Even at a lithe 31 minutes, it serves as Hecker’s most diverse work, an unfixed landscape that moves from shadowy to frigid to transcendent with ease. The song titles and album notes leave no real clues as to which films each track was actually intended for.

Shygirl’s ability to cook cutesy, juvenile references into grown and sexy club candy shines on “Wifey Riddim.” Its vintage lunchroom table production, evoking Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” or Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” gets a refreshing update with the addition of hip-rocking Jersey club breakdowns.

This isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos.

On choke enough, that highly skilled performer comes into her own as an artist. The title track is easily Oklou’s best to date.

Her supple singing and the lively production keep Jupiter from being a slog, but the hazy symbolism sours the experience.

Locks lets the past speak by keeping the grit and the grain in his samples, conjuring the dust of the archives. Like Madlib, another jazz-influenced samplerist, he leaves the seams in his loops and builds meta-rhythms from the clicks of his edit points.

There’s no harm in taking inspiration from others. But here, it sounds like McRae and her writing team hopped on the left-of-center-pop bandwagon without building out something new and wholly Tate—and it’s hard to make leftovers taste as enticing as when they were first served hot and fresh.

Saya is more of a restoration: filling in the cracks of Gray’s music, redrawing her in bolder shades and more vivid hues—indigo, flesh tone, spring green.

Horror lacks some of the DIY immediacy of Strange’s first two records. A new degree of studio polish is palpable. .... But with Antonoff’s blockbuster-coded fingerprints on the record, the hooks also go bigger than before, and Strange’s heart and fierce desire for connection bleed through.

Powers narrates these vignettes from a distant storyteller’s perspective, and a gap emerges between his authorial point of view and the intimacy of the home video material. This dissonance is certainly haunting, but when the album’s final track arrives in a montage of the VHS clips strung together over heartfelt piano, its affecting ambience feels somewhat abrupt. But the record’s final moments remind us that these songs still spring from a singular voice.

In an effort to make everything sound as massive as possible, the team obscures some of Fender’s more pointed moments.

The lucidity and beauty of this music feels hard-won, something to revere and cherish.

Like a Ribbon is lush and engrossing, the rare Big Indie debut that outstrips its own hype.

“Mayfield” barrels out of the gate like a runaway Arctic train—the 2025 mix adds propulsion by removing a flanged drop-out section. As vocalist Paula Kelley winds black ribbons around Ackell’s melancholy topline, sheets of guitar clip overhead: proto-blackgaze. The two other EP tracks included here are dreamier, but no less impressive.

Here, Horsegirl learn how dazzling it is to instead pull back and feel the invisible touch of what was once there, a fizzy tingling on the palms and cushion of silence around the ears. That growth is the most memorable part of Horsegirl’s new album.

His singing voice isn’t nearly as tender and smooth as once it was. .... Sometimes the effect is monotonous and emotionless, which might suit his headspace, but ultimately it’s just boring. When he adds a little spice to his voice he can still sound expressive, like on the album standout “Small Town Fame,” which, if you ignore the shamelessness of the Brat summer bar, features him at his most earnest.

Drawing out stories across generations, Dawson captures the way memories loom large in the present.

Squid’s most wide-ranging album yet, and somehow still the one that hits closest to home.

More than his previous records, Lay Low focuses on the clarity that arrives with age and time. You can hear the proof in Chacon’s songwriting, which has sharpened to an impressively minimalist degree.

Even with this shared billing, Van Etten remains the album’s undeniable highlight, though she explores a range of vocal approaches outside her trademark wail.

Your tolerance for freeform and frequently harsh-sounding guitar music determines whether A Shaw Deal will make it into your regular rotation or slot into the lesser-played ranks of the band’s catalog. But its funky, egoless spirit is infectious.

It all amalgamates into a fine late-career achievement for the master bandleader.

Not every intuition bears fruit, but more and more it is becoming clear that the iconoclastic rapper’s impulses are to be trusted.

The group effort renders Humanhood’s songs lush and circuitous, seemingly propelled by an internal logic that’s being pieced together as you hear it.

A record with infernally catchy dance-pop hooks and the nutritional value of cotton candy.

Hiatt’s candid emotions feel earned; her open-hearted melodies and punchy hooks play out like a series of unguarded moments.

The result is an opulent, elegant, and occasionally exasperating farewell. This is the Weeknd’s most expansive-sounding album that’s also narrowly focused.

Showbiz! is the young artist’s greatest accomplishment thus far, the product of a passionate, creative journeyman fully making his home in music.

If this is an album about growth and greatness, then it’s the kind you see depicted in charts on an end-of-year earnings report. It is precision engineered to stream big, and all the duller for it.

There’s a freewheeling spirit to the music they created together, a punchy camaraderie that connects these disparate songs from the agitpolka of “Guns Are for Cowards” to the Celtic dreamfolk of “Downstream,” and from the rambunctious ramble of “Turned to Dust (Rolling On)” to the despairing chorus of “Boise, Idaho” (which contains one of Oldham’s loveliest and most forlorn melodies).

An album that pushes Minus’ musical vision outward while burrowing deeper inward lyrically.

Listeners who come for the record’s novelty will stay for the class. Seldom do musical fusions sound both so perfectly weighted and utterly irresistible, a cartoon hit of delirious joy.

The contrasts within the songs are more interesting than those between style and source.

Segal comes from underground hip-hop and Booker from retro-leaning rock’n’roll, but LOWER doesn’t sound like any of those genres’ past collisions. Instead, it takes the basic textures of rap rock—boom-bap beats, Deftones’ icy ambiance, the corroded shredding of “She Watch Channel Zero?!”—and fashions them into a new strain of beat-centric grunge.

On a fundamental level, the bangers on EUSEXUA bang like once and future bangers.

For the most part, Congleton doesn’t push Mogwai anywhere they weren’t already heading, but in its home stretch, The Bad Fire proves this band of steely veterans can still disarm you by opening up surprising new dimensions to their sound.

Miller was a natural melodicist, a captivating vocalist, and an evocative songwriter, all of which are here on display. It’s a mood piece, and the mood is sweet and sedate.

Despite radiating a gentle, unassuming tranquility, Weft rarely bores.

Recorded with Gilla Band bassist Daniel Fox, Who Let the Dogs Out wisely leans on nosier elements when the subject matter gets earnest.

Bad Bunny’s sixth studio album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I Should Have Taken More Photos), is a bold declaration—a groundbreaking testament to his evolved artistry and vision for the future of música urbana.

Across these 10 uncommonly beautiful songs, she finds the spiritual in the everyday.

The sidelining of his talents on the kit is a disappointment, but it’s not a deal breaker. On the whole, Look Up succeeds for the same reasons that Beaucoups of Blues did: songs that play to Starr’s vocal strengths, a sympathetic supporting cast, and a natural, Nashville feel.

Perverts is an awful lot to take in one sitting, and it often feels split between two distinct aesthetic modes: the wistful chill of slow but structured songs, and the brutal unmooring of eerie ambient collages. Both styles converge thematically on the same tortured core, but the switch between them can cause whiplash.

There’s a great lightness to each of Olsen’s covers, an attempt to abandon the feet she has planted on the ground. But the songs are rendered so fluffily that it’s hard to hear any of their structural elements; instead, the collection sounds more like a series of beautiful ooh-ing.

The Human Fear isn’t provocative enough to revitalize their reputation, but it certainly won’t do it any harm.

Consider Midwinter Swimmers, then, an invitation to reclaim the assured and commonplace language of awe. This is what “beautiful” was meant to describe.

It’s a brief rush, at a hair over 27 minutes, but covers a remarkable amount of ground. And as a blueprint for a new, pan-African pop music, it is thoroughly convincing.

Fennesz may not care much if he surprises us, but he never runs out of ways to get us.

The Night is frequently cold and lonely, but Saint Etienne make for invaluable company.

In trying to live up to the “personal album” trope, rosie opts to explore rather than define, and the emotional grooves are polished smooth. Whether you’re a new fan or a devoted Blink (as BLACKPINK fans are known), you’re likely to feel left cold.

Each piece on V​ė​jula offers a chance at transcendence, even if only for a small moment. Even the quickest glimpses into the beyond are revelatory. It’s heavy work, but always welcome and necessary.

Rome shows how precise the National’s alchemy is: If Devendorf is replaced with a drum machine, if Dessner confines himself to the piano or quiet noodling, if Berninger rambles too far afield, the whole thing falls apart. It’s Alligator deep cut “The Geese of Beverly Road” where Rome best demonstrates the band’s collective power. On record, it’s patient but stiff, held back by a lo-fi drum recording; live, it’s the massive, sweeping anthem early believers always hoped it would become.

Her frank storytelling makes “Coast” the most vivid song on Nobody Loves You More, like the account of a beachside outlaw whose levity is its own triumph. The best moments are when Deal slows her pace and stretches out like a daydream, recalling, more than any of her other bands, her sublime cover of Chris Bell’s “You And Your Sister” with This Mortal Coil in 1991.

3AM’s muted irony dulls the sparkle, leaving the cracks more visible. The album doesn’t have any disastrous lows—but it never quite surpasses that initial dopamine rush, either.

The best songs here are warmed and colored by instrumental flourishes, as with the bright guitar and piano notes on “Demons” or the opening electric noodle of “Tangent Dissolve.” .... The album’s weakest moments come when the band leans on contemplative vibes without evoking any whiff of danger or hallucination.

Petrichor’s many quick pivots are almost guaranteed to provoke occasional frustration that Shake has seized upon a great idea and then let it go. Which tracks provoke it is a matter of taste.

In Dreams isn’t at all a crash-landing, but it is a soft one, as Duster settle into a perception of themselves rather than fly above it.

“Blowing Kisses” serves as the emotional anchor of Castle’s stunning seventh album, Camelot, which feels like the sort of bold breakthrough that her peers in U.S. Girls and the Weather Station respectively experienced with In a Poem Unlimited and Ignorance.

Dorji’s music is rapturously motivational, bolts of pure feeling that at least make me want to be a better citizen of the world. It is perennially honest about the long odds of the struggles that inspire it, too, how the work of fixing this place is never done.

Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that’s part of the pleasure of Small Changes. It’s a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he’s made.

Here, Richard and Zahn have captured grief like a carved piece of obsidian—glossy, beautiful, and sharp.

An album that’s intimate in mood no matter how expansive in sound. .... Generally, the alternate takes offer little more than subtle differences, such as the lack of Indian instrumentation during the middle section of “Living in the Material World,” but the pair of non-LP songs add a dose of good cheer that’s conspicuously lacking on the original album.

Bouquet is as odd as boring gets—an album inspired by her real life that nonetheless comes off as lifeless.

The vibrant, expressive songs on Curyman II return often to this theme: how Brazil's unique cultural identity is a product of its diverse ethnic populations.

Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic.

Sometimes extended improvisation carries with it an expectation of drama, where you think about what just happened and what might come next. This exceptional record fixes your attention on the present moment.

All the best songs stretch toward seven minutes and beyond. A toast to decadent culture! The evident pleasure in the construction and writing of these songs is strong enough to justify lingering on this side of the veil.

If a girl group’s main job is to supply harmonies for days and kick out songs that roll around your head like marble, their debut album, Access All Areas, achieves it all with a decidedly R&B edge.

What LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit.

ny footholds you might find in the record’s craggy surface are slippery by design. But as a result, the pleasures of Space as an Instrument feel hard won, each moment of melody and peace an epiphany amid a backdrop of stormy uncertainty.

For fans who hopped off the bus, Come Ahead is interesting enough to hop back in. It’s also good enough for newcomers who may have discovered Primal Scream via Dua Lipa’s endorsement of “Loaded,” or Gillespie’s participation in one of the past decade’s better memes.

She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing.

The quality of the recording captures the glorious tumult in the band’s interplay, making it visceral and elemental.

The record demonstrates something Kamaru senses more easily than the rest of us, which is the richness and drama of everyday sounds. Natur helps us hear what he hears.

While it doesn’t reach the soaring highs of Gavin’s work with MUNA, What a Relief offers introspective self-portraits whose sound calls back to Gavin’s youth and stories rich with the kind of empathy that’s only gained over time.

The broad sweep of the anthology—from state-sanctioned folk-rock to disco, exotica, musique concrete, and jazz in many guises—offers a breathtaking introduction to Ukrainian music’s scope and diversity.

If you listen to EA2 it seems like the goal isn’t for the album to be divisive or even loved—just for it not to be hated.

Even on an album steeped in melancholy, Berrin finds plenty of moments to be cheeky and theatrical, just like fellow teen queen Olivia Rodrigo and new pop star on the block Chappell Roan.

The first disc contains some of the loveliest songs Phil Elverum has ever written. .... The second disc, meanwhile, demonstrates that touring with the great anti-fascist doom duo Ragana has done wonders for his work.

SABLE, distills the familiar pleasures of Vernon’s extraordinary oeuvre while providing a singular magic all its own—one of refinement and maturation, of clarity and confidence.

Overall, Rønnenfelt seems to focus more on discovery than on crafting a cohesive whole. But Heavy Glory’s most assured tracks—like “Doomsday Childsplay,” with its mournful, Western stomp, or the Lou Reed-influenced “No One Else” (complete with talk-sung vocals and a bassline nicked wholesale from “Walk on the Wild Side”)—show Rønnenfelt’s experimenting and broadened emotional palette paying off considerably.

Evergreen is pristine and light, as indebted to Soccer Mommy’s early sound as it is to the restorative effects of nature.

Songs of a Lost World may not be a vast step up in quality from the highlights of Bloodflowers, 4:13 Dream, or whatever your favorite is of the band’s post-Wish records. (Opinions vary wildly.) But it feels like a record whose time is right, delivering a concentrated dose of the Cure and cutting the fat that dogged their later albums.

For all of CHROMAKOPIA’s hitting-your-thirties ego death confessionals, it’s the braggadocious, Cherry Bomb-sounding tracks that really hit.

Not every big swing makes contact. The ultra-earnest ballads “Big Dreams” and “Bailing on Me” are overly sleepy, and they interrupt the flow the album establishes with its faster songs. Far better are the record’s experimental flourishes, like the sax on “U Should Not Be Doing That” and the inspired, oddball pairing of jaw harp and vocoder on “Me and the Girls.”

Yeat’s linguistic flair has kept him from tipping over into the infinitely derivative personalities of Balenciaga-wearing, blank-Instagram-feed-having twentysomethings, but LYFESTYLE sometimes gets awfully close to the edge. Still, his heavy-handed punch-ins are hefty enough to make a couple dents.

All this pomp and pap is unfortunate, because the moments on the album where Halsey zeroes in on the concrete realities of her life, as opposed to her own ideas of how others perceive her, are some of her most interesting songs in a long while.

The duo’s latest, Rong Weicknes, is their prettiest, poppiest rush-hour prog-jazz clusterfuck yet.

There’s a whole history in these songs. There’s also a certain honesty, plainer here than in Marling’s more ornate work.

This is a slow, steady album; if you thought MJ Lenderman was uncompromising in his lolling tempos, this album might make you feel like time is flowing backward after a few tracks.

Owens has created a leaner and more direct record that uses ultra-crisp and gleamingly bright production to find a whole new way to dream.

They’ve managed to smuggle working-class subject matter into grand, gleaming Britpop without sacrificing their hardcore ethos or the scrappy hope that keeps them in forward motion.

On Fate & Alcohol, Japandroids deliver the conviction that made their early records so great, but cannot overcome the palpable mismatch between their current lives and the characters their newest songs portray.

It’s a “breakout album” from an underground artist designed for the drama and spectacle of live performance as it is deep listening. But, more importantly, it’s soul food for those who know a better world is possible if we’re willing to fight for it.

No knowledge of his long, shadowy history is needed for Dance of Love to work its charms: Its understated joy and gratitude are palpable.

Clouds unfurls its delicate arrangements and startling contrasts across a wider space than Porridge Radio has ever played in before.

The band has lost none of the adventurousness of Lament, but the songs are more direct and immediate, weaponizing Bolm’s hoarse roar in service of the strongest and most surprising hooks of their career to date.

Somewhere between King Tubby and King Buzzo, Machine may not have the irresistible grooves of 2003’s Pressure or the political resonance of 2008’s landmark London Zoo, but—by thudding leaps and earthquaking bounds—is easily the heaviest, ugliest, paint-peelingest record in an already seismic discography.