Beth and Hostile have been collaborators for nearly two decades, and together they’re responsible not only for every sound on the record, but for the entire visual package, too. Their mutual force and focus give the album the pressurized insularity and cracked intensity of a one-person project.

The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators.

Although his voice doesn’t quiver with emotion and texture like those of serpentwithfeet, Sampha, and FKA twigs, it makes plaintive lines land as dreamy.

Here, she doesn’t limit herself to one cohesive palette. Instead, she and producer Daniel James frame Williams’ multi-octave range in a variety of pop subgenres—indie pop, pop rock, dream pop—giving it ample space to roam and ramble.

Its heavy-handedness drags down otherwise solid material.

It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.

On A Danger to Ourselves she turns the camera on herself and the lens becomes a mirror, revealing an artist even less inhibited than before.

Not every great album hits on the first listen, but Freeman’s second record, Burnover, somehow feels like it’s always existed.

The resulting psych-folk arrangements are wandering and iterative. These songs are less inclined to tell a story from start to finish than transport you into a space of pure feeling.

The band’s tight, canny songwriting is so winsome on most of the album that weaker tracks, or trite phrases like “I’ll always be addicted to your energy” on the otherwise charming “Roundabout,” momentarily break the spell.

Billionaire may showcase the curling intricacy of her voice, but her songwriting seems less invested in striving for a similar complexity.

Its focus on the verities of songcraft suggests an artist confident enough to lean harder into tropes, formulas, and covers (including a spicy take on Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye”). It may feel like fiddling while Rome burns, but artistically it pays off.

Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime.

He hasn’t lost a step: WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE keeps his signature storminess intact while seeking new contours to his breathless style.

There are still some brilliant moments, but safety is hard to fully fall for.

It’s a lonely album with a whopping heart, a hungry siren call for connection.

There’s so much musical and personal inspiration colliding at once, you can feel the passion even when you can’t quite crack it all.

The songs on Who's the Clown fittingly sound like an extension of Abrams’ world: verbose, conversational, unfiltered. .... But the album falters in its second half, where Hobert uses specificity as a crutch, struggling to transcend the biographical details of her own, quite exceptional, life.

Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures.

Unlike many albums to come from its synth-pop cohort, Flux resists being taken apart for playlists. Set almost any similar song against it, and you realize how heady a spell has just been broken.

Staking his place as a fully formed singer, composer, and producer with All Our Knives Are Always Sharp, Njoku unsheathes his blade.

The loose, intuitive instrumental interplay is crucial to the album’s charm. Often, songs feel as if they’re conjured from the air: Lyrics are rudimentary yet keenly felt; melodies drift into view only to evaporate shortly afterward.

If Smith’s earlier albums tended to flush the sound field with twirling synthesized figures like so many kites in the sky, Gush turns up the gravity and clears out more negative space. Each sound bears more weight and locks more readily into prolonged grooves.

A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.

At times, bursts of velocity push the group toward a kind of transcendence, particularly when the spiky “Everybody Dies” is chased by the galvanizing gallop of “Stuck in a Dream.” The moments of speed also lend a sense of urgency to McCaughan’s nagging anxiety, which complements the barbed melodies and gnarled chords; every element suggests that he’s searching for a way outside of his head.

This is DeMarco’s most direct and confident expression ever—OK with being a little sad, happy to have the chance to get over it.

TWIABP are now making the most technically proficient music of their career and admirably facing down some of the world’s most dire issues. But in the pursuit of radical evolution, they’ve forsaken the emotional dynamism that has consistently buoyed their music through their tumultuous history.

Though Duffy’s voice and sensibility guide the record, the fingerprints of their musical community are all over Blue Reminder, including (among others) Uhlmann on guitar, bass, and percussion; Perfume Genius’ Alan Wyffels on piano, Wurlitzer, and flute; producer Blake Mills on organ and guitar. Together, the band shapeshifts across a range of sounds.

Aaron Dessner helps Laufey change wardrobe (on “Castle in Hollywood” and “A Cautionary Tale”) to lean into less mannered storytelling. But formal dress suits her best, at least on this set, which is the fullest expression of the Cinemascope songcraft that’s got her selling out arenas.

private music—like A Moon Shaped Pool and Fossora—is unlikely to draw in unconvinced listeners, but like those records, it shows them fully in control of their instantly recognizable sound, able to effortlessly bend it around whatever structures they put in its place.

Without a razor-sharp point of view, mgk far too often fails to synthesize his very real pain into something truly artful, instead falling back on the crude tools of rote songwriting and borrowed melodies, which he occasionally manages to build out into something arresting thanks to his instinct for what resonates with his audience.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.

It’s rarely bad, just safe, doing more to remind us of the old days than to embrace the musical crossroads he’s at. That feels like a missed opportunity to fill in the blanks that are still there.

He devises a palette that lends texture and personality to Music for Writers. Still, not every composition stands out—“Pedvale Sunrise” sounds like someone noodling in a cloud—but even the ones that drift by in the background at the very least don’t rip you out of your writerly headspace.

AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is consummately smooth, but it rewards close reading and detective work. Brilliant things are happening underneath the gleaming surface.

While not as pristine as the self-titled, their debut record for Epitaph is much denser, often overwhelming.

Though the album can be quite funny, it delivers the goods with no funny business—16 songs and not a throwaway among them, each an example of what works, rather than an experiment in what might.

This is bold, irreverent, exploratory music.

On ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST, Osees begin their return flight to the garage-rock headbanging of their mid-2010s material. There’s too much synth and wooden drumming to sound like a full throwback to their Thee Oh Sees days, but you wouldn’t be misguided if you said the album’s title and art mirror Mutilator Defeated at Last from a decade ago.

Taking in Bugland’s spree of bright colors and surprise twists can feel like breaking a piñata onto the crazy-pattern carpet in the laser-tag arena: There is so much happening, and nearly all of it commands your attention.

At its best, Pressing Onward amplifies that magic with powerful choral harmonies, carving out new space in contemporary gospel and shaping it in her own image.

It sheds the excesses of Five Leaves Left and finds the gift buried beneath the brush: a singer, forever short on time, always at his best when taking the most direct route to a beautiful bedrock of very hard truth.

The result is a dance record that wears its political themes like a Halloween costume—great for cheap, campy thrills but falling short of striking any deeper, never mind radical, notes of terror.

When backed by such light-touch production, these mantras can feel like a first draft whose final hues haven’t been colored in. At its best, though, this unforced approach manifests in Levy’s gift for stream-of-consciousness narratives that spin out as if propelled by their own internal velocity.

Next to Fountain Baby’s splashy bombast, Amaarae’s embrace of tension and restraint is both audacious and inspired.

Younger’s familiarity with her harp opens up many avenues, but Gadabout Season settles for following what’s by now a familiar path: that of the skillful and charming contemporary spiritual jazz record content to linger in the background.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

Sprawling as it is, the project, so far, coheres around its defining theme of fragility—of life, of love, and of the American dream. You’d be forgiven for not getting all of that just from listening. While loaded with backstory, these records subsist more on ambiance than on plot.

THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is billed as a spasmodic response to dehumanization and disaster. And when it sticks to that first-thought philosophy, it’s a thrilling success. .... The trouble with state-of-the-union albums is that they often come off as didactic, and the Armed do clip the edges of that minefield occasionally.

Part stage-managed pop crossover and part pretty-good gay Sheryl Crow record, BITE ME never quite convinces you that it’s got something new to share.

Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor.

“Gold Feet” feels as if it could have been pulled off a hard drive that had been neglected since 2018, all the way down to its JID feature. But more often, the album pushes through that illusory ease to deliver heavier tracks and a more animated Gibbs than we’ve seen for some time.

Though there are pockets of brightness, the melancholy of Kenny Segal’s “contraband” and Child Actor’s “phone screen” are Neighborhood Gods’ prevailing mood. .... On this album’s paralyzing second half, he slips in and out of sometimes wildly disparate vocal modes to communicate that flickering dread. When he recounts a dream about a seemingly omniscient baby, he does so in a regimented syllable pattern that feels, uncannily, like a downward spiral.

Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album.

Irony and easy melody spur I Love People’s best songs beyond tribute or satire towards a lived-in equilibrium.

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.