The album as a whole feels warmer, more spacious. The songs on Painted Shut were doled out like 10 fist-shaped car door dents, but Bark Your Head Off, Dog moves at an agitated hum.

Pound for pound, The Louder I Call is Wye Oak’s brightest, most straightforward effort

Layered and smeared and cut up into melodies, the vocals chant and enchant, and at times it’s difficult to tell what’s what. ... For a little over an hour, the past and future spin, dissolving in fields full of chatterboxes. It’s a world not unlike the present one.

This is a record where inspired ideas are constantly battling for oxygen with dubious ones.

By working with Daphne & Celeste’s notoriety and, it turns out, actual charm, Tundra is able to project his idea of what pop should sound like in 2018 onto an essentially blank slate. Instead of a tired pastiche, the three musicians have created one of the most weirdly compelling pop collaborations in recent memory.

Kiyoko’s debut won’t blow past anyone’s expectations, but it contains just enough intrigue and individuality to sustain them for a second shot.

As Liberty proceeds to its final act, the mood grows graver, the music more straightforward and streamlined but no less inventive.

While My Dear Melancholy, makes for a slight curio in the Weeknd’s discography, it also feels like an unnecessary step backwards following the down-for-whatever approach of his recent work. There’s nothing wrong with reflecting on the past, but sometimes it’s better to just leave it there.

Written by a motley crew of college professors and white bohemians, these songs undeniably lift from Iraq’s maqam tradition and India’s ragas, from the barebones blues and brassy bebop. But they feel like composites of enthusiasms, made not with a mind for exploitation so much as exploration.

Less concerned with outside forces than internal balance, Golden Hour stands as an assured, artful snapshot of a particular rush of feelings, but its wisdom speaks volumes to Musgraves’ ongoing evolution.

You can’t knock Czarface Meets Metal Face too much for sounding like a period piece, since that’s so clearly the intention. Czarface has always spoken directly to a specific audience, one that values familiarity over progression. And if what you’re looking for is a hip-hop album that sounds like it could have been recorded 15 years ago, Czarface Meets Metal Face certainly delivers.

There’s plenty to unpack here, as there is with all of Jaar’s work, but if you wanted to simplify things you could call 2012 - 2017 his house album, in that Jaar imposes upon himself the conventions and requirements of traditional house music.

Sons of Kemet are most effective when they transpose concept to instrument this way. But despite the group’s skill for conversing between genres and generations, words are Your Queen’s greatest weakness.

Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music.

You can hear the sideman straining to push past Davis—the man primarily responsible for realizing that Coltrane could be Coltrane. In turn, Coltrane’s stratospheric rise would soon lead Davis to raze his sound to its foundation and build it up anew in the years to come.

The way he colors the film’s world leaves it wide open, with room enough for gentle movement and subtle triumphs. His light, playful motifs buoy the narrative without crowding it, and help paint a rich, fulfilling portrait of a girl on the edge, ready to fly.

Cinema takes in Czukay’s solo and collaborative work outside of Can, the iconic avant-rock quintet he co-founded in 1968. Starting in the early 1960s and ending in 2014, the set lights a path through his sprawling, winding oeuvre and confirms Czukay’s status as one of the great weirdo geniuses of the 20th century.

There is palpable anger in her voice on Sex & Cigarettes, but beneath it is a deep sea of tranquility, and it’s the latter tone that defines her performances on this album.

Vessel is not the first album I would suggest to an uninitiated Frankie Cosmos fan. Still, as with any great book or television series, you want to continue following along, even if the best place to start is at the beginning.

Sometimes, the veteran Detroit rapper transcends his natural Buddenism, avoiding corny punchlines, esoteric lyrical easter eggs, and bars that lead him nowhere. At other times, he doesn’t.

Haley Heynderickx may not have a garden just yet, but if beauty can cure uncertainty, this album should be enough for now.

It’s a perfect union if anyone finds the former too glossy and the other too gritty, but in occupying this middle ground, nothing here would qualify as potentially divisive protest music. In fact, there’s nothing divisive about Twentytwo in Blue at all.

Hormone Lemonade is the work of a band who couldn’t write a bad chord sequence if they tried, allying rare melodic nous to dazzling rhythmic instincts. Rather than being trapped by his past, on Hormone Lemonade Gane draws upon it in brilliant new ways.

There’s a stark immediacy to the production on Longwave, rendering the band’s simple arrangements and basic chords without a shade of embellishment. They’d much rather use negative space than a dynamic flourish.

Boarding House Reach is a long, bewildering slog studded with these moments, which seem to be directly antagonizing you.

The band’s defeatism takes on a new tenor: battle-worn, sincere, and not quite so antagonistic. That may mean that New Material lacks the punch of their feisty debut, but it also lends these songs a soothing quality.

The Neighbourhood is as ponderous as any forgotten post-grunge also-ran record selling for one cent on Amazon.

The way she’s able to inject these quietly pretty, happy styles of music with an underlying weariness and a clever touch is what makes No Fool Like an Old Fool stand out among the many musicians currently borrowing similar sets of sounds.

Across six tracks that clock in at over an hour in total, Long Trax 2 tends to melt in and out of the background, making it an ambient album that almost makes you want to wiggle a little, or a house album content to exist as wallpaper.

All That Must Be doesn’t quite live up to its own heartstring-tugging goals; too often, it’s just kind of comfortably glum.

Though it can feel a bit too calm and sedate, the album also reflects the group’s greatest and most instantly recognizable strengths. Their sound might suggest that they’re wound up in nostalgia, but that’s never been the case: They are able to tap into a performative naïvete.

Across 11 tracks clocking in at 72 minutes, Romance offers a comprehensive yet concise survey of the best of Oneida’s vast and varied catalog--transfixing ambient loops, expansive krautrock jams, and even straight-ahead rock, while taking less time than ever to get to the point.

They’re still making some alluring music, yet their albums have never sounded more disjointed.

Jericho Sirens releases the pause button as if Hot Snakes had been locked in freeze-frame for the past 14 years, instantly thrusting them back into action.

Throughout the length of Ventriloquism, in Ndegeocello’s hands, no cover is ever mere lip service. A cover is an act of scholarship, an act of criticism, an act of intimacy. An act of love.

The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding.

These songs are both more urgent and exploratory than the last albums by either band, though they were both very good. There’s a real sense of shared wonder here.

Now Only isn’t as easily categorized as its predecessor. These songs arrive with such urgency, such purpose, that it feels all-encompassing: part-memoir, part magnum opus.

Beyond simply making surface references to scramble suits and fields of blue flowers, Essaie Pas connect to something deeper--real human emotion.

Pulse and Quartet feel plucked from a vacuum, a place where flickers of dissonance yield to waves of redemptive harmony and where the chord always comes back to sparkle. In a world of increasing entropy, these are two too-tidy self-reflections, Reich on what made Reich great.

LONER is a singular artistic statement, from its unforgettable album art all the way down. It represents for her a major change--a change she totally commands.

Just as the album looks like it’s about to settle and prosper in this zone, in comes “Piano Interlude,” and the tone of August Greene shifts messily.

Tight, affable, and unpretentious.

Just 35 minutes long, the album is a mix of downbeat mood pieces, more fully fleshed-out songs, and effervescent ambient miniatures.

If Holy Motors are limited in range, they show genuine skill at bringing their one mood to vivid life.

The hour-long album honors all the work he’s put in and looks back at all he’s achieved, but it also looks forward to all he has yet to build and all those he can still inspire.

It’s easy to miss the album’s sonic and conceptual ingenuity amid the lyrical bloat. The thing is, even Barnes’ worst clunkers serve a purpose.

Yachty has definitely improved as a technician, making his raps more mobile and structurally sound, but most times the rhymes pass by as if on a conveyor belt. They seemingly have the same function, and the same constructions, and once they happen they’re forgotten almost instantly.

The impulse to luxuriate in despair, to find the lushness in it, rather than shut it down and shove it away. He does that well on Everything Was Beautiful, but he’s already done it better.

She doesn’t shy away from political protest, but she’s careful to couch her dissent in the personal and the compassionate.

Despite his reputation as one of rock’s great thinkers, Byrne has never sounded more like a stoned teenager staring at the clouds and spit-balling deep thoughts about the universe. And yet despite its many misfires—including a truly unfortunate pun on the word “duty” in that dog song—American Utopia manages two unblemished triumphs in its final stretch.

I’m Bad Now is a more forthright, steady-going listen than Thought Rock Fish Scale, and, on first pass, it seems a touch less enchanting than that record’s nocturnal reveries. The new album shows Nap Eyes can certainly excel at tight, snappy power-pop (check the incisive opener “Every Time the Feeling”). But there are also all-too-brief flashes of viscerality that you wish the band had explored further.

By lacing arms with Dan Deacon, the duo throw themselves into an auspicious zone, creating an album that remains introspective even at its wildest moments.

His album is at once beyond footwork and of it completely--a case for the form being strengthened, not diluted, by the push and pull of influences over the years.

Being shouted at for 53 minutes to find some agency in the midst of chaos may not make for highly nuanced music, but it would be hard to argue that you couldn’t use it. This is kitchen-sink maximalism as refuge—just throw everything in there, there’s no time.

Nearly everything he raps on Memories Don’t Die is something you’ve heard before, performed more ably elsewhere, and the few lines that aren’t are unbelievably simple-minded or straight-up witless.

Camp Cope’s windswept punk feels both retro and right now, like Courtney Barnett covering Tigers Jaw covering Ani DiFranco. Their sound is jangly but unpolished, folky but not crunchy. Maq’s voice, decorated with Australian diphthongs, ably meanders from shouty to soft, conjuring an inexplicable mashup of Joe Strummer and Joni Mitchell

Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.

For all its promises of a leisurely, good time, A Productive Cough plays like a quarantine.

Growing up to the world as Fela Kuti’s son will naturally always cast something of a shadow over Seun Kuti’s music, but Black Times comes across as both a respectful reminder of his legacy and a demonstration of Kuti’s own fresh talent.

That gradual unfolding is one of Historian’s many delights. It’s not an easy album to wear out. It lasts, and it should, given that so many of its lyrics pick at time, and the way time condenses around deep emotional attachments to other people.

Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.

Clean is that much-cooler indie record Taylor once sung of. Below the surface, its spark gleams like a secret.

Drift is the sound of them trying to figure out what to do next--and compared to the maniacal focus and intensity of previous records, the band can sound oddly rudderless here. But they can still stun you with a radical reinvention.

Tahoe only starts to perk up and run counter to expectations with “MMXIX,” an epic, nine-minute track that utilizes all manner of ambient tropes and then upends them.

Ocean’s no extrovert, but he’s an intersection for a wide array of listeners, and Felt exhibits a porousness that could also attract new and more varied fans of Suuns. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll all want it weird.

More often than not, All Nerve is a satisfying listen because it lets the Breeders dig into their reasons for being drawn back into each other’s orbit--including the left-of-center hooks, the withering poetics, and the shared prickliness toward meeting outside expectations.

An album that confirms Superorganism as that rarest and most wonderful of all musical beasts: a guitar band that reflects the age we are living in by embracing the technological anarchy of the modern world, as well as their own glorious peculiarities.

It’s as good an introduction as you’ll get to the group and its charmingly skewed perspective on the world.

Time & Space is actually a punishingly familiar collision of yesteryear's crossover rock with textbook hardcore bluster.

If they’re not quite fully formed, the music resonates with potential all the same.

Though worthy, at times enjoyable, and well-intentioned, as a standalone work it’s uneven and hemmed in. Its greatest tribute will be to lead listeners back to the source.

The elegiac tracks of Landfall, most no longer than two or three minutes, are episodic fragments that can cut off abruptly, like photographs with torn or water-damaged edges. This gives Landfall a momentum and a grace that’s slightly askew.

Three/Three is stacked with features from Detroit area MCs (Danny Brown, Clear Soul Forces) and heavy-hitting veterans (MF DOOM, Ghostface Killah), but only a handful of his guests truly rise to the occasion.

We know from songs like “Alpenglow,” from Range of Light, that he’s able to express real emotional grit in his songs. Carey gets there occasionally on this album, as when he restates his marital vows on “True North.” Too often, though, Hundred Acres is content to be pleasant.

Effected is a confident step toward turning what used to be fantasy into cold, hard reality.

His new one, a solo rap record called FEVER, confirms he’s still a serviceable emcee prospering as a session leader with a sense of purpose.

Take the sophistication out of sophisti-pop, and Lo Moon is just another L.A. indie R&B act who tries to bring us a higher love but can’t take things much further beyond bed and bath.

Lala Belu rings out with the resilience of a onetime dreamer who’s absorbed disappointment and settled for something close to optimism.

While less bombastic than Dangers’ ’90s albums, many of which came strapped with absolute banger singles (“Asbestos Lead Asbestos,” “Radio Babylon,” “Helter Skelter,” “Acid Again,” etc.), it evokes their wide-ranging combination of macabre moodiness, driving dance beats and playful aural collage, all while sounding surprisingly contemporary.

The album unfolds and reveals itself like the rolling hills of Tuscany, the outer-reaching moments tempered by Simon’s delicate touch and deft ear. Tongue creates a world built from the snug comfort of rain and the quiet joy that comes from solitude.

Though the songs on Rose Mountain were tighter than ever, the record felt like it was gritting its teeth, waiting for a fever to break. On All at Once, it does. Bayles is back, and so is the band’s storehouse of killer riffs.

The musical flourishes and pitch-black noir that run like a current underneath American Nightmare bring the album into a wider world.

Despite the collaboration behind its making, it’s rife with loneliness; Cross tends to sing as though she’s in an infinitely empty room, and Duszynski’s production amplifies the effect. But from that alienation arises a way forward.

While it might not be a satisfying goodbye, Last Night All My Dreams Came True is--like all of Wild Beasts’ albums--an artfully rendered snapshot of a band always in motion.

What a Time to Be Alive’s rage feels visceral because of age and experience and exhaustion, not despite it.

The slower that Russell moves, the better for allowing the disparate components of Everything Is Recorded to settle into something exquisite.

Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.

Given Ought’s radical inklings, you wish they dared to make these lovely songs say or do something a little more righteous, to twist them into more adventurous shapes. However, Ought achieve this spectacularly on the blue-eyed soul of “Desire.” It towers over Room Inside the World like the album’s lighthouse.

The album’s a tad awkward, like many projects steeped in the mild tea of sincerity, but By the Way, I Forgive You is the necessary next step in a shrewdly managed career. Brandi Carlile requires no forgiveness from us.

The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak.

There is very little happening within his verses right now, and even as he’s pivoted toward the personal, he’s still doing impressions, sonically and stylistically.

If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience.

Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work.

The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing--but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.