If you really are the sort of person who's been waiting with bated breath for a new Depeche Mode release, then don't worry: You'll love this. Dear everyone else: It's pretty okay.

Discover a Lovelier you isn't really even a bad album, only unremarkably OK.

Lullabies occasionally evokes early Black Sabbath and nods to a few psych-rock stalwarts but, like most Queens' records, it's oddly unclassifiable. It's also troublingly inconsistent.

Matangi is a disappointing record because of how listlessly over and "beyond" everything it is--to the point that it often feels uncharacteristically weary and out of touch.

Most of these tracks merely feel professional or workmanlike, sincere recordings that sadly lack inspiration.

The newness of it is exciting, and so is the fullness of his vision; between the narcotic mood and the omnipresent murk, Dream a Garden suggests a maze-like expanse within its borders, perfect for getting lost in. Unfortunately, the album only partly lives up to those promises.

His antiquated fantasies still very much belong to him, but it's still a joy to peer inside them--even if the canvases they're displayed on have shrunk ever so slightly.

Though NV is credited with handling the majority of the album’s production (Deradoorian, in turn, is the record’s principal lyricist), she keeps a loose grip behind the boards, allowing some of Deradoorian’s psychedelic krautrock inclinations to slip through. The results are mixed. .... But Deradoorian shines as a lyricist.

Swift's merry melodies and uninhibited sensitivity draw equally on the immaculate piano pop of Carole King's Tapestry and the strummy self-awareness of Jackson Browne's early Asylum Records releases, but it's his noticeable theatricality that sets him apart.

Overall, General Dome's rewards are equal to its considerable demands, proving that there's more to Buke and Gase than a good story.

The album does rather muddle the group's ongoing identity, but hopefully future releases can serve to confirm this album as the watershed it now appears to be.

Major's reliance on words rather than riffs doesn't quite feel as effective or unique in conveying its highness on life. It doesn't sound notably more polished or expensive than its predecessor, just more restrained.

Burna Boy has more than established himself; I Told Them is an adventurous promise that he won’t become complacent.

Garbus continues to examine our political landscape—and her own position in it—with her usual unflinching lyrical style, but this time it’s been metabolized into something more outward-facing and hopeful: songs you can really dance to.

Forget the details: The sheer comfort of this stuff can charm just about anyone, from the rock bar to the office to your grandma's house.

De Casier’s got a soft voice but a big personality, and even at its most muted, Sensational radiates charm.

Craggy and hard as hell, you'll wish Chance of Rain forged a few more such moments [like the title track], but its consistent, nagging ability to knock you off balance is worth wrestling with.

"Midnight Organ Fight" announced with its title that its underlying concern was sex (not getting it, not getting it from who you want, being unfulfilled by it), and the songs on this new album, though more lyrically complex, seem neutered by comparison.

Come to Life shows Cities Aviv putting post-punk, Oneontrix Point Never-like samples (“Realms”), and even a little bit of rap into one holistically new blend.

Planet (i) is bigger and bolder than Squirrel Flower’s previous work, augmenting Williams’ alternate tunings and folkie charm with grand gestures and abrupt tonal shifts. ... Like I Was Born Swimming, Planet (i) grows a bit listless towards the back half (“Desert Wildflowers”), and some of its song fragments don’t quite land.

The Rat Road offers no easy answers and—frankly—not all that much easy listening. But if you’re looking for a sometimes baffling yet often entertaining adventure, The Rat Road delivers.

With Dawson, the focus is on the lyrics, with her music tending to serve as a mere platform for sprawling, humorous stories whose serious subject matter contradicts the childlike catchiness underpinning them.

The political lyrics are the most troublesome.

Though Brandy’s voice remains a beautiful, resonant instrument, her songwriting here is so often functional and humdrum, and her performances rarely sparkle with personality or feeling. It’s obvious she has many stories to tell; what’s less clear is what compels her to tell them, what makes her want to sing.

By now, Nation of Language are well-versed in the ways of “less is more.” On Strange Disciple, they’re also learning what it means to get bigger and better.

These periodic lapses of over-constraint are especially disappointing given the group's obvious talent for making spontaneous mid-air adjustments to their sound; but there's enough evidence here to be optimistic that one day soon the group will gain the swagger necessary to more consistently abandon themselves to their wilder sonic impulses.

Despite the production and sonic sweep, this is a standard rock band working within an oft-stated, faux-experimental dream-pop realm.

The sad fact is, no marketing strategy, no matter how savvy, could conceal this collection's bathetic, overwrought travesties and gruesome failures.

As a singer, he's remarkable and distinctive, and on Cellar Door, he explores the range and impact of his voice to great effect.

Gold comes off as clean, shiny, and over-the-top as Elliott Smith's XO, replete with strings, horns, and female backup singers. I double-checked the credits. Jon Brion wasn't listed.

Equally inspired by The Raincoats and Jacques Brel, The Power Out veers from one inspired genre tribute to the next, if it never quite cements the band's identity.

An exhilarating but disorienting ride.

A fairly nice little slab of French Anglo-pop, and pleasant reading accompaniment if you can reach the skip button from where you're sitting.

Quest for Fire's sophomore release, Lights From Paradise, is less stoner rock than stoned rock, marked by a patient pace and a foggy-headed whimsy that lingers even as the VU levels surge into the red.

All in all, Fly Zone is an epically audacious record, boiling down to essentially a 13-track demand from Le1f to be allowed access to a mainstream audience without sacrificing a shred of the identity that sets him apart from nearly every rapper a mainstream audience has been drawn to.

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.

Zoospa’s musical elements feel cohesive, even as they bounce across genres and eras, often within the same song.

When celebration seems impossible, music like Harlecore can ferry you to a world that’s brighter and more interesting than your own.

The Great Regression has fun pointing out the world’s contradictions, subverting its vulgarity, questioning its systems. At its peaks, it feels like an antidote for the ennui of ceaseless catastrophe.

This is the Joyce Manor album for Joyce Manor fans—a loving, uncynical refinement of the band’s best.

There’s still plenty of pop culture shoutouts and nods to modern mundanity delivered in a deadpan voice, but at their best they feel less like provocations and more like world-building details—observations of a messy world contextualized with messy anxieties about growing up.

Refining the sprawling sound of Souvenir, Portrait of a Dog is produced entirely by the Toronto group BADBADNOTGOOD, encasing Yano’s melancholy lyrics and tranquil guitar playing in a more casual environment and giving the album a meditative, inviting tone.

In its effort to reach the masses, Special has the unfortunate fault of both trying too hard to hit the zeitgeist—like the nonsensical Tesla metaphor on opener “The Sign”—and striving for pure blahtitude. ... In fact, when it comes to happiness, some of the most satisfying songs on Special—the ones that come closest to finding inner peace—are also the most subdued.

Tucker’s titanic vibrato and ferocious conviction are the anchors of Little Rope. She has audibly risen to the occasion, in every note, to support her friend.

Dreamt for Light Years proves less targeted than 2001's It's a Wonderful Life, but this is a check in the plus column: Linkous sounds best when he's warring with structure and sound, when his songs sound unsettled.

The album on the whole is a solid, self-aware addition to Jimmy Eat World’s catalog, and if the band’s modest strivers’ outlook has proved anything, it’s that there will be another. A band whose biggest song is against writing oneself off always has work to do.

Pretty Little Head is better than her debut. It's less showy, more confident, tighter, lacking antics-- it's confounding stylistically, just as her debut was, but less an act of throwing ideas at the wall.

I prefer to think of Lookout Mountain as an album of pretty-good songs from a guy who has written some unbelievably great ones, and will, more than likely, write some more of that quality down the road.

The band's now-routine gospel-like chanting grows tiresome by album end (they miss Vanderhoof's vocals), and, as was expected, Set ‘Em Wild doesn't necessarily expand the band's sound so much as further splinter their interest.

Instead of shoehorning references to celebrity into some tracks, she's borrowing elements and templates and simply focusing on quality control. The weird result is that, despite her flitting between personalities and personas, her music feels more like her own here than it did on her debut LP.

Over a well-played hand of wistful, bright-eyed and reflective beats, HNDRXX strikes a near-perfect balance between a man still licking his wounds and a man emerging from a long, dark night.

The early-stage versions of a few Ultramega OK tracks that round out this reissue ... add to the story by showing how much more precise the band got in the year or so after they recorded the Screaming Life EP, with the two versions of the single-chord grind “Incessant Mace” showing how that song’s brimming dread was the result of a fair amount of experimentation.

Unburdened by nostalgia, accepting the world as is while avoiding complacency, Made of Rain isn’t a comeback—it’s a new road.

Perfect Picture hits its sweet spot with the mid-album trio of “Flashback,” “No FX,” and “Lip Sync.” “Flashback” tenderly reflects on a bygone relationship, lowering the emotional temperature a notch, before the sugary love song “No FX” picks it back up again to become the album’s shimmering centerpiece

If Crumb’s first two full-lengths squeezed worlds into safety-sized containers, this record is as authoritative as they’ve ever sounded. It sprawls in the vein of psych-pop genre-benders King Krule and Toro y Moi, but also manages to feel singular, a standalone statement of their ever-evolving identity.

Why, pray tell, did Elbow decide to start sounding less like Radiohead rip-offs and more like midlife-crisis Travis?

It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect.

While he might elicit the specific from his listeners, his music--especially here--is general. This is his gift and the gift of effective storytellers: to build toward the general by using the specific.

Sadly missing here is Ash's sense of vulnerability, a key element to their charm.

Slayer being timely is not Slayer being timeless. But the way they're still playing, they sure sound like it.

This is the product of a dynamic and assured vision, one that retains an alluring sense of mystery.

O'Neil's certainly made her share of enrapturing, enveloping music. But I'm not sure she's ever made one quite as transportive--or, for that matter, as alive--as Where Shine New Lights.

Plants and Animals may not be the first band to put Montreal on the musical map, but, with this album's there's-no-place-like-home vibe, they are certainly the first to celebrate it so warmly

He's probably not going to be a break-out star, but it's hard to imagine that there will be many more original or satisfying rap long-players this year.

A complex, even contradictory record, not just the Black Swans' best but one of the most incisive and moving mediations on life and the loss of it in recent memory.

The resulting sound feels neither modern nor particularly retro, although it's certainly arguable that the music's buffed up, high-gloss late night classicism resembles just a bit too strongly the kind of music that, say, Poker Flat label boss Steve Bug was playing nine years ago.

These ninety-second-ish ditties are too gaunt and echo-ridden to stand alone as memorable singles, but within the tempestuous framework of the album, their vulnerability hits like a late-summer thunderstorm.

As on previous albums from the Trio, the overarching vibe remains murky and muddled, like a strong joint on top of a hangover on a humid, overcast day. But they cover more range than ever before.

The hooks on “Alibi” and “Keep It Alive” hit with scream-along jollity, even if Cabral’s punk turn means we get less of the fairytale quality that made her earlier work bewitching—and even if the drums sound curiously flimsy at times, crushed underfoot

Whether it be for a lazy day under the shade or a muggy evening of shared, muted physicality, Tuff Times Never Last welcomingly meets you in the moment.

Together [with producer Gaslamp Killer] they've created A Sufi and a Killer, one of the most fascinating slabs of hallucinogenic head-nod music to arise from Southern California's post-hip-hop vanguard.

In a world that is newly full of "content" at every turn, it can be refreshing to find an uncompromising record that exists so honestly on its own.

More deeply satisfying than extraordinary, it seems unlikely to displace anyone's favorite Camera Obscura record, but neither is it a negligible entry in one of the smartest and most loveable discographies in contemporary indie-pop.

Mew’s most consistently engaging record, even if it’s also the longest on both a cumulative and per-song basis.

There’s a nagging instinct that pop songs are supposed to have more pieces to them, or that drummer Eric McGrady is supposed to be using more than half of a drum set. Stick with it, though, and something even better emerges from those gaps. By leaving their songs exposed, Dehd show how much they believe in them, and rightfully so. Their confidence in their concision is the best part.

You could knock Magic for being backward-facing, but then again, all of Nas’s music is backward-facing. It’s charming when he revisits his own gospels, but the nostalgia act would be easier to swallow if it weren’t so resentful.

Different Talking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for short songs—only two tracks of its 17 pass the two-and-a-half-minute mark—but Kline and the band make each feel like a universe in miniature.

Ripped and Torn is the sound of a band making music with the care and attention of a kid standing over a Risograph, printing up the interviews his friends have typed up for their zine, leaving fingerprints on every page.

Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse.

It's deadly entertaining in bursts-- especially if you pick out the right bursts.

Sometimes the fervor gets to be too much for them: the grating but mercifully brief "Blood for You" is little more than the junkyard clang of the rhythm section and Sollee's stuck-pig shout, and the verses "Cradle on Fire" seem to get away from Sollee, who loses the melody somewhere in the back of his throat. But there's few moments when they don't seem to be throwing everything they've got into these performances, and that furious intensity drives them past both rough patches and easy comparisons.

Robinson sings with a newfound clarity on Nurture, writing directly about his struggles and the ecstatic realizations that have come from hard times.

The most striking element of Long Time Coming is the one that made Ferrell go viral in the first place—her voice.

R&B informed the Sonics’ unhinged passion from the get-go, and This Is the Sonics pays proper homage to the group’s roots.

Anthology is a bold, often dazzling throwback, a grand suite rendered in crystalline keyboards and lavish synths.

In a year in need of centering and a sense of calm, Phantom Brickworks lives up to its name; it feels haunted while also offering up a hope to rebuild.

These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.

What The Golden Casket is missing is the kind of contagious earworm that made Modest Mouse radio mainstays. There’s no “Float On” here. There’s not even a “Dashboard.” But the album rewards the time and patience it demands in a way the last couple haven’t.

On Nothing Valley--the first release from Wax Nine, a Carpark Records subsidiary launched by Speedy Ortiz bandleader Sadie Dupuis--Melkbelly reach their hands into pink slime and somehow pull out real nourishment, along the way finding square footing for a mutual next step.

Far from perfect-- at times even dull-- these songs balance their heavy despair with genuine, if hesitant, hope.

Though her approach has calcified, the environments generated by her records are still singular, a gentle, untroubled, indefinite ambience that is very soothing to inhabit. It's like being embraced by the air.

HTRK are at their most vulnerable here, sounding in desperate need of sating desires before they are paralyzed by listlessness and disappointment.

What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.

Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox.

Clean is that much-cooler indie record Taylor once sung of. Below the surface, its spark gleams like a secret.

The album is so densely packed that it’s easy to miss Marr’s overarching themes, a shame exacerbated by his habitual neglect to draw attention to his lyrics. A pleasantly flat, unassuming singer, he functions mostly as a conduit for his melodies, which is only a detriment on an album with so much potential thematic resonance.

No Wow steps up to the promise of their EPs and debut LP, a boisterous reminder that kids can still hook up to songs that are little more than a guitar and attitude.