The headier and grander it grows, the more its heavy drones swarm, the more undeniable the duo’s alchemy proves to be.

Despite its faults and flaws, it mostly scans as two talented musicians just having a good time.

The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill.

Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight escapes as Travis Scott’s best work yet: a combination of elevated significance, self-awareness, and the old trick of spinning something so plain into something so luxurious.

This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

This time, the inevitable transition from vocalizations to near-unison saxophone shredding doesn’t carry quite the same charge. But on the whole, Blade Of Love shows that there’s plenty of sax-quartet innovation left for these artists to explore.

While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in AIM, M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.

It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music.

Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.

Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.

Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.

The ideas are articulated much more distinctly than on past recordings, bringing added significance to the gorgeous compositions.

For the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort--not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.

There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful.

One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent.

It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store.

Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

The sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone.

The album flows well, effortlessly segueing from Achtung Baby-like rock to mechanical new wave like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys. O’Riordan and Koretsky sing simple lyrics, often repeating the same phrase over and over, allowing alternate meanings to sink in.

In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract.

Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. Anonymous Nobody is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface.

Even if Here, the band’s 10th album, finds Teenage Fanclub comfortable with their identity and largely uninterested in testing its boundaries, they still find some room for experimentation.

Ultra is also Zomby’s most experimental record in ages.

Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming. My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before.

While Brettin’s singing is greatly improved--lazy but more present and self-assured--his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance.

This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries.

So as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Take It, It’s Yours may be one of the comfiest cover-sets in recent memory, but beneath its chilled-out façade lurks an identity crisis.

Motion Graphics’ contradictions--simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant--make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt.

Even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection.

Standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires.

["Sometimes" is] a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself.

The power of Frank’s work often comes via extreme transparency, but he’s not writing diaries. It’s about how he’s able to locate the crux of any situation, or expose undue artifice, or peel things back to their naked core.

46 minutes of music that plays like a mixtape, sliding from song to song, demo to demo, like scrolling through Frank’s hard drive of unreleased material. It’s an intriguing peek into his process, and it contains some of the rawest vocal takes he’s ever put out.

Home Wrecking Years feels like a guy just filling in the downtime before he gets back to work with his main band.

Taken as a suite of music on its own merits, Volume One flows rather seamlessly—no small achievement. The canvas they paint on is remarkably spare and restrained.

The duo’s sense of freedom and unwillingness to mimic the tropes of conventional songwriting are to be admired, even if they’re not necessarily traits that will convince anyone but ardent early-Reich fans that drumming records are worthy of a place on their shelf.

The Childhood of a Leader is a clear high water mark for Walker in terms of instrumental writing, but it is also, in many ways, an apt extension of textural ideas Walker has explored on his past two albums.

Sometimes what seems like a forward move turns out to be a lateral one, and right now it's an open question whether Delt’s more professional environs were preferable to his messy charm.

Every song on the record contributes to this air of reverie, a testament to Roosevelt’s strength as a producer, as one track languidly slips into the next. If anything, it can get a little too laid back--it’s the kind of record that's so uniform it ends before you realize it.

These lyrics threaten to drag the rest of the album down if you listen too closely, but Stephenson’s vocal melodies are buoyant enough to keep it all afloat if you’re playing this in the background.

Fishing Blues’ saving grace, the only song with any real passion and continuity, is one about police brutality written from the perspective of the officer.

An album that’s disorienting at its catchiest, harrowing at its ugliest, and more than willing to run both of those modes at the same time.

Alice Bag feels like effortless self-expression that simply needed an outlet.

The melding of these stories with Cameron’s efficient, minimal compositions create the type of songs that penetrate deeply and linger in your consciousness long after you’ve stopped listening to them.

The album helps prove he’s a lot more than just Drake’s patois advisor. Clothes that don’t quite fit his boss feel effortlessly tailored to Brathwaite.

The album is simply not the format for DJ Snake. The conventional song barely is. He makes tracks. Instead of being, at least, a collection of great, standalone singles, the album is riddled with ill-advised rap songs and bad ballads.

There aren’t a load of bangers on here, [but] there are several stellar songs, the best of which showcase the duo’s adaptability, especially in surrendering musical control to the Spacebomb house band.

SremmLife 2 collects all of the quirks in the margins of its predecessor and develops them; more than anything else, SremmLife 2 is the ultimate middle finger to grouches who think this brand of rap can’t be complex.

It’s evident that Walker is talented and brimming with ideas--and there are moments on this record that mark the best music he’s ever made. But he needs to get a better understanding of his strengths if he wants to become more than just another nifty live-guitar throwback.

At times he nodded toward mainstream trends. “Way Down” soars like a jetliner; “Moody Blue” co-opts every soft, hazy sound of AM pop in the mid-’70s. But the striking thing about Way Down in the Jungle Room is how it stays true to all the music Presley claimed as his own in ’68.

Revisit older Factory Floor tracks like “A Wooden Box” or “(R E A L L O V E)” and there remains something tantalizing there--the way they morph back and forth between live band and broiling techno, a trompe l’oeil for the ear. On 25 25, they’ve shed this dimension, and the results can feel depthless and a little flat.

Even when their pendulum is swinging at a steadier pace, Thee Oh Sees still have the power to hypnotize--but from its twitchy jams to its blown-out power ballads, A Weird Exits’ most intriguing moments come when they break the trance.

Helpfully, the 17-song record includes eight interstitials to ease the intensity, though admittedly they’re more useful in the first half, which is frantic and sparkly, than the sleepier second.

His albums are very much the work and vision of one man, and so even on a relatively easygoing outing like Innocence Reaches, that insularity can grow stifling. It’s as if since Barnes can’t escape his own head, he won’t allow listeners to, either.

You get the sense that he can go pretty much anywhere sonically, and the brevity of each track combined with all the driving rhythms makes the record feel like a roller-coaster tour of his firing neurons.

McKenna has a remarkable facility for conveying the inner lives of women trapped in soured relationships; that may not be an easy sell for the conservative playlists of country radio, but it makes for one of the most accomplished and devastating singer-songwriter albums of the year.

The record is not always as engaging for the listener as it might like to be. Gengras emphasizes the experience of sound over the process of constructing it.

Fec’s most disturbing songs were often his funniest, but Sweatbox Dynasty rarely allows Fec’s puckish side to rise from the muck.

Now and then, Wild Beasts break beyond the surface to offer a few sharper observations.

Almost half of the first CD is made up of Cline originals, and these pale a bit in comparison with the surrounding material. Though thanks to its sly and measured embrace of the experimental, Lovers still has all the originality it needs to endear.

It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams.

Like all of his albums, Major Key is a mixed bag, fitting for a maestro who traffics in a blend of chest-thumping and humility that’s both as comical as it is prophetic.

As Durk grapples with leaving his old life behind to create a better life for his sons, he creates his most gratifying and moving work yet. Lil Dirk 2X seeks rehabilitation but finds evolution.

Cheena is not trying to blow your mind. In fact, they’re not trying to do much of anything. But that spirit rings true, and it feels less like a pose the longer the album goes on.

Another brisk half-hour of barbed power-pop tunes that sting so sweetly that it’s only after the fact you consider you might need a tetanus shot.

Fortunately for the diehards, Hypercaffium Spazzinate is devoid of the stylistic overindulgence or inflated self-importance often associated with hiatus-ending efforts.

Elseq feels like an advancement of the duo’s recent live sets, offering a similar ratio of rhythm to noise and order to chaos, but a richer palette of sounds.

Due to the narrow artistic parameters of Shriek (mostly: no guitars), every song on Tween has this quality of a gem rescued from the cracks.

Even when Guidance gets complicated, there’s a more organic and unforced feel to it, as if songs were allowed to grow wild rather than carefully cultivated.

Give a Glimpse does, however, stick largely to well-trod paths, with not a ton in the way of experimentation. As always, it’s Mascis’ guitar that is the main attraction here, the reason for caring.

Victorious is filled with moments that give you glimpses of the club in heaven, but like the afterlife itself, it’s always out of reach, distinct only in brief flashes and in feverish moments.

The King of Whys is never not magnificent, maybe too much for its own good–despite Kinsella’s unsparing account of his father's alcoholism and depression, the handclaps and chipper strumming of “A Burning Soul” could’ve made it a mid-‘90s college hit à la Guster.

At 54 minutes, the 18-track record begins to feel a little baggy, its uncharismatic drums and textural familiarity giving Nao’s paragliding voice one job too many. Even when overlong, though, the songs can impress with their breadth.

Memories are themselves temporal hangovers; as one accesses them, one also accesses what could’ve been, drawing reality through the distortions of regret and nostalgia. The best Johnny Foreigner songs, several of which are included on Mono No Aware, depict this process holistically; you hear someone sifting through their failures and their fantasies, their past and present mistakes swarming into each other.

Sweaty and ecstatic, elevated and pure, The Disco’s of Imhotep weaves quite the spell. This might be the most accessible Hieroglyphic Being album to date, but Jamal Moss remains out there on his own.

Taken as a whole, S+@dium Rock ultimately feels less like a document of an historic homecoming event and more like the sort of bonus material that comprises the extra disc of a deluxe reissue.

As a snapshot of an influential band in their prime, Live is undeniable, and the set serves as an especially effective tribute to Bewley’s crucial contributions.

His openness to creative inspiration in far-flung cities has paid off. If this is what he came up with in a fortnight, running on what couldn’t have been much sleep, the wait for what he does next should be worth it.

For all the champion horsepower in their stable, Gone Is Gone just never really gets going.

It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar--now six- or seven-year-old--formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed.

This Is Gap Dream ends up being too truthful, as there’s rarely any indication Fulvimar intended for this to reach an audience far beyond himself.

Iit confirms anew that Big Business remain a band without comfortable genre quarters, as indebted to power pop and psychedelic rock as they to sludge or stoner metal.

Warm Leatherette was alternately more sanguine and more severe—a bracing confluence of reggae, new-wave, and post-punk that showcased Jones’ range as a performer and her uncanny, occasionally perverse vision as an interpreter of other people’s songs.

While it’s a creative step forward for Kiwanuka, it’s still tough to get a sense of just who he is at times.

With Coolaid, arguably Snoop’s first real hip-hop album in half a decade, we find his reinvention back into “Rapper Snoop” to be a bit wobbly.

Like its older sibling, the songs on Cistern exist independently of each other. The nine tracks feel connected only by the fact that they share the same space on record, more like a collection of long takes rather than a movie.

The group has never sounded richer, fuller, or more confident in their own narcotic powers. Misery suits them.

Artistically speaking, Demon City represents a leap forward in terms of Crampton’s musical growth. American Drift was like a sumptuous glass overflowing, but Demon City is a wonder of concision, with songs that mostly fall under four minutes.

The moody guitar solo at the end is deflating endpoint to a well-trodden path, but Shepherd’s band nonetheless exhibits a rare combination of restraint and brawn.

Centres initially seems like a near-formless sea of sound and voice. But over time, it reveals patterns inside the swirl, and the more time you spend in it, the further you will to get lost in its wondrous confines.

Overall, it’s hard to see where his strengths are, and on some deeper level, I can’t imagine a situation where listening to this album is appropriate for anything else but falling asleep at your desk.