The music feels wedged between weight classes--too ridiculous to be indie rock and too ponderous and generic for Top 40 pop.

Wand excels at delivering heavy and murky sounds, but they're a bit late to a conversation that their peers have already dominated.

Throughout, and to the album's benefit, the duo's individual identities are more fully dissolved, so they can be more malleable in pursuing the idea behind a given song.

Lamar’s new album, To Pimp a Butterfly, doesn’t explicitly bill itself as a movie like good kid, m.A.A.d city did, but the network of interlocking dramas explored here feels filmic nonetheless, and a variety of characters appear across the album’s expanse.

We’ve got some Black Metal Muzak here, competent musically but too timid to go into the depths, emotional, musical or otherwise, that black metal should strive for.

They're still doing what they've always done, but Fantasy Empire is the best they've done it in a long time, and the new sheen makes everything seem magic again.

For an artist who has undergone so many identity experiments before her debut, Soft Control is a promising, if not groundbreaking, beginning.

Perhaps in the end they are simply too smitten with the idea of Smith as a beautifully doomed artist to create anything beyond a loving, reverent, and therefore sheepish tribute.

Here they sound like they’ve settled into their status as a reliable indie rock institution. Strangers to Ourselves is a pleasant album, and one that completes their transition from "inspired" to "sturdy".

Goon isn’t an album of layers; what you hear is what you get, which in this case turns out to be something special.

His masterful way with configured elements provides the illusion of a story without dictating the narrative: Here, you decipher the tones and rhythms, and conjure your own ideas of good and evil.

Rebel Heart grows confusing and irreconcilably uneven as it progresses.

The music evolves so gradually, it's easy to find yourself wondering how you've wound up at a given point; there's a sense of traveling without moving, of zooming in and out between broad strokes and pinpoint details, toggling between distracted reverie and close attention.

Even with the decibel meter dialed down to accommodate his wounded croon, Mendel struggles to assert himself, flattening out the album’s dynamic variation in the process.

Empire is a wonder of absurd tricks and unforeseen turns, but the ultimate goal--rendering its music as something more than just a side platter to gripping TV--proves elusive.

It would be hard to call the album unsentimental. At times it feels as though Cantu-Ledesma is fighting his way through the fog, swinging wildly, exhausted but determined.

SOL has less gravity when it steers away from its majestic solar themes and tries to put its abstract sensations into words. Eskmo's vocals, while delicate, still feel intrusive.

It's all crunchy and cloying and probably better if you're high, but that just makes Wasted on the Dream something like a store-brand version of your favorite cereal; it's close, but not there, usually a matter of texture and feel.

On their first full-length collaboration, Late Night Endless, the two draw on their formidable pedigree, yet at times the album feels cluttered with sound.

Thanks to its pared-down gear list and capricious flow, Levon Vincent feels like the work of someone left alone in the studio, sketching in real time with what's at hand and moving on. And that spontaneity gives it an even greater sense of intimacy.

What's refreshing about Kennedy's tracks--alluded to in Madak's quote above--is the amount of fun he wrangles out of such a sparse and austere template.

This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Melbourne, Florida is an exciting progression to old fans, and a solid entry point for new audiences.

Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Even those who decided years ago that this album was going to be great will be hard-pressed to find a great rap record here, only a sporadically enjoyable one.

Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.

Acollection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to.

At times, White’s knack for simplicity lapses into the slightly generic.

It’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.

While Jack Ü doesn't exactly roll the ball forward, or do much else to make listeners rethink the principal actors here, it's dumb, loud fun from two architects of the dumbest, loudest fun of the 2000s.

Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction.

The quieter work here may suggest a way forward, but Wild Strawberries has a transitional feel.

This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

After clocks in at a solid hour--and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium.

You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort.

If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.

The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety--the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage--is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur.

This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

While the songwriting may be on autopilot, Gallagher’s decision to self-produce Chasing Yesterday was a smart one, resulting in an album that feels both intimate and expansive.

Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece.

Though the busy, Reichian loops help decorate the retro palette, it's the sort of intricacy that can encase art-pop in bulletproof glass, demanding admiration without meeting us halfway. At its best, though, O Shudder's timeworn skill is to combat looming adversity with verve and rhythm, emptying the mind through the body.

This record reads like an object lesson in how former glories are sometime best served by becoming a malleable part of the present.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

Ultimately, what’s most disappointing about What Happens Next is not that it will in any way tarnish Gang of Four’s legacy--if their vanguard reputation could withstand Hard and Mall, it can withstand this. Rather, it’s the unshakeable feeling that, if Gill had released this as some newly branded collaborative project, no one would question why it wasn’t a Gang of Four album.

Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively.

While the composition of Bad News Boys adheres to a tried ‘n’ true formula, the songs here consistently yield charming little details.

Seasonal Hire sounds more like a Black Twig Pickers album than a Steve Gunn album.

It's good for what it is--better than it needs to be, in fact--yet what it is is only a fraction of what it could be, if only Earle would stop trying to tidy up his inspirations.

EarthEE makes one think more than feel.

Dark Sky Paradise is a big leap in the direction of the ideal Big Sean full-length.

The songs on here are surprisingly strong, such that any of them could have appeared on a proper album at any point in Beam’s decade-plus career. But the collection never sounds like the sum of its parts.

Physical Graffiti is Zeppelin's best album ultimately because it felt like a culmination.

Her blasé delivery might seem impenetrable at first, but there is warmth and wit to her work that rewards those who are patient enough to hear its message.

Some of the rougher edges and raw(er) emotion that got the twins noticed in the first place get ironed out a bit. And one side effect is that a few of the album's final tracks sound somewhat similar in tonality, tempo, and their vibe. But Ibeyi still find subtle ways to create shape.

Rose Mountain might be Screaming Females' most deliberate music yet, but it lacks much of their former wildness.

At his finest, most expansive moments, Deacon renders this dilemma beside the point, but on Gliss Riffer, it's hard to avoid it; the battle between song and arrangement is staged in too small of an arena.

On Restarter, that precept again takes the lead, and Torche have made their most compelling record since Meanderthal.

It sounds less like a young producer enjoying the fruits of quick success than a restless experimenter figuring out what to do next. Lucky for us, the woodshed is destination enough.

Rapture is ultimately an honest effort devoid of staying power.

As it is, the album feels slightly cluttered by a surfeit of dry minutiae that calls for a cutting room floor of its own.

On a whole, Whatever is milder and gentler than the darker Become What You Are; that comes with age, I guess. But, all said, it does feel like a return.

The six-piece around Houck is more competent than combustible, a quality that’s long made Phosphorescent a good band to see for a 90-minute show but not one that makes you need to take them home.

Pierson hasn’t lost any of the force or heat that’s characterized her vocal work for 40 years; if anything, she’s acquired the ability to enrich otherwise pedestrian line readings with a resonance that feels born of a life well lived.

The most successful [alternative versions] are the ones that drastically reinvent their material, recasting, for instance, rock songs as synth-pop songs, synth-pop songs as rock songs, or busy twee-punk as slightly less busy acoustic twee-punk. But Supermoon never takes those kinds of leaps.

Even when Vestiges & Claws exudes strain, González never gives the impression of truly challenging himself.

Most tracks on the first half clock in under four-minutes, but as the songs stretch out longer on the album’s back half, there’s not enough structure to support them.

It might still mortify some of his more purist fans, but there's little on this record that a few instrumental-version substitutions wouldn't fix.

The end result is a record that reverently draws from a dazzling array of past masters only to short-circuit critical capacity.

Both the scant material and under-inspired lyricism are symptoms of the same problem: a dearth of unexpected ideas from an MC once seemingly capable of endless ones. Ghost’s done worse, but he used to be so excitingly unpredictable. Now you pretty much know what you’re going to get.

On If You’re Reading This, all of this chest beating is delivered over the most darkly hypnotic beats Drake’s graced since So Far Gone.

He’s spent decades getting musical vocabularies from all over the world under his fingers, and even when his improvisations begin to meander, what he creates from his well of options is remarkable and wholly his own.

Those who are coming into Transfixiation blind might just hear a notable band boasting a currently rare commitment to an '80s kind of noise-rock rather than the '90s iterations of shoegaze, goth, or industrial that’s more prominent in 2015. Then again, APTBS’ progress as a band only serves to expose the underlying one-dimensionality of their actual songwriting.

Talent Night at the Ashram is grounded in a very palatable reality, one that harkens back to the band’s first two albums. But that isn’t to say this record isn’t without its surrealist moments.

If Circus isn't a front-to-back triumph, it's got enough juice in it to forgive the occasional misfire.

More than a simple clash of teen-angst noise and old-soul poise, Mourn’s debut album is a reminder that a big impetus for the former is the frustration of wishing you were old enough to savor the latter.

The album needs the percussive abrasion of his voice, and digging into some of the more typical slabs of Death Grips' instrumental tendencies doesn't unearth much more than a pretty solid workout soundtrack.

On Sorry 4 the Wait 2, he's enjoying being Lil Wayne again, for better or worse. It also feels like rapping is once more a choice rather than a contractual obligation, which, at this point, might be the single greatest compliment one can pay Lil Wayne.

For a notionally darker work this album ends up being more enjoyable than some of his prior records, mainly because the sense of exploration is heightened with each turn taken.

The four songs are pleasant enough, but in comparison to the unruly sounds on Live in San Francisco, it feels like a bit of an afterthought.

Consistent, concise and stylistically compelling, Hyperview is a good set of tracks, and a worthy crossover attempt at that, provided you’re OK with consulting the lyrics booklet and willing to take a ride on the undertow.

Even in their repeated defiance of having anything to prove, Pond still scramble with the passion and irreverence of underdogs.

It’s an album of fun, feminist pop that is simultaneously wise beyond its years (four of its five members are still in their teens) and refreshingly age-appropriate—and it effortlessly embodies the ideals grasped at by the girl power think piece wave, with a sharp, nuanced perspective that can only come from lived experience.

She has indeed stepped outside with S, but perhaps not far out enough; as it stands, Moss’ journey isn’t done just yet, but the final stretches of her expedition are in sight.

The legacy of Dance Mania’s insouciant, trail-blazing ghetto house is preserved in the city’s flourishing juke and footwork communities as much as it lives on through the label’s second life; Ghetto Madness is just a reminder.

Egregiously melodramatic missteps aside, Creatures exists as a reminder that out there in the between of electronic music are swirling, delirious spaces that are yet to be explored.

Though Time is never less than competent, its biggest problem is an unfortunate lack of personality.

Though Non-Fiction only occasionally rises to the high songwriting standards of Ne-Yo’s seamless 2008 album Year of the Gentleman, it does correct some of the faults of his last record, 2012’s R.E.D., where the R&B songs and the Euro-dance songs played as if they’d been written for entirely separate projects.

The constantly-disruptive feel of Hexadic makes it perhaps the most consistent Six Organs albums to date.

Blackheart is the singular, visionary work that she's been hinting at since she struck out on her own post-Diddy in 2011.

Given the similarities to its source material, Cowboy Worship probably would’ve made more sense as a bonus-disc appendage to Love than a stand-alone release.

Bored is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts.

Africa Express keeps it to a bite-sized 41 minutes, and every one of them includes something to savor.

"Sisters" and "Growing" display a tendency to let her fascination with the moving gears trump the narrative movement that marks her best material. But fortunately, such moments are few and far between.

They’re a "the + plural noun" band. For those who felt the "New Rock Revolution" was exactly what its name promised rather than a revival of old aesthetics, the Districts' A Flourish and a Spoil signifies a restoration of order. For everyone else who simply likes rock bands, it's actually kinda quaint.