McCauley’s raspy crow often overwhelms the more delicate material, but throughout both albums, the band varies its rhythms and arrangements with surprising agility.

The album is spacious and enveloping even as it warns of horrors down the line.

The Sparks catalog does not lack for unpleasant characters or situations, but existential anxiety rarely comes through this overtly.

Every song here sounds expensive, and would play exquisitely on enormous sound systems. But that imbalance, between the level of production and substance, means all the SFX and sonic wizardry of CCCLX can feel a little brainless.

It doesn’t help that their guest singers’ lyrics rarely scale heights comparable to the duo’s vertiginous waveforms.

Beautiful, strange, and stoned, Hitchhiker lets us in on one of those nights.

Whether he’s full of joy or howling into the void, he pushes his songs to their edge, which helps to deliver on the promise shown in his earlier work.

The Source may draw on Afrobeat and jazz to create something intricate and expansive, but the results are never contrived or academic.

While certainly not on the level of The Days of Wine and Roses, this reunion record could be considered that debut’s rightful follow-up, at least in spirit.

If anything, Scott’s romantic instincts are accentuated in an unprecedented way on Out of All This Blue because so much of this lengthy album is devoted to love songs.

The Hanged Man continues to project a bold, subversive spirit even after that introductory blast of static clears.

The duo’s music was always full of the small details, but they now conspire toward something bigger.

With Outrage! Is Now, Death From Above join the rare breed of artists who are able to capitalize on their maturity without betraying the spirit of their youth.

The album displays a pop prowess that Cameron’s debut only hinted at--these songs are as effortlessly catchy as they are eminently creepy. And Cameron’s songwriting has only turned more acerbic and outrageous.

Fifth Harmony isn’t offensively bad, in fact, it sits quite comfortably with many other acts dominating the charts at the moment. But it’s too safe, too by-the-numbers, too beige to stand up to even Fifth Harmony’s previous work, which carried more lyrical and musical heft.

Mountain Moves indicates that something better--something made by diverse but like-minded collaborators--might be able to come next.

They don’t reinvent the band’s image so much as carefully muss its hair a bit, unfasten one more button on its shirt collar. They are still a good dinner-party band, but now they’ve made the album for when the wine starts spilling on the rug, the tablecloth is rumpled, the music has imperceptibly gotten louder, and all those friendly conversations have turned a little too heated.

Aytche is, for the most part, an easygoing album, but an unsettling undercurrent runs through it as well. The muted thumps and ominous dissonance of “Chopping Wood” play like an ambient riposte to Bitches Brew.

If Abandon was the sound of a young man in flux, then Pleasure is the sound of settling.

It’s interesting to hear how Alvvays nod to their vaunted indie forebears while also stretching against the limitations of being too closely associated with the past.

He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes.

Okovi’s dramas are hard to miss.

With this album, Butler has thrown caution to the wind and his soul-searching has created some of his best dancefloor experimentation in years.

At its best, Every Country’s Sun is brash, gritty, unpretentious, and thrillingly claustrophobic--a work of volume and violence in tight spaces.

Musically, Toy is their most experimental and varied album.

Unlike a lot of ambient-leaning electronic music, this doesn’t necessarily work as background listening: Its moods are too mercurial, its changes too nuanced. You need to be paying attention to really appreciate the subtle mutations in his sound, yet there’s also something about his queasy tones and grizzled frequencies that keep the listener at arm’s length, emotionally speaking.

Holiday Destination is compellingly bleak, but Shah’s defiance and willingness connect the dots to make it hopeful.

Whereas Murphy once took on all of these influences lightly and cleverly, they feel heavier across much of American Dream’s 70 minutes, with the lingering responsibilities of a disappearing history becoming more apparent. On paper, that might sound like a bit of a slog, but this is not the case.

Where A$AP Mob’s early releases were guided by a clear vision and unifying aesthetic, everyone here is content to follow rap’s reigning trends rather than lead them, a surprising capitulation from what was once New York’s most ambitious hip-hop crew.

Much sharper-edged than the sounds one would usually associate with healing, Daijing’s music still seems to cultivate a space in which one might grow.

Bicep’s expansive production and compact song-lengths often lack the transportive and hypnotic potential that the best dance music offers. But it succeeds as a lean and consciously paced album.

Aside from a few bright spots, Rainbow Edition is ultimately a thin record of short, demo-quality beats. Like so many of Hype Williams’ records from the past, this one will feel like a curio or better yet, another reason to ask the question: Who the hell made this?

These new tracks are probably the strongest in his catalog--full of cheeky, relentless verses to match the energetic funk he’s best accompanied by--and the repetition feels strategic.

Invitation depends on its lack of surprise. In its clean, straightforward grooves, the album betrays no cynicism or enervation. It is a good time, and not much more.

Villains isn’t always so smooth and several sections fall flat, like the staccato-spiked funk that surfaces midway through “The Evil Has Landed” or the melodically static refrains on “Fortress.” Nevertheless, the stalled moments don’t detract from the fun of the ride.

This earnest, well-crafted jumble couldn’t be a more appropriate marker of the irrepressible project’s evolution, nor a more fitting testament to Liars’ legacy.

With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance.

Good Nature is SoCal to the core, a warm embrace of the area’s soft-focus spirituality and the optimism of young, beautiful creatives without much to worry about.

While much of the tape is forgettable, Still Striving is not without its standout moments.

What’s unique to Exile is the unreal world of the Outer Ring, which is as well developed in the music as it is in the lyrics and videos.

It’s the impossible sweep and grandeur of the music that tells the real story, of how a rush of sound can take us somewhere we can’t explain.

The union of players and material inspires a new synthesis: the sound of Iyer consolidating strengths and discovering some new ones as he settles into the vibe created by his most potent band yet.

It is the sound of Iron & Wine returning home, ending one chapter and beginning another.

The new Rainer Maria is slower, heavier, and more methodical than the old one. They swing less but land more blows.

Oh Sees prove that aforementioned Afro-funk excursion is no random one-off experiment, but a reliable rhythmic foundation that can fuse seamlessly with their signature garage-psych sound.

For all of Brand New’s ambitions, it’s hard to recall a popular rock band making an album this crafty, this finely decorated without jettisoning the attributes of rock music.

The record’s best songs are imbued with real emotional weight.

Perhaps they’re too-smart-for-their own good, but in the moments they can get over themselves, Althaea, at least for a flash, can offer more than just a thrill.

Warmth stands to resonate with those seeking a transportive experience whose peaks and valleys never overwhelm.

A rare example of indie-rock insurrection in Britain, A Fever Dream--darkly glamorous, flamboyantly appalled--is a fine monument to the nation’s despair.

Painted Ruins, cursorily an album about battling demons, can feel a little like prestige music. But there’s this moment at the end--a spot where Grizzly Bear records routinely reach their heights--that reminds listeners that tangible realism can be a necessary counterpoint to the quartet’s impressionism.

The wall of sound is strangely, stultifyingly uniform, a thick slab of piano-led clangour--like the din of a bustling room overwhelming a lounge singer’s best efforts.

The moments that work best are when the instrumentation and vocals distill singular, cohesive emotions. Her most literal lyrics are often the strongest.

Good Time invites emotional confusion along multiple vectors. Lopatin’s score opens fissures that let its beauty and ambivalences burrow deep under your skin.

Like all of their work, it’s capable and tuneful and reveals a young band of skilled songwriters that put all their faith in their guitars, even if it’s often hard to pinpoint where their own vision begins and their taste ends.

Neither refinement nor fulfillment, Cuidado Madame serves as a refutation. Lindsay’s lyrics are spare and precise enough to work on the page--and that’s a rare compliment. But even if they were woolier, his band’s rabid imagination won’t let these songs congeal into boutique hotel background music.

It’s hard to imagine a more vocally versatile pair than Lal and Mike, whose interplay adds depth to all of these moods.

On top of polishing up the band’s sound, Guided by Voices’ TVT releases also showcased a newfound clarity and emotional candor in Pollard’s often obtuse, fantastical lyrics, and How Do You Spell Heaven gamely follows suit.

Rainbow is inevitably heavy with subtext and a need to prove something, especially on “Praying.” ... The title track, a collaboration with Ben Folds that blooms into a string arrangement, is an improvement, but still sedate. Thankfully, the rest of Rainbow lets Kesha be her usual OTT self.

When tested to come up with his most insightful work and justify his missteps, he delivers compelling alternate truths. Wins and Losses shows the rap game is much harder to score than one might think.

Equal parts brittle and brazen, Shitty Hits is the work of a well-past-promising newcomer.

While one occasionally wishes that Frankie Rose could get a few paces further out from under her own shadow, the best of Cage Tropical does something similar, taking her own retro influences and using them to leapfrog her way out of a creative rut.

Cost of Living revels in the gleaming, multi-tracked expanse of a professional recording studio. It’s a richer, fuller sound; the stereo imaging is wider and the saxophone (they’ve stripped down to just one, now played by Joe DeGeorge, who also handles keyboards) has more presence in the mix. The bigger, brighter sound often serves them well.

Rembo is an album that prizes function as much as idiosyncrasy; much like Differ-Ent’s It’s Good To Be Differ-Ent, the yearning for experimentation is always kept in check by an intuitive appreciation for what dancers desire. It’s a talent to be cherished.

Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth.

An occasional stab of synthesizer is the closest these songs come to pomp, and the production is still scruffy around the edges, hi-fi only by the standards of her early self-recordings. But the improved fidelity lets her words and voice come across clearer than they did from the bedroom, revealing how much more elegant Allison’s wordplay is than it can seem at first blush, and her gift for detailing conflict with the economy of a young adult novel.

The result is Manchester Orchestra’s most confounding, thrilling, and unintentionally loopy album yet.

BBNG’s Late Night Tales certainly unwinds as it goes on, getting more and more hushed with each passing moment, but it never settles into any single sonic space, constantly shifting and advancing.

Yes, the music this band makes is undeniably fun--Dead Cross bounces along with so much pep you could almost consider it a party record. But they stick to a fairly straight-ahead take on thrash and hardcore that doesn’t shed much new light on the players involved.

Bits of space rock, dub, leftfield disco, and post-punk all feed into Square One, but despite the Scandinavian disco pedigree of its two participants, it’s less a dancefloor weapon than a soundtrack for dorm room philosophizing.

As impressive as Frost’s music is, he seems always a bit too eager to impress, a sure turn-off. It’s less a matter of the parts Frost writes, which are often lovely and/or awesomely grand, and more in the way he frames them.

The lack of anything like a pained or ecstatic voice in Call It Love can make its emotional core tricky to access. Instead of reading it in her voice, you have to read it in her lyrics and the environments in which she’s chosen to nestle them. That doesn’t detract from Call It Love’s prettiness.

Sodium is liable to leave you just as drained as its creator, but it’s the sort of exhaustion that feels valorous and victorious. After all, losing your voice is a small price to pay for saving your sanity.

Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree.

His message loses strength, in part, because he doesn’t fully commit to it.

With Raft, he drifts past all of the above touchstones and ventures a bit further out, with each of the album’s seven tracks delving deeper into the 74-year-old musician’s idiosyncratic sound.

Theirs is a meaty, swollen approach to garage rock that leaves ample room for diversions into exploratory psych and shredded rockabilly, and these moments turn out to be the best on Emerge.

Mensa is also writerly. His bars can sound productively picked at and pored over, or clunky and pent-up when overly pampered. The Autobiography splits those tendencies down the middle, casting its star as a remarkable, easy-to-digest rapper with an affinity for half-baked wordplay.

Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever. Rotations is also richly emotional.

Butler’s commitment to the detached frontman where singing occurs barely or not at all robs songs of their emotional largesse, that basic thing we licensed to Arcade Fire and upon which their entire identity relies. What saving grace there is on Everything Now is scattered throughout its mercifully short 47 minutes.

Frustrates as much as it entices, even more so than the Mikael Jorgensen & Greg O’Keeffe album, its older spiritual twin. ... For the third album in a row, Jorgensen has proven himself to be masterful at carving arrangements so that all the parts work in tandem in a perfect balance between form and function, not a skill to be taken lightly or under-utilized.

Mullen’s personality goes a long way in setting him apart from the pack. The same goes for Suffocation as a whole, whose staying power on ...Of the Dark Night is undeniable.

Even in its busiest moments, the album has a soothing effect. Its rough charms begin to feel like an acceptance of a world in disarray, refining its chaos into compact moments of beauty.

At first listen, it’s as perplexing as its immediate antecedent Not the Actual Events. ... The EP’s final track is both the strongest and strangest.

Over time, the album’s subtle ambition becomes impossible to miss.

Her skepticism reflects a self-awareness that pairs nicely with the wide-eyed wonderment in her music. Korkejian strikes this balance with such delicacy that it’s sometimes hard to believe this is her first album.

Though its songs are lightly augmented with overdubs and outside voices, as well as the faintest outlines of orchestrations from Eyvind Kang, Eucalyptus retains its air of bedroom intimacy.

There are moments on Lust for Life that, while less successful on a pure songwriting level than some of Del Rey’s more focused work, are fascinating distillations of what a Lana Del Rey song mean.

Even at less than a half hour, Lo Tom suffers from redundancy, not surprising when you’ve made more than one song reminiscent of “Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap” and you’re not actually AC/DC.

Sacred Hearts Club splits the difference between the bookending acts on that Grammys tribute: Maroon 5 and the Beach Boys.

The mix won’t convince diehards that Snaith is a dance music demiurge. At crucial moments, it sacrifices momentum for eclecticism. It’s less for club puritans than for adventurous Caribou fans who are willing to follow Snaith no matter which rabbit hole he dives down.

Flower Boy shows thoughtfulness can be freeing. As Tyler, the Creator embarks on a journey of self-discovery, he becomes close to whole.

Grime at its best is defined by its steely economy, which makes Raskit’s rambling length and diluted focus frustrating. As a platform for Dizzee's flashy lyrical dexterity, Raskit does more than enough to shift the bitter aftertaste of The Fifth. With more of the laser-eyed focus that marked Boy in Da Corner, it could have been a triumph.

Jean-Jacques Perrey et son Ondioline is deceptively experimental music in the lineage of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Tomita: lush musical soundscapes that still come alive to modern ears, more than a half-century after they were recorded.

It’s as subdued an album as Oyamada has made. ... But thankfully “subdued,” by Cornelius’s standards, still entails unceasing rhythmic invention, perhaps the central musical theme of his career. Filling the stereo horizon with flickering instrumental flashes that often careen off each other in intricately syncopated arrangements, even the album’s most lulling moments have non-mellow currents churning beneath the surface.

The digs may occasionally seem claustrophobic, the host a bit eccentric, but it’s still a stay worth remembering.

He has evolved quite a bit since Excuse My French, coming up with moments of sharpness, but he is still limited in what he can do.

If the concert starts off jittery, with the frenetic 13-minute “Invitation”--the band seems almost too hyped-up--the remaining two-hours are a seamless, pitch-perfect display of A-game professionalism married to virtuoso sparkle.