Single lines don’t really stand out, but Morby’s commitment to such elemental concerns has a cumulative effect, and the album’s lack of specificity becomes a strength. That confidence extends to musical choices, including Morby’s tendency to let the small details of the sound do the work.

Her nervy assessments of the world are filled with equal parts suspense and heart, and beautifully zany riffs, where the feeling of being frayed by uncertainty comes together into a strangely comforting patchwork.

On Jettison, Tanton quietly sits down, picks up his guitar, and, without fuss or self-importance, transforms himself into a singer-songwriter. Surely that is a statement worth making.

It would have been a lot more of an interesting listen, however, had he decided to really get his hands dirty in feedback and digital fuzz.

The Hope Six Demolition Project is her most exhilarating rock album in years, yoking the siren-like catchiness of her last great America-influenced album, Stories From the City… to the swamp-tarnished filth of her classic first three records, Dry, Rid of Me, and To Bring You My Love. It’s leering, brash, and dissonant, but also not without its warmth.

For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug.

Psychic Lovers does try out a few different hues within its fairly limited palette, but they mainly just add to the confusion.

As the band’s tightest, most approachable album, Standards feels like Into It. Over It.’s answer to Transatlanticism, a record that, while not quite a commercial crossover, feels like a trial run for one.

Nothing short of a name change will likely convince skeptics at this point, but Gore proves that Deftones can remain vital as they are relevant, if they don’t kill each other first.

On More Issues Than Vogue, Michelle's third album, the performer and musician delivers her most affecting, skillful, and innovative record yet.

For all the guitar pyrotechnics, Western production, and reggae infusions, Azel never sounds like anything other than a sublime iteration of desert blues.

[Big Sean is] prone to rambling, will drag schemes out too long, and he isn't afraid to overcommit. But he strings together enough solid stretches to keep tracks moving. Still, Aiko is often the saving grace, holding songs together and delivering the better verses.

What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing.

In the end, though, it’s that feeling of disposability that makes the album’s title resonate more pointedly in the wrong way.

There's no question that many of Lost Time's lyrics are funny, but the attitude that fueled NVM feels crushed. In both the vocal delivery and the driving guitars, the vibe is damper, the color somewhat drained.

Despite its minimalistic approach, the album poignantly illustrates the binary oppositions that cropped up in Hiroshima’s wake: life and death, hope and fear, war and peace, atomic and organic.

At its best, Human Performance is Parquet Courts in a mellower, heart-stopping Velvet Underground mode, but it is also at turns upbeat and funny, sensitive and odd. Compositionally, these are the most dynamic Parquet Courts songs yet.

All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before.

There's not a lot of forward motion here; motifs and timbres repeat across the record, and while many tracks flow seamlessly from one to the next, his open-ended constructions give the album a rewardingly meandering feel.

Out My Feelings doesn’t have the rawness of In My Feelings, but its production is impeccable where that one was spotty, and it soars when Boosie reminisces on his pre-rap days or makes statements in line with Black Lives Matter about the murders of unarmed black people by cops.

A gorgeous, unassuming little record, it is Silver's most sophisticated virtual environment yet; disappear into it for a while, and you may come back with a newfound appreciation for sounds you once thought irredeemable--yes, even slap bass.

On Slay-Z, there are hints of that power. They don’t shine nearly as bright as her almost flawless debut record, but they keep us watching and listening.

This time Osborne, Kunka, Rutmanis and Crover all sing leads in various spots, which gives Three Men and a Baby a loose, freewheeling vibe, especially when coupled with the variety in the music.

The directness with which it speaks to its audience makes it easy to imagine Celebration inspiring a lot of its younger listeners to start a band. For anyone else, it’s just an inspiring testament to indie rock’s continued vitality.

Still curious, still appraising, Bird offers an intellect remarkably porous to change.

Kooshanejad works by breaking down samples into unrecognizable blips of sound, and then layering them up into thickets of melody and rhythm. There is the sense that any individual noise could be one locus on a larger waveform, any melodic line or rhythmic figure a patchwork of them.

It is a painfully raw, emotionally generous, politically charged, intensely intelligent, sometimes unlistenable album.

The songs here aren't necessarily breaking new ground stylistically, but that really isn't what matters. At this point, Mould clearly has nothing left to prove.

With songs that play like a grab-bag of genres and lyrics that have little of the humor or self-awareness the band displayed in the past, it's hard to muster the patience to uncover anything deeper.

The first five songs at least are totally gorgeous, the strings glassy, the tone all understated seduction, the structures fluid and surprising. ... By the Homme-tinged desert rider "Used to Be My Girl," misanthropy has set in.

All kudos go to Boots for parlaying this influence he’s garnered producing the likes of Beyoncé, Run The Jewels and FKA twigs to help craft this record for a band whose breakthrough moment has eluded them for long enough.

At once cosmically huge and acutely personal, Zauner captures grief for the perversely intimate yet overwhelming pain it is. Long may she keep at this music thing.

The five tracks here differ from their predecessors only by degrees, so if you liked the previous records there's little here to find too upsetting, but as an EP it feels like a stopgap ahead of the next Com Truise album.

Super elaborates and intensifies Electric’s approach: Louder, brighter, more. It doesn’t have the sustained arc of that album, but Price specializes in renovating house and disco, modernizing with care, and his small details still beguile.

It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured [than 2013's Cupid's Head].

He's a skilled enough songwriter that he could probably pull off an entire sobering album about this stuff. Instead he made a really fun, self-effacing one.

There may be no artist more committed to the line as a creative medium than Nisennenmondai; projected through Sherwood's spacetime-distorting lens, their vision of infinity becomes all the more engrossing.

Many of the songs ("Embody," "On the Lips," "Too Dark" and "Sleep Song") on the album have appeared in acoustic permutations in past work, and they make the leap seamlessly. Each are marvelously well-wrought trains of thought, cramming existential questions into the banality of everyday moments and finding something beatific even in the plainest of things.

All told, Fleeting isn't as distinct or as instant as its predecessors, particularly Jones' 2011 masterpiece, The Wanting.

As frustrated as those songs are, there's also a ruminative quality to their lyrics that carries throughout the album. It feels like the product of a man finally settling down after years of travel and activity, and not liking what he sees.

Where they once aspired to be your blood-pumping druganaut, Black Mountain now excel at the art of making you uncomfortably numb.

Changes’ lyrics are immediately and sometimes overly familiar, but Bradley’s unmistakable voice is the obvious draw throughout.

The pace is unhurried, and Gibson offers a cathartic tale of loss and redemption, set against a gorgeous sonic backdrop. She sounds newly confident, invigorated, and free.

A Mineral Love bursts with cheerful, candy-colored falsetto funk, not unlike Ambivalence, while leaving out the crunch and glitch, letting the instruments breathe.

The tape plays like a final installment, going out with a bang and saving some of the series' best for last.

We listen to Weezer in 2016 largely for nostalgic dog whistles. We listen because Blue retreads like "Endless Summer" and "Summer Elaine and Drunk Dori" offer Proustian pleasures in spite of their obviously-recycled frameworks, and because the simpering, sweet "L.A. Girlz" is the group's best single since "Island in the Sun."

Though it's Moderat's strongest record, III isn't quite all killer. The very Field-like "Finder" bounces its vocal loop into the pocket, but it doesn't show off the songcraft found on songs like "Reminder," which might have sprung from a solo album by Thom Yorke.

Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced.

Lacking compelling hooks, a unifying mood, or a clear narrative, his debut is oddly inflexible and over-calculated.

Even as they explore alien aesthetics, the Body and Full of Hell are constantly finding ways to uphold the spirit of each other's work.

Wuthering Drum is a work seemingly unconcerned about giving you what you want, but what it does provide is almost enough.

These songs feel personal. They tug at important moments. It's a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. Of all their records, it's ultimately the one that sounds the most like the image their band name evokes.

Much like the producer’s former offerings, Dame Fortune tries to be everything all at once, making for a good listen with occasional lapses.

Each song is well-structured and wise beyond its years while the messages are confused, delicate and very, very teenage. This is the sound of growing up smart.

At 11 tracks, it's longer than 2 and lacks the experimentation of Drink More Water 5, and it drags.

Daughter is best when it's specifically first-person, when Price bends country to fit her own story rather than bend herself to fit the form.

After two albums that struggled with the growing divide between the serious band they seemingly longed to be and the bubblegum punk band listeners want them to be, The Thermals strike the right balance on We Disappear, an album that manages to satisfy both camps.

A frequently gorgeous, sometimes roiling set that stands out in each artist’s catalog.

Glitterbust is not unlike Gordon's other recent duo, Body/Head, though less bold. Still, it feels like a gift to spend time in the oceanic space Gordon and Knost summon, letting its nuances wash over you.

Vroom Vroom is pointedly uncommercial and abrasive.

At times it almost sounds as if they know they've taken their current sound as far as it can go and seem palpably frustrated they can't figure out their next move.

Baauer and the other artists meet the heavyweight expectations head-on.

Hinton has an ability, not unlike the Books when they first hit the scene 14 years ago, of making shopworn techniques in sound manipulations seem strangely fresh, and Potential is the kind of music that makes you think about what your own part in a seemingly passive musical transaction of music might mean.

While the ground it covers is startling and often picturesque, Grapefruit is an album you feel led through, rather than being left to explore or inhabit.

As put-together as Good Grief’s presentation is, and as ingratiating as its songs are, the record suffers from a distinct lack of identity.

Festival is refreshingly cohesive, exploring varied themes without drifting off-course.

By the fourth or fifth trip through Gensho, the idea begins to slip into pure gimmickry, as though this were a notion that sounded fun for old friends to try but isn't so fun to hear.

Stefani’s focus on the good times alternates with songs where she expresses cartoonish anger by awkwardly rapping and shouting non-sequiturs (“Naughty,” “Red Flag”), and neither mode plays to her strengths as a songwriter and signature vocalist. Her best songs are the ones in which she is audibly upset.

No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record.

Massive Attack were always equally as good producers as they were curators; it's promising that, as much of their old sound as they've retained, they've kept this as well.

What is most impressive about The Last Panthers is the way in which Clark has taken all of this incidental music and shaped it into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of an imagined visual story as The Last Panthers show itself.

If there's emotional utility to be found in Epic Jammers, it's in how meditative, trancelike, and overwhelmingly positive this hour of music is.

Many of the songs here sound not just derivative but generic. Compassion still feels like the album that Lust For Youth have been working toward this whole time--it just turns out that the journey may have been more rewarding than the destination.

For the most part, the songs on Cosmic American Music slip into the ether without much to keep them earthbound.

As a guitarist, Forsyth has a clear and immediately identifiable voice. His tones and melodies are familiar yet fresh, at once embodying grace and freakiness, tradition and experimentation, the past and the present.

The bracing, sometimes violent collision of rock ‘n’ roll and dance music that’s powered Primal Scream’s best work has been melted down here into mercurial droplets--shiny and radiant, to be sure, but ultimately non-descript.

By wearing their influences on their sleeve while never slipping into gimmickry, HÆLOS are able to pull off an impressive trick, a debut record that both cements them in a genre and leaves then room to grow.

A good 80% of You and I, the latest album of the lot, consists of covers, many already released in some format.... The new material includes a version of "Grace" that is basically a fully formed demo, while "Dream of You and I" is barely even that; the title is literal, Buckley thinking aloud about a dream he had about a band’s "space jam," which inspired him to write what’d eventually become "You and I."

3001: A Laced Odyssey does an adequate job of reminding us all of Flatbush Zombies’ smart, sharp lyrics. What they lack in hit-single potential, they make up for in talent, but without a calling-card song it's hard to know what their next move is.

The Body has always been obsessed with feelings of consuming futility, and in kicking free of conventional structures and following Wolpert's lead, they've come closer than ever to their truest selves on record.

Underworld’s never had trouble getting listeners to their feet. This gorgeously love-drunk finale makes Barbara a record that can bring them to their knees.

Petrol, a looser, messier album, does a better job of communicating new ideas, and its emotional depth feels less gestural and more genuine.

Though it’s mostly a pleasant record, there’s not much from it that sticks around long after listening--for all the talk of deluge, More Rain manages to wash itself away.

The unusual dependence on space in the arrangements can make the interiors of Låpsley’s songs seem uncannily empty, glassy structures with their insides removed so all that’s left is angled crystal.... But in other instances her voice dissolves into an overabundance of negative space, and listening to the less-inspired sections of Long Way Home can feel like trying to remember something boring that happened to you once.

None of these songs would have the same effect if rushed, which is what set Big Ups apart from many of their peers.

Overall Brute is a frustrating mish-mosh of middling and artful. When it’s working, there is a certain panache in the high-powered, informationally dense musical speedballs she creates.

If Post Pop Depression’s refined execution has you missing the more unhinged Iggy of old, rest assured, he’s not going down without a fight.

Arcology, like its predecessor, is a genre study first and foremost, rearranging familiar elements according to McRyhew's own idiosyncratic vision.

Where Walker sings more naturally, with easier tones, Cleaver's shy, young-old voice is a reassuring presence beneath the music’s astral blanket. That they both sound overwhelmed by Forever Sounds’ vast scale is in fact the record’s saving grace; as ever, Wussy’s proximity to ordinariness is precisely what makes them lovable.

More often than not, ColleGrove plays out like 2 Chainz pulling his friend and mentor up by his bootstraps while ceding a bit of the spotlight in the process. It’s a generous gesture, but a costly one.

She wears her obvious theoretical grounding lightly and never lets it obstruct her ecstatic quest for new ideas and deranged stimuli. And Varmints is a knockout, the kind that makes you see cartoon stars.

In My Feelings often feels as if its about to collapse under its own weight, which is doubly frustrating when you consider it clocks in at a slight 34 minutes.

As a record, Eraser Stargazer is sometimes weirdly hookless and ponderous. There’s plenty of stoner fog, but not always much to grip. It is a forward move for the band, though.

Despite the agitation and raw nerves, the album feels like a therapeutic offering.

Poliça is a group with too much collected talent for that; as in life these days, one only waits and hopes the clouds will clear.

As with TPAB, untitled unmastered. demands to be approached on its own terms, even when you don't know what those terms are. You can't say he didn't try for you, ride for you, or push the club to the side for you.

Neither stale tribute nor sloppy lovefest, Headspace aims for simple fun and hits it square, like a T-16 targeting womp rats back on Tatooine.

The resulting album, the most resolutely electronic work he's done yet, buzzes like an ice-cream headache.