Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.

Kings of Convenience would do well to assimilate more of Øye's electronic leanings into their original sound, rather than merely mining sad troubadours past for inspiration and leaving these tracks as sparse source material for the obligatory remix album.

This Is a Photograph succeeds not because of its nostalgic freight but in spite of it, and Morby’s dialogues with the living, not the dead, are when he speaks most clearly.

Harvey remains mostly reverential to his sacrilegious source, but Delirium Tremens is much more than just Gainsbourg fed through Google Translate. Rather, it amplifies the unsettling undercurrents that always stewed beneath Gainsbourg’s impeccable arrangements.

Working outside of the framework of the pop song, Merritt is left to explore more exotic sound sources and song structures. Unfortunately, without that framework, these elements often fail to amount to anything significant, providing somewhat interesting, meandering background music, but little more.

Aside from "Valkyrie", Together is a solid collection of well-crafted songs. However, in spite of the quality, the album isn't entirely satisfying.

The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date. Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project.

Slime Language captures one of the most boundless rappers of his era operating near his peak. That it has a bill of goods to sell does little to diminish its accomplishments.

Bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk.

Despite these more reflective moments, Zipper Down mostly sticks to the formula of the duo’s past three albums, frequently recycling structural and instrumental elements from past songs.

Dramatic and driving, it never quite escapes the upper atmosphere, though thick loopy synth shapes provide an ample climax, showing how this band can go bigger without forsaking its cloistered center.

There is a lot of music about anxiety in the air these days, but Ellen Kempner’s voice is specific and visceral.

Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest.

Though he sticks closely to the conservative R&B, blues, and jazz modes that have defined his ’00s discography, the LP’s 14 songs showcase his determination to wring profundity out of even the most common language.

As an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing--and, more importantly, totally satisfying.

Some of Commune is pretty splendid.

COLD 2 THE TOUCH honors Angel Du$t’s tradition of fast songs and feisty spirit, but it also affirms that they’ll never settle for retreading ground they’ve already stomped on.

At its best, Blume is a testament to the rich aesthetic diversity of London’s jazz scene.

The album’s most affecting moments zero in on Albarn’s close relationship with nature, one built on trust and deference.

While this record's sense of self and attention to detail deserve to be praised, a small shift in Lanza's positioning and prominence could be the change that takes her next project from good to great.

So Embarrassing is a bold change in direction for Capillary Action, but one that pays off as well as one could hope.

Only once, on the wallowing “You Don’t Know What Love Is,” does the record get so caught up in its imagined misery that it becomes an actual buzzkill. Otherwise, Gillespie and Beth execute these songs with the tact of seasoned studio pros and the vigor of a couple crushing shared Righteous Brothers favorites at karaoke.

At their best, Pulse Emitter’s tracks trade ambient music’s aimless drift for deep compositional structure.

That this isn’t a more ornate, Watch the Throne-type album is a bit deflating; the two collab tracks between the duo–“Leadbelly” and “Kirkland”–display how much of their synergy is left untapped across the 31 other tracks. It took some living with this record for it not to feel like a homogeneous, just-decent meld of MIKE and Earl throwing shots up in an empty gym.

It's a damn good pop album, with a little muscle behind its melodies to boot.

In total, Stitches is exactly the sort of Americana record that can act as antidote for what’s happening in the genre right now.

She’s doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold--and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm.

For an album reportedly inspired by Carl Sagan, the 10-song, 36-minute Momentary Masters is remarkably lean and focused.

Despite Haliechuk and Falco’s bombastic concept, Dose Your Dreams functions similar to the recent hip-hop blockbusters that share its 82-minute length, best enjoyed in chunks or humming in the background between the singles.

The band sell their introspection by marrying it to convincingly urgent music. It’s also a lot of fun; all the flying guitar chords and thumping beats inevitably quicken pulses.

This is exactly what Cornershop has always been so good at, and which occasionally comes through on Lemon-- expecting us to be on the same page, and feeling no need to explain anything to those who aren't.

It’s Shelton who confidently ties everything together and insinuates a larger story arc in the sequencing.

Lyrically and musically, this album is built to pursue the felicity of spirit that can come with following an expertly manicured path, which is another way of saying it goes where it wants without worrying about the weight of other peoples’ expectations. You can travel so much farther when you pack light.

Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further.

The soft edges of Roped In make it both a sublime record in its own right as well as a pleasant, inviting portal into a wider world of simpatico artists. The album feels like the aural equivalent of gazing into a massive and well-appointed aquarium, a vessel for color and movement that quietly soothes as it shuttles along.

Here Ambarchi shows how sharp about-turns and starkly dissimilar contrasts can be equally potent.

It’s classic Hornsby: both squirrely and crowd-pleasing, weirder than you’d expect but as traditionally, autobiographically confessional as he’s ever allowed himself.

Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.

A New Found Relaxation suggests a New Mexico healing experience that’s both IRL and online. The samples move quickly, spiking the ambience with appropriate doses of anxiety.

This is not the music of men trying to be cool; it is the work of veterans unafraid to express mature emotions with an appropriate level of musical depth and nuance.

Good for You finds the Portland rapper, born Adam Daniel, sounding charming, clever, and carefree.

Not surprisingly, Art Department are at their lachrymose best not when trying to uncover house's absences, but when redrawing ever more finely what was always already there.

Cola haven’t reinvented the wheel, but these subtle experiments suggest they still have boundaries to push.

Harness doesn't deliver many surprises or follow through on the promise of the debut; it simply refines the sounds they explored and digs its heels in a little deeper.

Ultimately, Wyatt has made a sadly triumphant album that questions how our minds remember what they remember.

So while Violence Unimagined ranks as a top tier late-era Cannibal Corpse record, its triumphs are somewhat understated. It features plenty of impressive turns from drummer Paul Mazurkiewicz and some particularly inspired songs from guitarist Rob Barrett (“Murderous Rampage,” “Inhumane Harvest”). It is also at least their third studio album that feels like a conscious restart.

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

V for Vaselines leaves a lasting pop smear.

Basically, this is exciting, skilled, fist-pumping, true-to-life stuff made by good-seeming guys who, in the end, aren't afraid to laugh, goof around, or make fun of themselves.

Were its hooks not as strong, She's in Control would probably come across as mechanical and calculated, but its many bright spots elevate it above being just a shrewdly timed exercise in cultural re-appropriation.

As a collective, the Impossible Truth maintains the spiritual minimalism of Tyler’s solo work while expanding the sound.

Swallowed whole, Autumn Was a Lark can seem sonically disjointed, but it's also an apt representation of Portastatic's ever-roaming muse.

This is one of the reasons it's important to approach Discontinued Perfume as a full album, intentionally put together in a certain order. The Caribbean have never been what you'd call a singles act anyway, but here you need to take in the whole picture the band is painting.

Tie on the celebrity blindfold, and Broken Boy Soldiers no longer seems like that much of an achievement-- just another case of men recreating their favorite vinyl deep cuts, if a bit more skillfully than most FM scrapbookers.

Instead of justifying or summarizing two decades of work, Tyler and McDonnell set them aside and come up with a concise, lovely album that, like a gentle tourist, takes only pictures, leaves only footprints.

Cellophane Memories may be pretty, but it’s not easy.

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.

Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads.

The record is perhaps a more extreme a transformation than that of Patrick Wolf.

This is a brutally loud album, its low end practically steroidal; downstrokes are accompanied by walloping thwacks, rendering the guitar a percussive instrument as much as a tonal one. Few records—certainly few records that take their cues from the heaviest strains of metal—can boast such a vast dynamic range.

Aguayo’s productions have frequently flashed a sly sense of humor, but the mood here is driven, focused, heads-down. His drum programming is as slinky as ever, but there’s a newfound force to it; his drums could double as battering rams.

Together, they have managed to build a livelier, more bustling version of Hauschka's winsome snowglobe universe.

The true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity.

It maintains a simultaneously sleek and sludgy quality across its 35 minutes, like a cornstarch slurry gluing the whole thing together.

Duckart’s second album, Death in the Business of Whaling, further develops his creative identity by adding a little mystery, opting for abstract, free-associative musings over straightforwardly confessional songwriting.

The most dynamic of Austra’s albums, HiRUDiN cultivates the raw pleasure of pop hooks without shying from the strangeness and discordance that has lit up the project since its 2011 debut.

The lyrics’ pastiche of observations and fleeting memories isn’t always clear enough to be emotionally resonant, to cause you to ponder their meaning after the song stops playing. Instead, the appeal is in the temporary pleasure of listening. There is an unhurried joy in these arrangements.

Despite some interesting accoutrements (tasteful trumpets yay, bombastic strings meh) and some game attempts at eclecticism (acoustic pluck wicked, piano ballad oh geez), Stars of CCTV is of a part with the varied guitar-driven stuff that their fellow Mercury nominees-- Bloc Party, Kaiser Chiefs, etc.,-- have offered folks this past year.

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.

The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.

Dionysus is an album of radical ambition, a work of scholarly pursuit and musical depth that explores European folk traditions, the boundaries of language, and Latin American bird calls.

Crooked Wing promises to be a career highlight, then doesn’t quite deliver. Its first half is consistently astonishing, but its final third dips a little too far into the cryptic and lugubrious.

An unshowily eclectic record warmed by the glow of new love, is the group’s third and strongest album since signing to Fire Talk in 2021.

Winds Take No Shape seems to be the response to critics who called for more depth and less of the wide-eyed cuteness rampant on their self-titled debut. Their music is still lighter-than-air, but a newfound strain of wistfulness brings it closer to earth.

At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her.

For most of its 50-plus-minute runtime, Bieber appears, finally, entirely unencumbered. .... When Bieber dissociates into safe territory, alongside rappers Gunna, Sexyy Red, and Cash Cobain, on a trio of totally adequate but otherwise impersonal, paint-by-numbers R&B love songs, the specter of an algorithmic Spotify playlist looms. .... SWAG’s riskiest and most unexpected, are its most rewarding.

Over the course of 6 Feet's 52 minutes, the sound loses some of its essential mystery. Marshall still has a blood-freezing voice, someone to pay attention to, but 6 Feet Beneath the Moon doesn't feel like his Big Statement, not yet.

Faster and friskier than expected, No Gods, No Masters is their strongest album since Version 2.0.

Until in Excess rewards patience, but the roar of old is missed.

The new album finds Boris honing in on their most essential quality: their ability to wrest a kind of endless subtlety from thick layers of distortion and volume.

A Treasure is the first entry to put the spotlight on a less celebrated stretch of his career. As such, this choppy compilation of Harvesters tour highlights allows us to reassess some of Young's 80s output outside its contentious context.

It's not a case of Solange performing best when she jettisons her ambition, but rather her need to find a way to let her avant inclinations work with rather than against her pop instincts, and maybe the best way for that to happen is to let the former emerge organically through the latter.

The scale and intensity of Cook’s ambitions are laid bare on this outsized collection, a glimpse at the whirring cogs beneath hyperpop’s pristine casing.

While Ice Level's an awful lot to process, it's the finest sort of overload; listen closely enough, and you can almost hear your circuits being rewired.

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.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the heavy emotional inspiration behind Sia's trebly moans drags on over the course of 50 minutes.

Thankfully, once the album gathers the necessary steam, LOGGERHEAD’s world-weary portraits of survival take on a sharper focus.

Ultimately, End It All, is another well-earned notch in Beans' solo belt and a testament to the strength of his artistic vision-- anyone who can get a convincing hip-hop beat out of Interpol surely deserves some kind of ambassadorship.

If their first album, 2015’s Momentary Lapse of Happily, was intimate as a dorm-room performance, Driver feels bigger, like it’s performed from a stage. Knipes uses the emotional force of their suffering to propel expansive, layered arrangements that make room for head-bobbing melodies, chilly synths, and guitar solos.

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

Even as metal has come closer to the experimental world, he still feels quite far from them. American Dollar Bill bridges that gap, travelling through several extreme languages and still coming out with Haino’s iconoclastic touch.

The result is a sparkling debut for her and one of his most interesting collaborations.

Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible.

Bits of space rock, dub, leftfield disco, and post-punk all feed into Square One, but despite the Scandinavian disco pedigree of its two participants, it’s less a dancefloor weapon than a soundtrack for dorm room philosophizing.

Ending with what sounds like a tape spinning off its reel, it's a welcome break from the amorousness of the remainder of the album, which is charming, but may have a harder time finding a place in your record collection during the year's colder months.

This is a genuinely sincere, silly, joyous record that seems difficult to actually look down at. What it sometimes lacks in heavy groove and get-down raunch it makes up for in sheer enthusiasm and unpredictability.

The better part of this record is certainly charming, even more likeable than the folk that came before it... The only problem is that the magic fades.

What’s remarkable about It’s the Long Goodbye is that even in these moments of consuming anguish, the album doesn’t feel oppressive. The musicians’ interplay and MacFarlane’s exquisitely sculpted production balance Graham’s grief with consolation.