As sharp, urgent, and exploratory as they’ve ever been, The Dusk in Us is quintessential Converge, given the grand new purpose of salvation.

A superbly refined collection of songs, carefully crafted and smartly cast. It doesn’t have the longer thematic crescendos of TC, but is even more ruthlessly listenable, stacking hooks on top of hooks and flitting between an array different, pop-viable aesthetic frameworks.

Plunge is riskier than anything she has made before. It is sometimes harsh, often dissonant, frequently audacious.

The two formerly bonus tracks sound like just that: addenda, inessential and fairly unenlightening. ... The best thing about Punk Drunk & Trembling is Thorpe’s falsetto vocals, which shower the song with drama, torment and soul. His voice makes you believe in his words even as you marvel at his powers.

The structure of All American Made works in a strange way, grouping like-minded songs together and moving at a galloping, constantly shifting pace. It hits its peaks at the beginning and end.

Mirror Reaper simulates that totality of grief, but it also transcends its own function as a eulogy.

Screen Memories strikes a chord in a way that most blatantly political albums never quite manage. As society crumbles, John Maus’ commitment to being John Maus is inspiring, tapping an unexpected synchronicity with our doomed world.

Subwoofers are admittedly very cool, but by volume 4 (“Subenstein (My Sub IV)”) of K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus of adulation for the bass speakers, the conceit has worn a little thin. Still bumps, though.

By feeding her perceptions of a vast, uncaring universe through these tiny, delicate sounds, Schott comes closer than most to capturing our vulnerability as living creatures--animal or human--and the senselessness of suffering.

A direct thematic line runs from the album’s first full song, “Appointments,” to “Claws in Your Back”’s riveting finish.

Corgan settles for an album that’s tastefully cordial but about as suspenseful as a round of bumper bowling. There are a few moments when everything clicks, when the passive pleasantness gives way to active pleasure, most of them involving a smartly deployed string quartet.

Pacific Daydream, in spite of its name, mostly just gives you a feeling of being nowhere.

There’s no telling where these well-worn songs will go next. In this sense, the album--as much a kind of private sketchbook as anything--is curiously in keeping with his photographs. Even in music, he rebels against the obvious.

The whole album has a casual, freewheeling vibe, but it’s a testament to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s unity that it holds together so well.

While the vocal credits might have promised a more straightforward pop route this time around, It’s Alright Between Us… ends up being one of Lindstrøm’s most disjointed and ambiguous projects.

Shot through with seemingly innate bravado and the experience of a childhood spent near the pulpit, Shane had a pitch-perfect sense of when to stir up the dance floor, when to bring things down, and when to bring them up again.

Too much of Going Grey seems oddly unwilling to risk offense--the concepts of “Far Drive,” “Everyone But You,” and “Grand Finale,” songs about various lovelorn states, could be the work of any pop-punker with a passing AP English grade, feeling as perfunctory and indistinct as the hyper-compressed, airless music surrounding them. Stella’s still got his tics, but by this point, they can feel like shtick.

Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her.

Though it is certainly a darker listen, III is largely about the same concepts as its predecessor: unquenchable desire that eclipses reality, the ruthless blow of rejection, and the struggle to remain afloat even when “humanity equals misery.”

Anthology is a bold, often dazzling throwback, a grand suite rendered in crystalline keyboards and lavish synths.

The Saga Continues is full of competent if forgettable rapping straight out of the Wu-Tang manuscripts, and each Wu rapper does a serviceable job mustering up shades of their primes, in function. The verses don’t do what they used to, but at a distance they move in the same ways.

Morrissey’s words and delivery were never more deftly idiosyncratic or grandly moving; Johnny Marr’s guitar overflows with sparkling melody while his arrangements sustain a balance between spareness and intricacy. Rhythm section Andy Rourke and Mike Joyce supply foundation and frolic, proving once again how indispensable they were to the group’s magic. ... The demos contain differences that will interest the diehards.

Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album.

It’s an album bursting with ambition, alternating between moments of intimate beauty and stretches of dense, disorienting fog.

Like one of Lynch’s filmic worlds, ken is elegant and perverse, a reflection on where we came from, and the unbelievable place we seem to have ended up.

With 12 songs of nearly equal tone, volume, and length, the nearly hour-long As You Please becomes its own endurance test. When As You Please is taken in smaller chunks, the minor variations between the songs where Citizen churn and the ones where they steamroll ever forward become more discernible.

Between this spring’s cold, uncompromising Droptopwop and the personable crossover stab of Mr. Davis, Gucci Mane is making his most engaging music since his Trap Back/Trap God resurgence.

Rolling Blackouts Coastal Fever stand out for the precision of their melodies, the streamlined sophistication of their arrangements, and the undercurrent of melancholy that motivates every note.

As she reimagines the through line of modern-day romance and heartache in jazz, Salvant is at her most versatile and expressive on Dreams and Daggers, choosing songs that wholly capture and embrace the full spectrum that is love—from the initial yearning to the relentless ache and betrayal.

Airy and danceable, There Is No Love in Fluorescent Light revives our faith in Stars.

Beck has been working on Colors since 2013, and by the sounds of a recent interview, spent a lot of time trying to get the balance of “not retro and not modern” just so. He more or less nailed that bit, but what’s lacking from his Big Happy Pop Record is some kind of strong emotion that could elevate these songs above the “well crafted but innocuous” camp--something more than an idea.

The songs on Offering are fuller and brighter than they’ve ever been, leaving behind sinister samples and moribund imagery and making good on the promise of uptempo revelry that “Go Outside” offered.

Masseduction often feels fragmentary, like two or three albums in the campaign of one.

The OOZ drops at our feet like a piece of poisoned fruit, a masterpiece of jaundiced vision from one of the most compelling artists alive.

Weaves’ ambitious song structures used to be too large to wrangle. With Wide Open, they realize the straightforward tentpoles of pop may suit them after all.

On Nothing Valley--the first release from Wax Nine, a Carpark Records subsidiary launched by Speedy Ortiz bandleader Sadie Dupuis--Melkbelly reach their hands into pink slime and somehow pull out real nourishment, along the way finding square footing for a mutual next step.

Filled with personal memories, affirmations of self, and gazes of society’s racial strife, HEAVN is a singular mix of clear-eyed optimism and Black girl magic.

Pinewood Smile has got more jokes than ever, and it’s the first time the Darkness don’t evoke 1974 or 1984 so much as 2003--and they’ve never sounded more dated.

Lyrically, Tenderness can be pretty shallow. If these are songs about disconnection and misunderstanding, the lyrics don’t do a great job of fleshing out the concept. ... Still the warm, well-wrought pop of Tenderness is by far the group’s most enjoyable collection of songs.

This is a lazy-Sunday-hang of a record: cozy, congenial, and only periodically exerting the energy to get off the couch.

More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives.

Cry Cry Cry can be heard as an equal to At Mount Zoomer or Expo 86: a solid record, throwback indie rock by default, powered less by defiant belief than muted reliability.

On Heaven Upside Down, his 10th album, Manson embraces the tropes that made him a menace and a rock star and a stalwart of goth.

Unlike her boisterous debut album, it is a calming listen that lends itself to journeys into inner space, even if the lyrics can sometimes be distracting.

On this pristinely preserved live document, the entire underdog-comeback narrative of a Rocky movie plays out and repeats itself in recurring five-minute intervals.

She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before.

Fatherland is a significantly simplified effort, a work of gentle, singer-songwriter consideration largely haunted by lost loves rendered as exactingly as still lifes.

Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns.

What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing.

Without sacrificing her ear for detail, she’s engineered an album that sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s continued cerebral delights.

This valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke.

On Multi-task they’ve honed their sound to the point where it’s hard to imagine them playing anything that doesn’t take sharp turns or hit abrupt stops.

The diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.

At times, it seems like as soon as one record has left the turntable, he’s reaching for its successor’s replacement. Still, nothing here feels hurried or rushed. Tracks flow naturally from one to the next, their elements complementing each other the way two siblings might finish one another’s sentences.

With Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You.

Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.

At first, Ibeyi’s bright rhythms can feel deceptively stable, their harmonies uninhibited as they dip into dissonance, but they are deliberate in revealing the depth of their sadness.

This is where Tell Me You Love Me improves on Lovato’s previous albums: It gives you enough space to see Demi as something other than a no-holds-barred belter.

The album zeroes in on what the band did best (and what sounds best today), its non-chronological sequence making songs recorded several years apart sound as if they sprung from the same session.

Being grounded, after all, is what Wolfe was going for. That you have to work in order to appreciate what she went through to get there is what makes Hiss Spun so intriguing.

While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness.

These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop.

When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song.

Visions of a Life is an expansive trip. Devoutly 4/4 and unsyncopated, it nonetheless carves out raucous passages in which to burst open.

La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.

Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process.

Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said.

And yet, however thematically mired in misery, Cold Dark Place plays out as a triumphant march into the darkness: one man’s pain, collectively conjured and conquered.

Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river.

Fanon believed that romantic love was possible--that, above all else, was why love was worthy of critique and dismantling. Sumney, for his part, seems to have gone down a different path: diving into the bleak void in search of answers, giving us sumptuous music along the way.

In only two years, Wand has mirrored the maturation of the genre itself, moving from the youthful verve of “Tutti Frutti” toward rich, emotional terrain.

The Horrors’ most ambitious album to date. At the same time, it feels like a wasted arsenal of almost-brilliant songs, a record that lacks the essential quirk found in so many of the band’s touchstones.

The sound of New York is occasionally absent on 1992--in moments, her Migos-like repetitive hooks and regionless hashtag punchlines move it somewhere a bit less rooted--but Frasqueri’s loved for the city never wanes.

Laraaji brings a broader array of compositions to the eccentric Bring on the Sun. Where Sun Gong is dark and improvised, Bring on the Sun is made of weightless hypnotic loops (one is called “Laraajazzi”) and contemplative vocal tracks with standard song structures.

The music’s subdued hum brings to mind Eno as well as contemporary artists like Tim Hecker and Oneohtrix Point Never, except the mood feels divine in an almost undefinable way.

I’m a Harmony finds her drawing on the strengths of her current collaborators--several of whom she worked with on The Soul of All Natural Things, or on their own projects--to push her sound outward.

Thrice Woven is WITTR deboned. As welcome as it is that they’ve dropped Celestite’s pseudo-kosmische schtick, they’ve come back with a facsimile of what once was.

The record is not wondrous, but it’s a light listen with a couple of good moments and a handful of clunkers. The weaker moments reveal his shortcomings as a rapper without being provocative or ponderous enough to provoke a firebomb, or even a raspberry, in response.

It’s a slightly deflating end to an album that succeeds through its unnerving, unflinching personality. By now, the most interesting characters in Bridgers’ story are the ones she puts on the page herself.

To be clear, Metz haven’t turned into a pop band. They’ve actually done the opposite, incorporating harmony without going soft. The fact that so few heavy bands have been able to pull that off attests to how difficult it is. With Strange Peace, Metz make it sound easy.

A twelve-track exercise in mannerism that omits an essential element of what long made the Clientele so captivating. His wake-up call from pleasantry arrives too late to make much of Miracles.

No tens here—sixes and sevens abound, for sure, a few fives, maybe an eight. Even mired among the sixes, though, you can feel the palpable yearning.

The allusions thrum just beneath the surface of these vivid songs, as if to suggest that specific moments of music can get us through hard times or even just move us a little further down the road.

Impeccable as it is, Luciferian Towers has a disappointing lack of fury.

Sometimes the album sounds like typewriters hammering away, sometimes like a child mindlessly poking a wind chime, but it all pulses with the same energy—the kind that powers the brightest ambient music, the most ecstatic jazz, the most serene New Age.

The problem is that the production on ununiform struggles to match the raw, naive ingenuity of Tricky’s early music, instead suggesting the rather basic electronic beats of 2014’s Adrian Thaws.

When Cut Copy take a step back from the small details, forget about their perfect record collections for a few minutes and actually expose themselves as human beings, they hit on a sound that really rings true.

Produced and almost entirely performed by VanGaalen, Light Information demonstrates he still has an uncanny knack for off-kilter songcraft, while also gently questioning the societal pressures that might lead us to miss the point of creating and appreciating art in the first place.

From snaky power-pop to piquant autumnal balladry to the gospel-y back-and-forth of the title track, Electric Trim is a rangy but fluid record, constantly in rearrangement, rarely the same from one moment to the next.

Impressively, Eagle maintains a coherent aesthetic across 12 tracks by ten different producers, a muted brood that resists the default loudness of mainstream hip-pop. There’s a lushness to the production absent some of his earlier work.

The band hasn’t done themselves any favors by sticking so closely to the sounds of their youth, either--not that they were ever going to top the pipe-bomb intensity of their earliest recordings, anyway.

More often than not, they make the whole big mess work, even if they can’t make you care whether or not that damn boy even makes it out of the well.

There are boring Foo Fighters albums and pretty good ones; C&G is a pretty good one, and in two years there will probably be another.

Half-Light traces where he’s been so far, a typical theme for any solo debut. This is as understandable as it is slightly frustrating. Because all along, Rostam has never settled for anything close to typical.

Across Parallels, he seems so committed to the possibility of an open-ended project that he gets lost in the mix—where once he was a maestro of controlling space. Still, these subtle and intentional shifts suggest Chung could make a more focused album in the future, if only because it will be coming from a clearer headspace.

Communicating also features some of her most direct lyrics and singing to date, and much of the album will undoubtedly resonate with listeners struggling to make connections or find meaning in their lives, despite their best efforts.

Taken as a whole, the songs on Bobby Jameson play with a startling intimacy. These are among Pink’s simplest, sharpest compositions, sprawling with an intuitive charm.