The first third of the mix is particularly strong. ... But the back half feels directionless, tugged this way and that across a succession of nervous techno and electro cuts; a shift back toward more atmospheric climes, a few tracks from the end, doesn’t quite gel.

A bloated and expensive version of the rap he’s always made but without that signature effortlessness.

Even sharing a track with current it-man Ty Dolla $ign on the mellow celebration of “Hey Up There,” he’s able to hold his own. Conversely, when he leans into rapping, he achieves an emotive style of delivery that injects his words with extra resonance. Still, Buddy is at his best when he lets himself be carefree.

Like all agreeable ambient music, it burbles away in the background, invisible right up until the moment you notice it--a little like the ambient revival itself.

Shilonosova’s corner of Moscow is bubbly and fantastical--a place where you want to live and explore every nook and cranny.

While Ovlov are still as wonderfully wooly ever, they’re unleashing the noise in more purposeful, sculpted spurts and displaying a greater willingness to let their melodies sparkle through the clouds of distortion.

This egalitarian spirit and anti-hierarchical approach to song-making fuel the sleekest, most robust music of their career.

The album yielded a substantial return on whatever that audience invested. But Wild Pink ultimately came across like a conversation Ross preferred to keep to himself. Yolk in the Fur can’t wait to share it.

Forever requires sieving through plates of glinting sediment before discovering treasure. The album is best when luxuriating in its own divine intensity, when an earnest Popcaan reconciles the hunger of his past with the feasting of his present, hands clasped in grace.

Sure, fans who swear by Skeletonwitch’s early work might take a while to warm up to anthems like “Temple of the Sun,” a tightly constructed barnstormer in which the band dares to toss clean-sung vocal harmonies into the mix, or “The Vault,” a Pallbearer-esque doom experiment that grows more blackened with each wailing note until its entire soundscape is torched to a crisp. And yet, even when their creative lodestar shifts its orbit, the Ohioans’ cornerstones remain intact: their virtuosic riffs, their robust production (once again courtesy of Converge guitarist and board wizard Kurt Ballou), their endearingly adversarial presence on-record--and, most of all, their diabolical joie de vivre.

Joy is an album to be combed through and prodded. It’s a testament to their shorthand with each other, which somehow ties all the fraying, crusty, silken, wiener dog, kitty cat threads so seamlessly together.

How Many Times is an intriguing glimpse of an artist at the beginning of a skillfully carved path--even if it leaves you wondering what it was that made her cry in public in the first place, what makes her tears dry.

The real feat of Cloud Corner is how well Anderson has learned to fuse the musical traditions she favors without drawing attention to the juxtaposition itself.

Sculptor postures as a manifesto of independent thought, without saying anything specific or of substance.

Raw Silk Uncut Wood marks a departure from her usual mode of thorny, cerebral electronic compositions, but as her most ambient record to date, it also boasts some of her most unabashedly beautiful music.

It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018--an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way.

JP3 might sacrifice some of Junglepussy’s previously hedonistic splendor for poppier hooks and mellower vibes, but it also introduces us to a happier, more mature woman.

The result is a thoroughly dazed album that conjures a daydream so immersive (if not always so idyllic), it precludes any intrusive thoughts. The instrumentation on Sundays feels sun-baked and toasty in its fuzzy beach towel of distortion.

On paper, the decision to mix the raw invention their early work with the melodic catharsis of jazz and gospel sounds fascinating, while Closer Apart’s weirdly gorgeous companion video makes a case for Okzharp & Manthe Ribane as an enthralling visual act. But the album itself feels frustratingly limp, making you wish Okzharp & Ribane had stayed true to the kinetic force that lit up their EPs.

The beauty of Death Lust lies in how Williams makes them all sound like part of the same continuum of disaffection, and how he approaches each mode with a pop songwriter’s ear for concision. Chastity's debut full-length is a brief album, with 10 songs clocking in at 31 minutes total, but the terrain it covers is vast.

On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them.

While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list.

If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful.

If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.

You can start to see trajectory to Container’s LPs after this fourth edition, though the changes are deceptively subtle considering how unruly any specific release is. What’s never changed (and likely the reason the series remains so consistent) is simply how much fun Schofield makes all this mayhem sound.

Gordon’s most impassioned singing on the album helps here, too, but it’s the pair’s frame accuracy that makes the track so dramatic. The results are far from predictable, but they serve as further proof that Body/Head are fully in control.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

Ultimately, while this crowdedness [from guest appearances] prevents Supreme Blientele from feeling like a definitive statement from Gunn as a rapper, the album can still function as a fine entry point to the fast-growing catalog of an ascendant rap cult hero.

Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.

If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.

Uniform Distortion abounds with displays of James’ fiery fretwork, but he rarely wields his other signature weapon--that angelic croon that trembles with vulnerability yet can soar high enough to rattle satellites. In the fleeting moments when it does surface, the effect is doubly stunning.

I’ll Tell You What! is a masterful album of precision and imagination, one where footwork resounds with the potential of a rewritten rule book. It is also astoundingly alive, its energy and originality a reminder that visionary ideas and emptied minds can outlast feeble human mortality.

Palo Santo is a promising sophomore album because it evolves past the sound of the band’s debut. But at its low points, the record lacks the bite to drive home the razor’s-edge duality of sacred and profane that Alexander seems to thrive on.

Welch sounds content and resigned, recollecting the stormy Saturdays of the past with a Sunday-morning penitent’s shrug and a born-again sigh. How small, how beige, how disappointing.

On Sixth House, by embracing the spirit of their best records without leaning on those releases’ do-or-die, hard-luck intensity, they’ve found a way to settle comfortably into their strengths.

I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018.

The band’s most streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp release yet.

Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting.

A triumphant counterpoint [to YOL2]--a record that feels like pure, reckless release.

All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation--but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career.

It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.

It’s remarkable how many of Scorpion’s 90 minutes are musically engaging. But the kind of juvenile navel-gazing that leads someone to write a line like, “She say do you love me, I tell her only partly/I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is less compelling when it’s coming from a 31-year-old father than a would-be college kid trying to make a name for himself.

In reaching out to others, Georgopoulos is discovering his own voice for the first time.

Its intentions are noble. Yet the album’s sentiments are often bogged down by cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. At times, the music feels conspicuously out of character for a band that has historically made tactful, if occasionally bland, rock’n’roll.

It might be too humble for its own good, but The Now Now is the rare commercial sojourn that feels like a product of real fascination.

An M-80 blown up in an empty clearing--explosive, fun as hell, but lacking a clear target to give it meaning.

Wet Will Always Dry is tender, intense, and dramatic. But most of all it is fun, in a way that only the pursuit of the most ludicrous aural stimulation can be.

The album remains too small a platform for her tremendous vocal talent.

While the album’s open-endedness largely works to its benefit, Collagically Speaking occasionally meanders.

In his raps, Jay Rock can come off as a reclusive hard-liner with a remarkable storyteller’s acumen and an internal logic that always feels sound. Few gangsta rappers are better at illustrating just how limited their options were and how undaunted they had to be to overcome them.

For all its lavish instrumentation and weighty subtext, however, Babelsberg never overwhelms Rhys’ preternatural gift for writing swoon-worthy melodies.

Throughout Post Traumatic, you can sense how unmoored Shinoda is without that spectacle. His chest doesn’t puff out as far as it did on Fort Minor. His compositions don’t detonate like his best work for Linkin Park. His bandmates aren’t there to lift him up when he falls short. He sounds abandoned.

Kazuashita ends up saccharine and pompous, like music designed to soundtrack bad wildlife documentaries. Thankfully, these missteps are rare on an album that proves Gang Gang Dance aren’t so much of the moment as of a different moment, an alternative and rather more pleasant one.

A sense of cosmic ambiguity permeates Bad Witch. These are neither his most inviting new songs nor his most immediate, but they rank among his most urgent.

Part Three sounds much better. The songs are more linear and of a piece: dank bop compositions that often gnarl up in the middle and leave no room for extended solos. The pace and form of their songs no longer springs from jams, and there’s new tension and spacing to show for it.

Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back.

They continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around.

The album is so densely packed that it’s easy to miss Marr’s overarching themes, a shame exacerbated by his habitual neglect to draw attention to his lyrics. A pleasantly flat, unassuming singer, he functions mostly as a conduit for his melodies, which is only a detriment on an album with so much potential thematic resonance.

The writing is so meandering and mechanical that little here feels intentional, even the gaps. And strangely, that’s the bittersweet takeaway: Nas the meticulous observer has been supplanted by Nas the nervous rambler. It doesn’t feel like an accident.

Bon Voyage celebrates the catharsis of clearing away old wreckage, but it also revels in replacing that mess with new toys.

Like Elaenia, Nothing Is Still invites the listener recalibrate their expectations of the artist behind it. Vynehall is more than a producer with a great ear for texture and a nostalgic streak--he’s a storyteller, one who demands and merits our full attention.

These ["Maria," "Sick of Sittin’" and "Fall in Line"] are sturdy moments on an album that feels less like an end in itself than a promising first step toward a genuine pop rebirth—moments that are strong enough to inspire hope for Aguilera’s own The Velvet Rope or, at least, My Love Is Your Love. She has certainly still got the range.

Where Stetson’s solo albums use dread and paranoia to undercut his careful attention to post-rock’s sense of limitless possibility, Hereditary feeds off of his darkest impulses.

Ecstatic Arrow is full of declarations delivered with such lucid certainty that they make a brighter future seem persuasively simple.

It’s a testament to how a complicated love survived through self-reflection, compromise, and ruthless honesty.

Rigorous but rarely hermetic, the album is a small testament to his sustained excellence.

These small acknowledgments of past triumphs reverberate throughout Kicker: The Get Up Kids have finally reopened a dialogue with their younger selves.

For years, an emotional narrative like this one would have seemed superfluous for Tangents, a quintet devoted to technical dexterity and clarity. On New Bodies, they allow those sharpened skills to inhabit emerging human forms, a move that speaks as powerfully to the heart as it does to the brain.

Head Over Heels might replace the duo’s trademark mannequin legs on the cover for their own, but these days such co-opting of realness is real meh. It’s genderfluid like a tech bro in a stunt romper drinking a Monster. The farce is strong with these ones.

Dave Matthews Band sounds best when it’s weird; the bummer on these songs is how bored the band sounds. But even as a cadre of producers smoothes out the band’s crunchiest tendencies, glimpses of the DMB’s ambitious musicianship shine through. These outliers aren’t always successful.

By complicating the naturalness of the human voice and corrupting established pop structures, SOPHIE also complicates the supposed naturalness of gender, which has always been inextricable from music. Her work is a sphere where will and impulse take priority over fate and legacy.

Sophisticated and subversive in equal measure, their staccato sing-alongs come on pristine and precise, then unspool in surprising directions as decorum gives way to abandon.

When it comes to writing breathless love songs with hooks that rival those of alt-pop idols like Carly Rae Jepsen and Sky Ferreira--both of whom she’s cited as influence--Pilbeam is a prodigy. ... But Pilbeam sounds more distinctive when she’s leaning into bluntness than when she’s reaching for the rarefied heights of poetry.

Mental Wounds Not Healing is a brutal, beautiful experiment--and a seamless collaboration that sounds more like the birth of a great new band.

With soil, serpentwithfeet deeply engages with the complex membranes between the self and a loved one, the self and the world. Few albums attempt this much nuance in articulating love; Wise’s success in his ambitions feels like a gift.

Kidjo finds her own way into these songs, infusing them with a tactile sense of empathy.

The impulse to cast off cultural standards dictating how music should sound dominates IRISIRI, which seems most interested in articulating femininity outside the constraints of patriarchal expectations.

If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity--and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production.

On so sad, her traumas are too often muted by abstraction and unspecificity. Li is clearly an artist of stormy passions—four albums in, she still seeks the flood of love before she reaches for the life preserver.

What’s surprising--and thrilling--about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.

On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

Powers has forged a sound of his own, too: scattershot and emotional, attention deficient and frantically detailed. As its filigree twists expand into every available space, Insula suggests there are still acres left to explore in this increasingly virtual territory.

The lyrics can sometimes sit at the surface of a feeling, and you wish the stories said more. Still, Shannon in Nashville feels humbly victorious.

Bonet lets her imaginative, polymath inner child run free--but she never loses sight of adult reality.

The songs are the most intriguing ones to emerge from this Wyoming project thus far. ... A lot of the energy that "ye" seemed to be gasping for fills the lungs of this project, and it’s humbling to consider how much this material might have enlivened West’s own album.

It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons.

The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.

Throughout the record, each line is given its own story. Every vocal feels deeply considered and felt, yet nothing is over-rehearsed. She knows precisely when to dial in and when to dial back, when to fully commit to her longing and when to step back and shake her head at it.

If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity.

Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present--about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat.

“Rats” and “Witch Image” get their strength from smoldering licks and stacked harmonies plucked from the Ozzy Osbourne playbook, providing metalheads with a welcome break from all the mid-tempo durdling. Given the unremarkable tracks that follow it--particularly “Helvetesfönster,” an ostentatious, baroque instrumental reminiscent of Medieval Times muzak--the latter might as well be the record’s closer.

Dream House forsakes even the grandiose manipulations of their EPs for a placid, empty surface. It looks good on paper. It will sound nice while you cook dinner. Then you’ll forget you ever heard it.

Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength.

Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.

More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness.

Unclear messages and unspooled melodies break new ground for Hval, and she inhabits it with grace on The Long Sleep. It’s as penetrating a work as Blood Bitch and its predecessor, Apocalypse, girl, but more humble in concept and more suspicious of its own claims.

It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers.