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.

Chris Dave’s accomplished chops demand that he should be the star of his debut--but too often he’s lost in the firmament.

Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.

The visual [video] gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.

Although the record has a number of aesthetically appealing moments, Dead Start Program never quite coalesces.

With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

When Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be.

His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.

It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry.

Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.

The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes [fantasy and emotional urgency], interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.

If Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one.

Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.

If their debut fails to offer a consistent, forceful message the way their riot grrrl heroes once did, they have at least figured out how to capture some of those predecessors’ energy. For now, Dream Wife leaves you revved up and ready to go with nowhere suggested.

Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too.

The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.

Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.

As a standalone suite of songs, like a tuxedo you only dust off every now and then, it is beautiful, but only appropriate when the occasion demands it.

Distinguished by her sure-footed stride, Quit the Curse sounds like an album by an artist who at last knows where she’s going.

This album often sounds like a studio-crafted simulacrum of a full-band performance, every element a bit too polished.

The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.

On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.

It’s easy to indulge a reverie when it’s a vivid one, and Messes invites you to lose track of time for awhile with it.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

With Open Here, Field Music rises to the challenge with a set of newly crystallized talking points, offered up along with a glorious mess of noise.

Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music.

Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor.

Love Jail goes beyond a mere glance in the rearview mirror. It sounds vintage, but it feels current. Dommengang find some potential for escape in this music, some freedom in that absence of a destination.

P2 shows a man who is patient and relentless in honing his craft, getting closer to the debut with each track.

Oh My feels like a pocket-sized chapbook set to music: some songs inspire, some feel thin. When NADINE’s strange poetry does convince you to dog-ear a song, though, returning to it feels as creatively refreshing as when you heard it for the first time.

It’s still a joy to hear the Migos rap, which is why it’s especially depressing that Culture II ultimately feels like a drag--a formless grab bag compiled without much care.

Total Control make an EP of curveballs sound puzzlingly coherent thanks in no small part to their fine craftsmanship.

It’s a pleasant oddity in the Shins’ catalogue—neither a dazzling reinvention of the original release (see: Massive Attack V Mad Professor’s towering No Protection) nor a hastily-assembled insult to the band’s creative work .

Perhaps they figured dark times call for bright music, but this overly polished record often feels like a missed opportunity.

No Age’s name seems self-actualizing. And in their psycho-candied sound, which has progressively gotten better, they still know how to locate the timeless, fever-pitched feeling of a beginning.

By the end of Vessel of Love, it is apparent that an interest in reggae is far from the only thing Cook learned from Ari Up, or the most important thing. She learned to find her voice and make it heard.

This is a band that absolutely revels in the possibilities suggested by its obsidian thrills, no matter the potential changes in the audience’s size and scope. Down Below is about death and hell, sure, but it’s proudly, defiantly not meant for an underground anymore.

For an album called The Time Is Now, David spends too much of his time looking like he's trying to catch up.

Freedom’s Goblin is ultimately a celebration of Segall’s aesthetic and emotional freedom--a definitive capstone to the first decade of a scuzzy, heartfelt songwriter nonpareil.

Calexico have made records that sound like this one before, but they’ve never made one with quite this much fight in it.