopsided drum panning on “Stuck in my Head”? Aside from those curiously tacky outliers, Lanois’ tasteful ambience dampens the band’s everlasting, pulsating indie rock

It’s not merely a return to their old ways, nor does their long-teased reunion feel like a cynical, nostalgia-fueled cash grab. Instead, the record is a series of reminders of what Mclusky are still capable of—whether that’s melting faces in under a minute with “juan party-system” or the razor’s-edge guitar hammering driving “the digger you deep.”

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

She occupies the space between the bouncing, full-bodied bassline and plaintive keyboards with a plainly stated want that would be unthinkable on her introverted early releases. Having come so fully into her own, PinkPantheress still aspires to reach out to you.

If the results of Lifetime’s solo writing process are mixed, de Casier’s work behind the boards is wall-to-wall dazzling, from the extraterrestrial rave stabs that pan across the stereo field on “Seasons” to the mournful cyborg whose voice echoes her own on “December.”

In a first for PUP, the best tracks on their album are slow songs and mid-tempo romps, which bolster Who Will Look After the Dogs? after its rambunctious opening track.

Animaru has no duds but also no true stand-outs, shining most when Semones takes on the unexpected—suggesting a more idiosyncratic artist underneath all the virtuosity and polish.

GOLLIWOG masterfully uses that spooky proximity for self-reflection and thrills. Like the late MF DOOM, who he interpolates twice here, woods is perfectly intelligible despite his layered lyrics and elusive public profile.

What Tall Tales lacks in razzle-dazzle it makes up for with risky maneuvers, particularly Yorke’s in the vocal booth.

Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.

This is road trip music for the new normal. Yet you might also hope the widespread devastation on the West Coast would inspire something more substantial than a strong offering by an artist coming up on 30 years of dauntless consistency. It’s hard to shake the feeling this porous music can soak up any context in which it’s presented.

The songs may arise from turmoil, but the production is enveloping and inviting, suggesting there’s a path out of the darkness.

Rather than raucous and eruptive, the music is now icy, clipped, and clean, a step away from Einstürzende Neubauten and toward Crystal Castles and Circus-era Britney. It still has teeth, but they are oh-so-white.

Samia’s voice alternates between plainspoken and liltingly melodic, occasionally suggesting doubt and ambivalence. But an edge often enlivens her bittersweet, uneasy lyrics.

Even the album’s most notable song still doesn’t feel distinct from its peers. This is how Tennis sail into the sunset: as likeable and as intoxicatingly smooth as ever.

Impermanence is a symptom of transformation; on Iris Silver Mist, Hval extols this reality, inviting us to seek out the beauty in each stage.

Thackray’s talents as a singer and arranger are key to the album’s success. Her voice is airy like crepe-paper streamers, with a bit of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s pinch and some of Erykah Badu’s snap.

You can trace a path from the band’s beginning to this point, but that fact doesn’t make this latest step any less impressive; even longtime fans might be tempted to do a double take in admiration, as if to ask, “Wait, this is the same band from back then?”

Tyler uses major-key guitar melodies judiciously, instead of sprinkling them throughout, which makes their shapes more memorable: After the blown-out tape distortion of opener “Cabin Six,” his six-string enters at the start of “Concern” like morning sun through a window.

A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.

Bitchin Bajas remain flame-keepers of the sphere where Teutonic poise meets new-age fuzzies, but here they act as patient collaborators instead of scene-stealing spacemen. Still, this seven-headed hydra of head music remains a great ambassador of vibes.

Feels like an evolutionary leap akin to that of Cocteau Twins between Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas; the first was pretty, the second is sublime.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

A nostalgic return to happier times this ain’t; more like an indictment of the current malaise via a defense of the dancefloor at both its holiest and most profane.

Noble and Godlike in Ruin is cluttered and dense, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Everything feels stitched together, almost surgical—like, well, a Frankenstein monster. When the approach works, it’s exciting.

At times, the blend of their individual rock styles with country creates something fresh, but some efforts feel more pastiche than inventive.

A Study of Losses has some of Condon’s most effortless songwriting in years, melodies flowing with the easy appeal of the best of Lon Gisland and Gulag Orkestar.

As a whole, More Chaos is a lateral move, not a step up.

Up to the minute, well sequenced, and straightforward in its melodic chewiness and rhythmic intentions, Thee Black Boltz complements Dear Science and Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, Bush II-era canaries that have never stopped singing from their wretched coal mines.

Welcome to My Blue Sky isn’t concerned with filling in the whole backstory; Momma prefer to capture a snapshot with all the youthful romanticism of a faded Polaroid.

There are a lot of choir fills, growling electric guitars, and stomping drums, but the bombast is hollow. “Bulletproof” sounds like a “Wild Wild West” outtake, its country-and-western elements way overdone.

In a field of brilliant ambient techno producers, he’s delivered his most dazzling and definitive statement to date.

Borrowing Mahler’s vivid contrasts while jettisoning the soothing unity, Song of the Earth feels more like something coming apart than coming together, which may relate to Longstreth’s ideas about the earth and how we live now. But if you can’t get on its chaotic wavelength, it can wear you out.