Their career arc since 2001’s Beautiful Garbage suggests that wobbly songwriting is as much a tic as their masterful studio expertise. The cult still thrives, and we’ll happily settle for Let All We Imagine Be the Light—until the next album.

Alternately atmospheric and gut-punching, Demilitarize embodies these contradictions for a record even more searing—but also touching—than its civil war-inspired predecessor.

Despite its apparent intricacies, Evangelic Girl is a Gun feels oddly flat.

It would have been fascinating to see him apply those gifts more fully to writing about life as he searches for peace in middle age and refinds his voice after falling silent. Instead, Get Sunk feels like a missed opportunity.

It is more interested in signaling than embodying. Cyrus can access the best musicians and producers, and she can register a genuine interest in more subversive art, but few songs on her new album feel like they emerge from experience, or a burning desire to explore new sounds.

The album is at its strongest when it leans into its own mysticality, sounding old-fashioned and contemporary simultaneously.

With Trampled by Turtles—a raw snapshot of perfectly articulated hurt, and the first steps of navigating it for the rest of one’s life—is one of the most compelling records of Sparhawk’s career.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

While I Got Too Sad’s emotional tenor can occasionally feel one-note, its warm, lush sound offers a counterbalance to its gloomy lyrics.

caroline 2 offers a profound listening experience. But it also offers a reminder that walking through the English coastline, chatting on Zoom, jamming with your mates for hours on end—these experiences can all be equally profound if you just pay attention.

There’s confidence in the imperfections across Caveman Wakes Up.

Fabulous and melancholy.

The album is full of familiar moves—but comfortingly so.

Crooked Wing promises to be a career highlight, then doesn’t quite deliver. Its first half is consistently astonishing, but its final third dips a little too far into the cryptic and lugubrious.

Garbus continues to examine our political landscape—and her own position in it—with her usual unflinching lyrical style, but this time it’s been metabolized into something more outward-facing and hopeful: songs you can really dance to.

LETHAL is, in spirit, a passion project: Rico Nasty sounds like she’s having a blast. Yet certain moments seem dropped in, as if to meet a rebellion quota. .... The album has highlights if you know where to look.

These are angry, sad, hopeful songs that offer catharsis and solidarity. This mixture—of pulsating brains and jangling nerves, beating hearts and open minds—may be the closest we get to the essence of Stereolab; and in this, Instant Holograms on Metal Film is a laudable comeback.

Delete two-thirds of I’m the Problem, whose back-end filler tracks are not even worth noting (save for the bizarre “Miami,” which sounds like a The-Dream song for the Don’t Tread on Me set), and a more interesting album emerges.

They have to be heard as part of a larger experiment, an inquiry into what happens when you reject the careerism at the heart of the pop machine and decide to go a quieter, less goal-oriented way.

Sincerely plays better as a whole rather than as tracks excerpted for a playlist, which is fine, though “Sugar! Honey! Love!” and “Daggers!” rank among Uchis’ most lived-in tracks.

Was it really his idea to add the distorted microphones and insectoid buzzing into the overstuffed “Alien Nation” or the lopsided drum panning on “Stuck in my Head”? Aside from those curiously tacky outliers, Lanois’ tasteful ambience dampens the band’s everlasting, pulsating indie rock

It’s not merely a return to their old ways, nor does their long-teased reunion feel like a cynical, nostalgia-fueled cash grab. Instead, the record is a series of reminders of what Mclusky are still capable of—whether that’s melting faces in under a minute with “juan party-system” or the razor’s-edge guitar hammering driving “the digger you deep.”

Their bumbling composite of generic pop and trendy metalcore is both schmaltzy and dull: a vacant wasteland where joy, excitement, and intrigue—sensations that all good metal and pop should evoke—go to die.

She occupies the space between the bouncing, full-bodied bassline and plaintive keyboards with a plainly stated want that would be unthinkable on her introverted early releases. Having come so fully into her own, PinkPantheress still aspires to reach out to you.

If the results of Lifetime’s solo writing process are mixed, de Casier’s work behind the boards is wall-to-wall dazzling, from the extraterrestrial rave stabs that pan across the stereo field on “Seasons” to the mournful cyborg whose voice echoes her own on “December.”

In a first for PUP, the best tracks on their album are slow songs and mid-tempo romps, which bolster Who Will Look After the Dogs? after its rambunctious opening track.

Animaru has no duds but also no true stand-outs, shining most when Semones takes on the unexpected—suggesting a more idiosyncratic artist underneath all the virtuosity and polish.

GOLLIWOG masterfully uses that spooky proximity for self-reflection and thrills. Like the late MF DOOM, who he interpolates twice here, woods is perfectly intelligible despite his layered lyrics and elusive public profile.

What Tall Tales lacks in razzle-dazzle it makes up for with risky maneuvers, particularly Yorke’s in the vocal booth.

Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.

This is road trip music for the new normal. Yet you might also hope the widespread devastation on the West Coast would inspire something more substantial than a strong offering by an artist coming up on 30 years of dauntless consistency. It’s hard to shake the feeling this porous music can soak up any context in which it’s presented.

The songs may arise from turmoil, but the production is enveloping and inviting, suggesting there’s a path out of the darkness.

Rather than raucous and eruptive, the music is now icy, clipped, and clean, a step away from Einstürzende Neubauten and toward Crystal Castles and Circus-era Britney. It still has teeth, but they are oh-so-white.

Samia’s voice alternates between plainspoken and liltingly melodic, occasionally suggesting doubt and ambivalence. But an edge often enlivens her bittersweet, uneasy lyrics.

Even the album’s most notable song still doesn’t feel distinct from its peers. This is how Tennis sail into the sunset: as likeable and as intoxicatingly smooth as ever.

Impermanence is a symptom of transformation; on Iris Silver Mist, Hval extols this reality, inviting us to seek out the beauty in each stage.

Thackray’s talents as a singer and arranger are key to the album’s success. Her voice is airy like crepe-paper streamers, with a bit of Georgia Anne Muldrow’s pinch and some of Erykah Badu’s snap.

You can trace a path from the band’s beginning to this point, but that fact doesn’t make this latest step any less impressive; even longtime fans might be tempted to do a double take in admiration, as if to ask, “Wait, this is the same band from back then?”

Tyler uses major-key guitar melodies judiciously, instead of sprinkling them throughout, which makes their shapes more memorable: After the blown-out tape distortion of opener “Cabin Six,” his six-string enters at the start of “Concern” like morning sun through a window.

A Complicated Woman’s wide-reaching, mollifying remit feels like Taylor trying to be too much to too many people, to live up to the validation that her last album occasioned. Its best moments are the most personal.

Bitchin Bajas remain flame-keepers of the sphere where Teutonic poise meets new-age fuzzies, but here they act as patient collaborators instead of scene-stealing spacemen. Still, this seven-headed hydra of head music remains a great ambassador of vibes.

Feels like an evolutionary leap akin to that of Cocteau Twins between Blue Bell Knoll and Heaven or Las Vegas; the first was pretty, the second is sublime.

The album radiates a deep appreciation for the communities and history behind the global rise of dance music—and, as WITH A VENGEANCE’s title implies, a successful campaign to enshrine SHERELLE in its ranks.

A nostalgic return to happier times this ain’t; more like an indictment of the current malaise via a defense of the dancefloor at both its holiest and most profane.

Noble and Godlike in Ruin is cluttered and dense, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Everything feels stitched together, almost surgical—like, well, a Frankenstein monster. When the approach works, it’s exciting.

At times, the blend of their individual rock styles with country creates something fresh, but some efforts feel more pastiche than inventive.

A Study of Losses has some of Condon’s most effortless songwriting in years, melodies flowing with the easy appeal of the best of Lon Gisland and Gulag Orkestar.

As a whole, More Chaos is a lateral move, not a step up.

Up to the minute, well sequenced, and straightforward in its melodic chewiness and rhythmic intentions, Thee Black Boltz complements Dear Science and Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, Bush II-era canaries that have never stopped singing from their wretched coal mines.

Welcome to My Blue Sky isn’t concerned with filling in the whole backstory; Momma prefer to capture a snapshot with all the youthful romanticism of a faded Polaroid.

There are a lot of choir fills, growling electric guitars, and stomping drums, but the bombast is hollow. “Bulletproof” sounds like a “Wild Wild West” outtake, its country-and-western elements way overdone.

In a field of brilliant ambient techno producers, he’s delivered his most dazzling and definitive statement to date.

Borrowing Mahler’s vivid contrasts while jettisoning the soothing unity, Song of the Earth feels more like something coming apart than coming together, which may relate to Longstreth’s ideas about the earth and how we live now. But if you can’t get on its chaotic wavelength, it can wear you out.

What keeps Tripla from being the kind of acrid, messy screed that sometimes tempts artists later in their career is the joy with which Berenyi and her bandmates play this music, the sense of wonder that clings to the sadness near the album’s core.

For all the sonic risks and boundary-pushing distortions of previous records, SABLE, fABLE is the more daring album in Bon Iver’s catalog.

There are bound to be uncomfortable moments listening to someone else’s therapy, but there are also passages of profound beauty and clarity amid the maelstrom.

Even tracks that circle around a hazily imagined apocalypse—“This summer might be your last!”—can’t summon more than half a head bob. There’s enough energy pumping through these songs to move the 32-minute album along, but it feels like you’re slouching through the moving walkway at an airport. “Hi Someday” is an exception.

Where Saba’s previous music dwelled at length on emotions and scenes, these songs whisk past like a montage. No ID’s liquid production drives that fluidity. Backed by Saba and Pivot Gang members like Daoud and daedaePIVOT, he layers in drums, keys, and vocal loops that interlock and split apart like twisting gears.

A victory lap, the most fun “I told you so” you’ll probably ever hear. The title is a red herring, because no one would confuse Sonny Moore for an artist like Andy Warhol. He’s just Skrillex, writing some of the most ridiculous dance music ever made and making even purists fall for the wubs. If that’s not Pop Art, I don’t know what is.

Her lyrics mostly return to subjects she has revisited so many times that, on Jellywish, she also reflects on her weariness of talking about them: grief, death, and mortality. Here, though, even these topics are part of the record’s life-affirming warmth.

Derivative as it is, it’s all performed with care and craft, a frictionless blend of styles that feels a bit uncanny, like music you could imagine in a faux Urban Outfitters at Starcourt Mall. But there’s a sense The Crux aspires to something greater.

Folky and pastoral, with recorder solos and mandolin excursions and proggy journeys-in-song, Forever Howlong is as ambitious as anything this band has done.

It’s ambitious, stadium-sized, and risky—the sound of Hollis wringing his newfound star power for all it’s worth. Hollis’ two brief stabs at building up star’s world through balladry feel extraneous by comparison.

Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? .... To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us.

Deep in its mesmerizing glut are some astonishing works of synthesis. Sound bristles, foams, bursts, and oozes, lashing its acid against aya’s newly ferocious vocals.

The hooks on “Alibi” and “Keep It Alive” hit with scream-along jollity, even if Cabral’s punk turn means we get less of the fairytale quality that made her earlier work bewitching—and even if the drums sound curiously flimsy at times, crushed underfoot

End Beginnings shows an understandable desire to crack open the Sandwell District aesthetic, but the album too often struggles to express these ideas with the tyrannical clarity heard on, say, the malignant deep freeze of Function’s Isolation, or Sleeparchive’s Elephant Island, by which O’Connor and Sumner were so influenced.

Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood.

Dan’s Boogie is not a facsimile of its predecessors. It is funnier, wiser, though the stakes are perhaps a little lower. .... It all feels effortless, like he’s been doing this for his whole life, which he basically has.

It’s a collage of striking songs from a band that may have shied away from making some tough calls about what to cut and what to lean into during the long process of self-recording.

What’s remarkable is how wide a net Holley and Lee cast. Maybe it’s a sign of his broad appeal or the importance of the work he’s creating, but there’s something like fellowship in these songs, a sense of remembering together.

Where Hanoi drifted toward jazzy abstraction, Bogotá sees the band run wild over a much sturdier foundation of gritty grooves and DIY basement-club beats.

As often as the band has pushed in new directions, it’s never abandoned the core dynamics of its songwriting, a fact that Lonely People With Power underlines. Fifteen years into their career, having long transcended any given genre, set of influences, or fan expectations, Deafheaven sound, more than ever, like nothing other than themselves.

Forever Is a Feeling turns the most transcendent, hopeful, horny moments of a young lover’s life into maddeningly safe background music. It’s so frustrating, you could scream.

It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.

Glory is rich with beauty, but the band—Hadreas; longtime partner Alan Wyfells; producer Blake Mills; and drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, bassist Pat Kelly, and guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann—twists it just enough to let in flashes of the strange and idiosyncratic.

Tough, impressive, astonishingly good debut.

After album opener and slow-burn stunner “Canada,” “Sandcastle Molds” breaks the mood; the rollicking drumbeat, nervous blues licks, and dissonant climax feel muddled and a little overdone when compared to some of their more relaxed songs. But the next few tracks get the album back on solid footing.

I Said I Love You First is quite scattershot, an odd collection of songs that sound like other songs, incongruous spoken interludes, and one random reggaeton track (“I Can’t Get Enough”) first released in 2019.

It gives clarity to what’s so magnetic about their creative partnership: that, in the grand wilderness of America, these two unusual musicians found each other at all.

At just half an hour, this is a slight album, despite moments of heart-bursting ambition that at times leave you wishing for more to sink your teeth into.

No distinct group voice emerges from these 12 tracks, no clear sense of where they hope to head now. But there are enough revelatory moments, both solo and shared, that this lack only suggests itself once the album is done, when its pleasures have finished unspooling.

His first solo release in nearly 13 years, his most adventurous and surprising, and his best.

The MUSIC that does exist is somewhere in between, a flawed, contradictory, inflated, loud, exciting, mainstream-ified, uncomfortable, nostalgic event, but one that is still fixated on the music above all. It might go down as the purest distillation of Playboi Carti.

Twenty-plus years after its initial release—and commemorated here with a gargantuan 13-piece box set that exhaustively pieces together its rocky origins—it has never sounded so enduring.

She commits to pop music’s campiness to convey the way love and heartache magnify even the most fleeting memories into heart-wrenching melodrama. It’s an interesting pivot, but much of the music feels too aimless to effectively deliver these intense emotions.

The result is some of the most direct, spontaneous music in James’ catalog. Tracks feel less like songs or compositions than tone poems, mood pieces that flow naturally from one to the next, like clouds changing shape high overhead.

From a less confident artist, her writing might sound trite, but vocal experimentation is Fohr’s strength. The malleable and arresting delivery at the album’s core pushes the music forward, often reinventing itself mid-song.

The album’s improbable feat is that, even with its inherent tragedy, Cotton Crown is somehow an even breezier, more agreeable listen. It’s not often that sorrow goes down so easily.

Like many albums recorded over many years, at various studios with different producers, This Side of the Island can feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. .... Still, his ragged charisma holds it all together.

The production is more ambitious, the songwriting more accomplished. If JENNIE has the most robust individual musical identity of the quartet, it’s because her songs have a crucial element the others’ lack: They sound good.

If Alter Ego presents LISA as the most generic embodiment of a pop star, then it is no surprise that its best songs rely on tried-and-true formulas.

Summer is a season of extremes—exhilaration and malaise, heat that can feel more oppressive than the cold—and All Worlds is best when it leans into them.

MAYHEM may have played better if its tracklist were whittled down from 14 to, say, 10. Still, it is among Gaga’s strongest ever full-length statements.

It’s more restrained [than 2022's GOLD] but just as urgent: a pen scratching out a manifesto rather than a rallying cry through a megaphone.

Thundering, itchy, pneumatic new record.

The arrangements on Tears of Injustice skew closer to that style than the rock’n’roll on Funeral for Justice, and it’s poignant to think of the sad circumstances of Tears’ creation leading the artist to seek out the sounds of his youth.

On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons.