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.

If you’re looking for pop with a light outer frosting of edginess, Visuals hits the spot and then some. But if you’d like to hear Mew explore those edges and break free from the stultifying safety of their music, Visuals leaves you frustrated.

While remaining as obtuse as ever, O’Neil’s newfound appreciation for singer-songwriter-dom presents some of her most personal work yet.

When Meath and Sanborn ease into a slower lane, they find a sweetness that isn’t entirely likable. There is a bitterness to their Southern bless-your-heart feel, swaddling sharp observations in mannered dance-pop.

Look at the Powerful People begins with 54 of the most exciting seconds of music I’ve heard in 2017. And then they start talking.

The ease of his melody is matched by his own ideas. It might be a small notion, but that’s where Woods operate most efficiently, for a moment achieving the solidarity that Love Is Love desperately seeks.

These hooks are delivery mechanisms for often acerbic, often exhausted lyrics about the endless crap conveyor belt that is life and love as a girl.

The music carves out a space that always leaves plenty of room for the music’s most important component, the one that, in this artistic sphere, ultimately determines what it all means: the listener.

Its six songs shine just as bright as those on Talk Tight, but they cast longer, darker shadows.

Her voice and affectations are so guided by the heavy hands of Turner and Ford that Belladonna of Sadness is largely indistinguishable from their work: At best, Savior is a muse for her own introduction; at worst, she’s a conduit who’s yet to prove that she can hold her own with the company she keeps.

The downside of Belong’s greater tilt toward pop and feelings is an occasional lurch into treacle.

It’s progress, probably, that Mayer keeps the condescension to a dull sneer, but this also makes everything sound that much more anodyne.

No matter where he dwells, Davies remains an outsider, and that alienation unites Americana’s jumble of eras and places.

Kendrick Lamar has proven he’s a master storyteller, but he’s been saving his best plot twist this whole time, waiting until he was ready, or able, to pull it off.

Though solidly enjoyable, Electric Lines could have benefitted from some more concretely original ideas to propel it forward. But when Goddard taps into his love for house, disco, and techno, his enthusiasm radiates through the speakers.

She hasn’t yet sorted out the particular combination of influences that fit her strengths, and few of the songs’ melodies are compelling enough to overcome the album’s strangely stale take on alternative pop.

A quick glance at a recent list of his favorite hip-hop records of all-time--rooted firmly in the golden and silver ages of hip-hop--reveals what inspires him most. When Raekwon leans into those sounds and themes, the rhymes that flow through him are evidence that this OG can still hang with the best of them.

It's so clinical that it works better as an audition reel for their next round of features than it does its own statement.

They keep the music raw enough that it sounds almost-but-not-quite amateurish--again, following in the hardcore/early-thrash tradition--while Marrow’s willingness to indulge in comic absurdity with the lyrics makes Body Count’s preachiness more palatable.

For all its artfully-deployed discordance, AZD maintains a musicality that holds the listener close.

Siberia faithfully captures the wistfulness of the pilgrim’s journey--but it also suggests that the ears may be fickle traveling companions.

After over 30 years in pursuit of the perfect song, Pollard has finally started to recognize the album for everything it can be.

At What Cost is ambitious, slickly-produced, and relies a great deal on live instrumentation. However, where Attention Deficit’s jumbled tracklist smacked of design-by-committee compromise, At What Cost is clearly guided by GoldLink’s vision from start to finish.

It is an anodyne pop record for a post-EDM world, one where trap and trop-house mix with pale imitations of the Migos flow and Coldplay’s cornball sentimentality.

The World’s Best American Band is mixed significantly louder than anything else you’re probably listening to right now and it’s equally glittery and gritty like a blood-caked switchblade—far more polished than the similarly indebted Sheer Mag, but with more edge to rule out any comparisons to the ’70s LARPing of Free Energy.

Whiteout Conditions packs the most blanket pep of the power-pop group’s seven albums, dense with that particular new wave brand of electronic two-for-one.

While constant one-liners were a bit leaden on B4.DA.$$, they are sorely missed on AABA.

While it doesn’t break much new musical ground, and plays against Future Islands’ reputation for excess, The Far Field’s breathtaking sorrow is transformative.

Adios sounds more like Hola. Nearly 15 years into his career, Branan sounds like he’s finally found the right balance between audacity and subtlety, between humor and heartbreak.

While it doesn’t have quite the artistic heft of his self-titled album, the bright, punched-out shapes are more fun to listen to, with an emotional accessibility that makes me imagine a kind of post-rave Eluvium.

They arrive at the settled creative space they’ve hinted at but never quite reached in the past.

Diet Cig’s debut is almost entirely made of other people’s gestures hastily collected and cheaply executed.

After that opening suite--“Pure Comedy,” “Total Entertainment Forever,” and “Revolution”--the music settles into a tonal plateau. Even the most gripping songs unspool with acoustic leisure, and they can be long and lofty trips.

One does get the sense of life behind these performances, of private experience refracted through universal sentiment, of hard knocks transubstantiated into easy wisdom, but, as is often the case with Bob Dylan, the drama remains mostly internal.

It’s a Myth is the natural progression from Gymnastics, and so across the record, Moolchan refines her sound within these limits. Inside and outside of the music, she embraces the self-built space that she crafted for herself.

The discoveries Ghersi makes on Arca allow him to write his most relaxed and intimate songs. His work is still mysterious, but not as opaque--it doesn’t keep you at an arm’s length, instead he offers up his pleasures more readily.

Rosebudd’s Revenge isn’t as seamless as Marcberg or Reloaded, suffering from some fidelity issues and perhaps being a bit back-loaded, but it’s endlessly, almost impossibly entertaining.

Deep into their career, Dieng at times reveals the advanced stage of its players. The songs are taken a step slower, the rhumbas show a consideration for the pulse as well as the spaces between them, and the themes in some manner or another touch upon mortality.

There are a few spots on Silver/Lead where Wire succumbs to its own subtlety, as words empty and the tempos deflate toward flatness. But the group catches itself quickly, producing the album’s best track, “Sleep on the Wing.”

They’re still figuring it out, but somehow, even their mistakes feel fresh.

Rather You Than Me is a smooth, enjoyable attempt to wrestle the spotlight back onto his solo work.