Weather Diaries is no Tarantula-sized affront to Ride’s legacy, but neither is it a Going Blank Again-style triumph of reinvention and focus. Weather-wise, it is an overcast day with a hint of sun: promising but never quite satisfying.

Despite Isbell’s general aimlessness, The Nashville Sound features several winning moments.

While Trouble Maker doesn’t usurp the band’s primordial peak, it’s far and wide their strongest effort since 2000’s excellent self-titled.

Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.

Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017--reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.

He struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm.

Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

Droptopwop, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, is Gucci’s first post-prison project that truly gels. This is thanks in no small part to Metro.

She is in touch with love’s fragilities and understands that it is worth protecting, there is just a lot of tireless work to get it. The record is all the more beautiful for it.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

The Chuck Berry template rears its head, for better and worse, throughout Chuck.

It’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making.

The melancholy saunter of Henriksen’s lines is isolated and sculpted by glimmering, whirring atmospheres full of emptiness and portent. Testing different ways to contrast eloquent material and enigmatic medium, the record plays like some lost collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and Brian Eno circa Ambient 4: On Land.

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.

Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.

Pixx is at her sharpest when her doubt and discontent are animated by something more acute.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. ... Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album.

Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus.

Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.

For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable.

The slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths.

When Somersault reaches its unfettered climax, the five-minute-plus tension-releasing eruption of “Be Nothing,” it’s clear that the project has overcome its greatest burden. Like DeMarco and DIIV before it, Beach Fossils emerged from Captured Tracks haze and established its own identity on the other side.

On an album full of radio experiments, some succeed--“100 Letters,” “Walls Could Talk” and “Alone” demonstrate the perennially fertile sound of alt-pop--and some inevitably fail.

Asking his band to change course in a dramatic fashion after nearly three decades together might be too much. But allowing themselves to get away from the tried and true could give the Charlatans a nice creative jolt to keep them going for another 30 years.

I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone curls into dark corners, exploring the depths of desperation and self-loathing that Chastity Belt only hinted at on their last two albums.

RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.

As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force.

By aiming for the textbook definition of a big-picture pop album, Antonoff has ended up with the epitome of a vanity project: an album that revolves entirely around one person, made more enjoyable the less you expect from it.

While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio.

For all of the uneven and uncertain moments of Cascades, it ends on a very high note, and “Landscape” is one of the most unequivocally gorgeous covers imaginable.

Carrie & Lowell Live--while highlighting the starkest, saddest songs Stevens has ever written--reflects that side of his personality like no other release. This juxtaposition makes it a compelling listen and a fitting companion to a deep, multifaceted record.

His vocals are becoming more textural and less the main focus. That actually works, as Crown has his smartest writing in years, keeping his youthful demons alive, if not running amok. He may have matured, but we don’t want to him to grow up.

Is This the Life’s myriad sonic references to his work with Pink Floyd suggest that Waters is comfortable with his past. The more you accept how much his past reflects in his present, the more receptive you’ll be to this album’s charms.

Though far too long and sometimes aimless, Teenage Emotions is the mind of a child star blown-up and on exhibition at the epicenter of modern rap. It’s there to be gawked at and appreciated, and then maybe enjoyed.

Recording and performing for nearly 20 years with Oneida and spin-offs like People of the North, Colpitts’ drums have sometimes provided an almost melodic key to understanding the full-bore noise-blasts surrounding them. On Play What They Want, those melodies can be heard more directly than ever.

The lyrical setbacks also help emphasize Dreamcar’s greatest strength: It’s a simple labor of love, as opposed to a grandiose spectacle, and in doing so, it sidesteps the usual supergroup cesspool.

A few odd decisions aside, there’s enough between the unforgiving slopes to make this essential for Amidon’s present devotees, if not the perfect mountain for prospective new ones to climb.

It’s pitched almost entirely at “Bob’s” die-hards and listening to this album without being a fan of “Bob’s Burgers” is a fool’s errand. Even for fanatics, the two hours still feels like an ill-advised trek. ... The ease with which the soundtrack switches between novelty ditties and riot grrrl homage--a genre the show is most cozy with--is part of its draw.

You’re Welcome feels stale, dried of both new inspiration or improvisational allure.

As “Dancing Is the Best Revenge” illustrates, !!! are at their best when making dance music that’s both unabashedly celebratory and stridently unsentimental. When the band veer into more typically romantic house terrain (“Our Love (U Can Get)”) and starry-eyed electro-rock (“Throw Yourself in the River”), their peculiar, provocateur personality is muted.

Where Singles the movie was a romantic comedy with Seattle rock as its backdrop, its soundtrack, for anyone outside of the Pacific Northwest or the college radio universe, was a revelation. The 25th-anniversary reissue of the compilation revisits and further contextualizes this moment, with a bonus disc of demos, live versions, and other film ephemera never before issued on CD or vinyl.

The King & I is simultaneously too stingy and too indiscriminate with its star attraction, denying fans new verses yet projecting his hologram raps over every song until the reflexive thrill of hearing one of rap’s greatest voices is extinguished.

The songs on Green Twins feel like attempts to save remnants of the cherished encounters that fill up a lifetime. So few of these moments last long. But Nick Hakim has set out to preserve his any way possible.

Stratton’s ambitions are far more modest, but the new album quite successfully transports your attention away from the banal.

Shine isn’t dark. But it feels like an exercise in avoidance as if Wale took the advice to ease up too far.

Goths is Darnielle’s most evocative work since the occultist All Eternals Deck and even though it remains loosely conceptual like Beat the Champ, it’s all tethered to this palpable, too-casual melancholy, the kind that comes with telling a cautionary tale one too many times.

It’s a proudly ugly Frankenstein, an LP that clambers along at a fitful pace, stopping for the occasional smoke break.

What it reveals is someone of talent, ambition, and enough wit and self-awareness to keep that ambition grounded in reality. It’s an excellent debut from an artist on the cusp.

Sometimes, there really is no substitute for the revelations that come when an artist unlocks the mysteries of their work. But it’s certainly the reason why Rocket feels like one of the year’s most endlessly generous records, as Alex G’s restraint is our gift that keeps on giving.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

By staying the course after their risky pivot rather than retrenching, they’ve done their heroes one better.

A solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.

The album is easy to let play through, but sometimes hard to feel intimate with its complexity. It makes for music that’s wonderful to live with, encouraging repetition while allowing for unconcentrated listening.

On its best songs, he trades his breezy pop chops for earnest, soul-seeking Americana.

As an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing--and, more importantly, totally satisfying.

The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford--each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments--affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results.

Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness. His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs.

Just as this album highlights Williams’ most existentially despondent musings to date, it is also the most fizzy record Paramore have ever recorded.

Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years--an unmovable feast, immortalized.

It’s both sharp-tongued and warm hearted, an LP-length memoir that dabbles in political manifesto. But it comes over like an album Ali made for himself, and he sounds better off because of it.

Aside from its more sociopolitical shortcomings, Everybody refuses to stop and evaluate why it exists in the first place. A lot has been made of Logic’s technical skill, but it can’t really be considered proficiency if it isn’t efficient.

Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy.

Their sophomore LP Powerplant sounds a little more like everyone else, echoing second-wave emo sourness (“Your Heart”), Britpop jangle (“She Goes By”), and classic alt-rock loud-quiet-loudness throughout. But Tucker and Tividad are wise enough not to abandon what makes them distinct--that unsettling magic that exists between them when they sing, the harmonic equivalent of The Shining’s Grady twins.

The album’s relaxed charm makes it an easy, endearing listen, but some of its collaborations don’t transcend their novelty.

It may not be their definitive show of force, but it’s a dazzling spectacle nonetheless.

Three albums in, it’s yet to be determined just where the younger Jeffes aims to take the group, but there’s a rigidity to The Imperfect Sea that approaches ordered desolation.

Although it has its moments, the end result is predictably uneven. Blondie’s commitment to tense and jumpy pop remains, even though Harry’s voice is more grounded some four decades after the band’s debut.

By putting old sounds into different contexts, Nite Jewel’s albums work as an exploration of a happier nostalgia. Because she takes a specific sound as her point of departure this time around, Real High is her most focused work yet.

These sublime ensemble recordings reflect not just the result but the process of deep enlightenment. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, droning Wurlitzer lines, and full-bodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth.

Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.

Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before.

Her early folk tendencies and pop structures served a similar purpose, a means to explore the off-kilter rhythms and ambient melodies that lulled her into a trance as a child, pulling us in along with her. Halo suggests a self-realization that is often breathtaking.

While it’s a quieter record than its predecessors, and her ceaseless questions and lacerating self-doubt would seem like the opposite of asserting an artistic identity, Shelley’s absence of imposition only emphasizes her enviable patience and burgeoning tenderness.

While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass.

With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement.

Audacious and spectacular high stakes.

For all its disjointedness, the album never wanders more than a few inches away from the sublime. It’s a document of a band knocking loudly on the door of greatness.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with This Old Dog, it’s more that DeMarco is keeping his sights low. Some people might appreciate this record more than his last two, with the extra refinement of the sound, others may prefer the earlier stuff, which had a bit more humor and with lyrics that painted more colorful pictures.

Untitled is, crucially, not nihilistic. WALL point out the state of reality and attempt to exist within the never-ending nightmare. Together, the songs on Untitled paint a picture of a city in a time of uncertainty.

Glory instead settles into grooves and revisit territories. Stetson plies us with all his best techniques.

BNQT (pronounced “banquet”) is not a push outside the comfort zone for those involved, but further indication of restlessness from a collection of indie rock lifers, each of whose primary acts made their dent in the blog-rock boom and find their relevance dimming. At that, the optimistically titled Volume 1 serves more to elaborate on its characters than it does to recapture past glory.

And yet, as loaded as the subject matter is, it does amazingly little to diminish Hatfield’s bright spirit. Even on this, her angriest record by a landslide, the singer retains the intrinsic tunefulness that’s marked every record she’s made since she was a teenager.

async is more closely aligned with his 21st-century experimental side and his ongoing collaborations with the likes of Christian Fennesz, Alva Noto, and Christopher Willits. But there’s a warmth and fragility to the album here that makes it stand apart from these works.

Lanegan all too often prevents the audience from seeing the artist that lives behind his dour exterior. Gargoyle is most engaging when it invites glimpses, however fleeting.

Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues.

At times, Nelson’s nonchalance makes some of the more topical concerns on God’s Problem Child feel a tad hackneyed. ... That leaves plenty of space for the other veteran songwriters to slip Nelson their own meditations on aging.

It’s an intergalactic screening turned sci-fi odyssey. There are visions of interstellar travel, premonitions of the moon landing, and parallels to the mythical, relating the scientific with the divine.

There’s a moment in virtually every song where a single loose strand seems to break free and float skyward and it’s there, in the languid sway, where Snow truly takes hold.

Where The Best Day proffered a somewhat uneven mix of extended odysseys and rough-hewn sketches, Rock n Roll Consciousness is much more cohesive and smoothly sequenced.

All the masks and cameos aside, this still feels like a Damon Albarn solo project, a place for him to treat the studio like the welcoming arms of oblivion, and for us to join him.

Pleasure features a number of songs that stretch towards the five-minute mark, making more sense as part of the whole rather than individually.

From its gentle textures come a calm centeredness, from its soft words a sense of strength.

Playboi Carti feels like a break from life, the soundtrack to a mindless good time.

At Saint Thomas feels drier. The virtuosically unspooling vocal runs of “Die Stunde Kommt” feel particularly embodied, like you’re watching her vocal cords come unraveled there in person.