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.

If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life.

Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests--but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition.

This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away.

Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic.

Its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back.

Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone.

The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

On Appreciation, Horse Feathers’ sixth full-length, that introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of both Stax-era soul and the country-fried sound of Doug Sahm and the Flying Burrito Brothers. While the looser grooves can deflate the tension, they also frame Ringle’s world-weariness in terms that are directed, finally, at us.

Tear aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness.

Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.

The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.

There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

What makes Hundreds of Days so special, though, is how often it hits ambient music’s sweetest spot--a place where the world slows down and the performer’s free-floating noise makes you appreciate everything around it.

Rausch, though hardly topical, feels current, as jarring and revealing as last night’s nightmare.

Where Malkmus’ solo work has sometimes walked the fine line between too detached or too self-satisfied, the record cartwheels over it with the assurance of an artist who’s correctly assumed that so long as he’s enjoying himself enough, others will too.

It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie.

Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.

True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable. The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making.

With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance.

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently.

Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich.

These songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought.

It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.

SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally.

It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating.

Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses.