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.

Emma Maatman’s vocals are the real standout on Free Energy, and one of the band’s most successful adjustments is pushing her gorgeous, expressive tone to the fore.

What’s most exciting about GLORIOUS is its idiosyncrasy. Expanding beyond playlistable trap prerequisites and the wistful soul chops that signal A Serious Rap Album, GloRilla channels the music of her youth, cycling through crunk and gospel with aplomb.

As for now, he has the voice, the pathos, and the charisma required of an American folk hero. Now all he needs are the songs.

Each task is completed hyper-competently if dispassionately, creating a catalog of feats by a band that can seemingly do anything, remarkable in scope but lacking in focus. Mighty Vertebrate proves that Butterss can thrive in whatever world they find themself in. Now they just have to choose which one to conquer.

All the emotions Bridges mines in looking back are flattened into another textural element in the mix, a move that results in an album as comforting as a cool summer breeze—and just as ephemeral.

Although Cool World doesn’t stomp with the same weight of God’s Country, Chat Pile’s stylistic experiments pay off.

Like its sister album, it is unexpected, unfiltered, uncomfortably messy, and dizzyingly fun.

His self-produced beats do more talking than his words, filling in emotional blanks with a 4o-esque fogginess and R&B samples that add some longing to his nonstop raunchiness.

Mixtape Pluto seems to grind every cliche and caricature sketch of Future into pulp, then mold it into something odder, more alien, more jagged and delightfully misshapen.

Ultimately, the album functions as an offering, an effort to commune with the listener despite the limitations of language and the specificity of her pain.

That unpredictable quality control makes Coldplay frustrating to defend or dismiss—for every questionable choice, there’s a 6-minute nu-jazz vamp or classical prog-pop opus waiting around the corner.

Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring.

It’s too frantic, too kinetic, and has too many places to be, which over the course of the album makes the essential beauty of Greep’s singing and the featherlight precision of his band feel like a front they’re tiring of holding up. It’s fitting, even artistically admirable, that such strain makes The New Sound’s music an appropriate wingman for characters who struggle to maintain basic human kindness. But it sure makes for an uncomfortable conversation.

“NO TITLE” is not without its mournful, meditative passages (could an interstitial track called “Broken Spires at Dead Kapital” be anything but?), but the album more frequently provides accessible and expedient pathways to its moments of communal ecstasy. It’s a record that welcomes you in rather than making you work for it.

The Hard Quartet lets us into their circle for just under an hour; it’s hard not to want to bask in its stoned brilliance even longer.

Her songs remain as focused as ever, and she uses these other musicians with the same consideration with which she uses various techniques; nothing is simply spectacle. More than anything else in Williams’ catalog, Acadia is open to tangents, wild ideas, sudden realizations, and sustained moods.

Her writing is focused and concept-driven, often scaffolded around a single word or image. “Coffee” and “Kaleidescope” are lesser examples—not coincidentally, both are rather somber piano ballads—but “Picture You” is perfectly executed, conjuring drawn curtains and flickering candles in the bedroom where Roan fantasizes alone, “counting lipstick stains where you should be.”

AI is simply another tool that will sometimes be used badly and sometimes be used well, and on Honey I think it’s used well.

Blood Incantation not only understand, but delight in what makes the best prog endure: lush textures, dizzying interplay, undeniable groove, a sense of worlds beyond. Toward the end of the album, the band digs into an unsuspectingly aching black-metal churn, the maelstrom building to supernova levels as Riedl’s screams stretch to an infinite howl.

He’s finding new aural and emotional textures within a familiar genre. Those fresh sounds are married to the sturdiest set of songs Strings has written, with defined melodies distinguished by flashes of empathy and wit.

EELS is relentless, hooky, and thematically looser than the band’s full-length debut, 2023’s When Horses Would Run, which reveled in the mythos of the American West. This is music of fine details and huge sentiments.

Mustafa’s pliant, breathy singing holds all these threads together.

For 56 minutes Foxing alternately thrills and confounds but provides little in the way of catharsis.

White Roses, My God won’t be for all Low fans, and though—perhaps as with the strangely comparable posthumous SOPHIE album—its reception will certainly be softened by goodwill, it stands alone. Sparhawk releasing a record this immediate and inchoate feels like a gesture of faith, in both listeners’ patience and the musical futures it might yet bloom.

As a legacy product, it justly preserves these 16 songs, some of which are as good as anything she’s ever done. But it’s hard not to wonder if this is really it. Part of the issue is structural. SOPHIE is roughly comprised of four sections of four tracks each, with the strangest works up front.

Across the album, his voice is helplessly buried beneath vocal processing and mixed conspicuously low, as if to purposely obscure his lyrics. These effects aren’t new to the Voidz, but on Like All Before You, they dominate, obscuring any humanity in Casablancas’ vocals.

Lowe has created something daring and unwavering in Lover, Other. In using her most provocative production to date, she doesn’t dim the shine of her primary instrument—instead, she highlights its brilliance.

Aside from some fleeting hellacious decisions, like the jump scare of a warbling child’s voice that opens the cloying final track “Wonder,” 143 is mostly just…there.

Odyssey isn’t just full of ideas; it’s full of good ideas—rich, challenging, and inspiring in their largess. A decade into the new jazz boom and seven years on from Garcia’s debut EP, Odyssey shows ambition and style.

Tasteful and slick, approachable and antiperspirant, less oceanic ecstasy than the pool party of the year.

At times Wish on the Bone can be non-specific, and the universality of Howerton’s feelings becomes untethered and slippery. Perhaps that’s why the album ends with the brief, incisive finale “I Took the Shot.”

Aside from the sheer invention, what’s most striking about Viewfinder is Eisenberg’s ability to crystallize their complex, nuanced thoughts about the limits of perception without creating new dogma in the process.

This is the first album where Yanya has worked with only one producer, and having a steady collaborator gives the album a cohesion you may not have noticed the previous two didn’t have. The sound is unhurried and lush, with Yanya’s voice confidently tender.

Knotty, distorted, and alien, Shirt operates only in intensity and extremes, an adrenaline shot for a songwriter liable to get lost in dreams.

When Forsyth piles on effects like Quine does, as in the wild wah-wah of “Versatile Switch,” he risks sounding tasteless, too. But these are faults that BASIC are glad to share with their namesake, proof that they truly embrace its sound. For Basic’s devoted fan base, This Is BASIC is evidence, finally, of the album’s enduring influence.

Migratory balances this restlessness with an equanimous serenity unruffled by the gales, confident that Fujita’s scrupulous hand will catch the next updraft.

Now all parts of Shepherd are on display, the scientist-DJ-producer-jazz-musician who can have his cake and eat it, too.

Unfortunately, Fat Dog’s debut slumps right in that tepid puddle, weighed down by gimmicks, cheap irony, and unearned mythology. Rather than stoking rapture or rage, it prods with hollow indifference. More a whimper than a woof.

Richter’s approach is almost too cut-and-dry; there’s none of the messiness that comes with processing emotion or the tension and release that defines catharsis. But closer “Movement, Before all Flowers” offers a welcome surprise.

Endlessness is more than a crafty marvel, or even than the sum of its vaunted parts. It feels like a feat of physics.

With these songs, you can hear the love letter to aughts rap-rock that Bear aimed for, not a misguided attempt at catering to Fortnite players. Unfortunately, most of Hole Erth comes across like the latter.

Mercury Rev have created so many otherworldly symphonies in the past, but there’s very little of their previous ingenuity or vision on Born Horses. Everything shimmers and sparkles in roughly the same way, with very little to distinguish one song from the next.

While contemporary political and personal unrest continues to invade the lives of Molchat Doma’s members—and those of many other people—their music remains firmly rooted in the past. Even if it’s not entirely innovative, it offers a sense of security, and that can be its own reward.

What’s Wrong With New York? isn’t inventive or texturally weird enough to geek the analog synth heads, and its hooks aren’t massive or sticky enough to work as pure pop either. The embrace of pretentiousness and artifice comes at the expense of real emotional complexity and memorably witty writing.

Lenderman has honed his songwriting such that I’d nominate a couplet for short story of the year: “Kahlúa shooter/DUI scooter.” He’s got lines that’ll paint a stupid grin on your face.

Alligator Bites makes Doechii’s stance clear: Nobody puts Doechii in a corner. But if this is the sound of Doechii pushing against constraints, a little friction might not be the worst thing.

Amelia flits briskly from scene to scene, with just enough musical backing to flesh out the atmosphere: shimmering oceanic drones; subtly driving pulses; dissonant whorls abruptly smoothed into reassuring consonance.

Joy isn’t merely happiness felt, it’s happiness earned, and Wild God is a remarkable portrait of a man putting in the work required to cross the threshold.

Ritual holds down his rock-star impulses and ties the album to a specific time and place, settling for the merely pretty instead of the all-consuming. Richly textured and carefully composed, Ritual is an impressive composition, but for Hopkins it feels rote.

In the same way the band’s first records felt like off-kilter interpretations of, say, King Tubby and krautrock, these new ones recast, not retread, what we’ve already heard. Seefeel have still got it, and are still finding new things to do with it.

The Bed I Made is a lovely introduction to their orbit.

As a transitory release, Persona is the best of both worlds: just as ferocious and unrelenting, but with bolder production and deeper hooks.

Though the dreamy atmosphere and embrace of pop formalism make for the band’s most accessible record, You’ll Have to Lose Something is still profoundly challenging.

Nursing wounds while simultaneously trying to put her problems to scale, Tudzin writes unpretentious songs that aim straight for the heart (“I Would Like, Still Love You,” “You Are Not Who You Were”) like the enduring hits of So Jealous.

["Big Mama" is] a brief flash of greatness on an album overwhelmingly satisfied with the mundane.