Since their inception in 2016, Magdalena Bay have made aqueous internet pop and low-voltage funk full of pinwheeling arpeggios and inside jokes. Imaginal Disk sounds like that, but bigger and punchier—more keyboards! More percussion tracks! Add a string section!! Synth harp!!! The total effect brings to mind ’90s Madchester, the progression of Tame Impala after Lonerism, and peak CD sonics.

What sets Woodland apart from the rest of the duo’s remarkable catalog is its quiet adventure and clear empathy, qualities that give the sense that Welch and Rawlings are building a new structure upon an old foundation.

The brilliance of Romance lies in its unsettling blend of antic energy with refined craft—in the depths of detachment, Fontaines D.C. strike an engaging pose.

Chapter I, the stronger of the two releases, features one of Crockett’s most personal and well-executed ballads to date, “Good at Losing,” a solemn ride-along through the years he spent traveling aimlessly. The title track, “$10 Cowboy,” is another highlight.

An album that prizes both goofiness and growth, one that takes the long view of emotional vacillation without sacrificing forward momentum.

There’s enough proof here that Post has the voice, demeanor, and goodwill to easily ingratiate himself into the Nashville scene.

Wishy’s most cohesive moments come from their knack for memorable, solid melodies.

The album sometimes sounds slightly undercooked, like a set of production sketches awaiting further embellishment. And the debt it owes to its influences dilutes any shock of the new. But it takes skill and a degree of daring to riff on an album as monumental as Loveless

So though Lungu Boy will deliver on Asake fans’ expectations, what’s missing is something more personal.

Quantum Baby is a lean and muscular eight-song accompaniment to 2023’s BB/Ang3l that asserts itself with the insistence of manicured nails tapping on a hard surface.

With Disaster Trick, Horse Jumper of Love subtly expand their sound without losing the instinctual, otherworldly interplay of their melodies, dizzying guitar lines and serpentine rhythms blurring together in a narcotic ooze.

A Dancefloor in Ndola shows the art of the DJ as selector, joining the dots between musical trends in a way that flows effortlessly onto the dancefloor.

Despite the frequent overtures to grandeur, spectacle, and machismo, these songs are limp and flabby.

What’s fascinating about SORCS 80 is that it feels vaguely rootless—some sounds are familiar but the form is not. That isn’t to say Dwyer has chucked out hooks or melodies the way he did his guitar. SORCS 80 contains some of his sharpest recent songwriting—the tunes just happen to get transformed by the Osees’ execution.

Another Day falters when it gets too ethereal and singy—as on the Haliechuk-led “Follow Fine Feeling,” which doesn’t have the melodic juice of his excellent song “Cicada” on One Day—or too straight-up and untextured, as on the plodding closer “House Lights.” But at its best, Another Day showcases Fucked Up as masters of transformation.

The album’s minimalist moments are its strongest.

Shadows of doubt give the album its quaint, mercurial feel, deepening Lenae’s quest for understanding. Bird’s Eye situates her as a consummate thrill-seeker with limitless curiosity, restricted only by the uncertainties in her own mind.

Listening to Smoke & Fiction in the same sitting as Los Angeles or Wild Gift, the lasting impression isn’t how they’ve changed over the years, but how much of their original spark they’ve sustained.

At times his extremely online subject matter takes the bloom off his writing. But his innate ability to shift between breakneck flows amid chaotic production buoys the album.

The project’s raw immediacy initially suggested it might be throwaway, a palette cleanser before White resumed his usual studio tinkering, but its triple-octane riffage and seething, sticky hooks pointed to something more lasting and substantial.

Songs for Sinners and Saints doesn’t cover as much ground as Michael, which offered the rich multi-genre sprawl of a classic Dungeon Family release. But the narrower palette and lower stakes of the project restore the focus and play of his “Snappin’ & Trappin” days.

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

Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib.

Five albums in, Cults sound just as eerie and cheery as ever but struggle to transcend the fleeting pleasantries of paint-by-numbers pop.

Banjo-led instrumentals that pay homage to Appalachian folk music is a hyper-specific niche, but Bowles and his band never allow their preferred sounds to hem in their experiments.

Strange Burden is meticulous and crackling—a concise, gripping record that sparks and sizzles like a kinked spike of lightning.

Blur certainly sounds older on Live at Wembley Stadium than they did on their previous live albums, yet those scars lend poignance to these familiar songs. The erosion in Albarn’s voice diminishes his impishness, adding a sense of empathy to his cultural observations.

Gone is their past material’s giddy, lysergic bounce; instead, drummer Evan Burrows pours a spacious, continual foundation where melodies rise through repetition, and rich details (with string and wind arrangements courtesy of Backer) slither and swim.

RiotUSA is behind the boards on every track, and Y2K! is a testament to the strength of their long-running creative partnership. Its weakest moments are those featuring outsiders—Gunna and Travis Scott just get absolutely rinsed here. What makes Y2K! so instantly memorable is Ice Spice’s refusal to be pigeonholed.

Vertigo is very well-studied and primed to reach the rafters of the mega venues she was thrust into early on. It just lacks much sense of her in it.

He’s willing to be chaotic and a little all over the place, and though that does occasionally result in moments that are hard to process, Robinson proves that he’s as adept at wringing moving moments out of pop tropes as he is conjuring alien worlds.

The illusion of continuous chatter and conversation is compelling enough even if you don’t understand any of the languages spoken therein.

It’s hard to grasp who Childish Gambino is supposed to be. So even when he’s genuine, I have a little bit of skepticism on my mind.

Without romanticizing their lives, they do manage to find something meaningful in that pursuit, even if it’s just another song to stave off the darkness.

It’s clear that Lava La Rue’s ambition as an artist burns brightly. Right now, its light and heat is overflowing, a little messy and uncontained; but the stardust is unmistakable.

Harmonics’ collection of relatable songs and interesting ideas could use a stronger hand on the tiller to reach its intended destination.

The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime.

Big Ideas plays like an eclectic compilation of scattered thoughts from her journal. Songs grapple with big questions but offer few answers.

“Only One” highlights Jenkins’ facility for understated sophistipop; she’s a masterfully silky interpreter of hurt, a canny channeler of failed love in the softest possible tones. But the album’s very best song is its most atypical. “Delphinium Blue” is mostly synths.

Cohen’s inviting arrangements may not always strike the delicate balance between peace and uncertainty that he strives for, but when they do, his music remains as warm and rewarding as a fresh cup of coffee at dawn.

No other American singer is repurposing our old folk scripts with so much authority or ingenuity; When I’m Called proclaims—softly, gently, and slowly, with a sly grin and a Southern ease—that what these songs have to say isn’t old at all.

At just 28 minutes, HEIS moves with ceaseless hustle.

It’s a long slog to get to “Guilty Conscience 2,” but there are moments of genuine inspiration along the way.

Macro’s swooning arrangements bloom and bend, revealing a band comfortable with experimenting within the boundaries of a certain sound.

The sound of Bar Scene is the most full-bodied of Bryan’s career, building upon the heartland rock that he explored in his 2022 major-label breakthrough American Heartbreak and the self-titled follow-up from last year.

It’s been only three years since Dood & Juanita, but Passage still feels like a comeback. .... On Passage du Desire, he sounds more like himself than he has in ages.

Rarely do these songs stray from this sophisticated palette. It suits her well, but it marks Charm as yet another successful but polite soft-rock outing, a format with somewhat diminishing returns.

Small Medium Large might signal a new iteration of jazz, or it might not be jazz at all, or it might not matter. At the very least, it represents the thrilling next phase of a vibrant L.A. community that, for a decade now, has only moved from strength to strength.

God Said No stands apart from Apollo’s previous releases not only because of its genre experimentation and its stickier choruses, but for its willingness to get ugly.

Walk Thru Me’s idiomatic alt-rock composition feels too stable to properly channel it. At their best, Barlow and Davis wrestled with seemingly opposing interests in the primal and futuristic: After a long period of inactivity, they’re still finding their footing in the present.

Redd Kross is a hit parade that perpetually walks the tightrope between the McDonalds’ pristine melodic craft and their innate garage-band insolence.

Despite its slightness, Notes From a Quiet Life is still a landmark in Washed Out’s catalog: a true solo turn and a complete break from chillwave sonics. But having finally acquired all this space, Greene seems unsure how to fill it.

Forgoing their usual evocative song titles in favor of a suite of numbered pieces that often flow into and out of one another, Dirty Three have made not only their most absorbing album but also the one that’s most open to interpretation.

The cloudier nature of Ishibashi’s score leaves it feeling less like a standalone piece than the soft, jazzy pop of her Drive My Car soundtrack. But as a mirror to Hamaguchi’s tale of creeping environmental anxiety, Ishibashi’s ghostly music makes a rich companion.

An uneven album so preoccupied with giving every single type of fan exactly what they want that it might as well be crowdsourced.

Like many other major pop albums of the 2020s, it would have benefited from a careful edit and a more varied track order.

It can be difficult to hear Cash’s charms through the bright, digital clang that plagues his ’80s recordings. The refurbished warmth of Songwriter makes it easier to concentrate on the clever turns of phrase and solid construction of these excavated tunes.

While it often sounds like Kehlani is trying on a series of flashy outfits to see which one fits best, it’s still exhilarating when Crash dials up their signature swagger.

The bulk of Bad Cameo’s novelty arrives, instead, in songcraft. To Blake’s credit, he’s a master of seeing tracks as living things, subject to as much growth and meandering as the masterminds who make them. Familiar as they may feel, the most striking songs on this project keep some powder dry, sprawling into realms far beyond their starting places.

Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before.

Her third album in eight months, is a statement of self-definition—one that encourages you to be at peace with all your insecurities. It’s this propensity to let the irregular feel like second nature that makes Fratti so magnetic. Sentir que no sabes is a summons to make your own rawness a home.

It is a strange and sometimes brilliant album—one that only Linda Thompson could have made, whether or not you can hear her singing.

It’s an album that uses the rejection of metal’s well-trodden forms not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for bringing something else into being.

Scream From New York, NY harnesses the group’s keening intensity and taps into a vivid sense of place. They’re not the first songwriters to draw inspiration from the chaotic thrum of New York City, but they bring this literary tradition into a troubled new era.

The record’s innovations are modestly hidden in clever programming, while Paradinas himself is too level-headed to inspire Aphex Twin-style devotion. But he does make a compelling case for the genre as a living entity that’s open to new ideas, and not nearly as persnickety as its reputation suggests.

Disconnect gets its message across through Kamaru’s words and through the music itself, whose darkness feels less oppressive thanks to the creators who speak life into it.

While hooks abound, WeirdOs also plays as one big, roiling piece. Like the live jams from which it emerged, the album has peaks and valleys, passages of unrelenting intensity followed by space-out cooldowns that offer the slightest moment to breathe.

McKiel finds humanity in a bit of confusion, and on this oddly affecting album he comes across as a medium, closely attuned to the unknown and unknowable as he deciphers missives from another plane.

If Darcy’s lyrics require putting in some work to decode them, the band makes musical immersion easy by consistently striking the familiar balance of dissonant sound, disjointed melody, and bone-dry production that defined indie rock’s late-’80s/early-’90s golden age, before synths, string sections, and festival-baiting choruses became de rigueur.

It’s more a personal reckoning with their own past: a rummage sale of dusty enthusiasms.

DOPAMINE, her highly anticipated debut-slash-comeback album, still can’t shake the anonymity of her ensemble days, but it lays the foundation for what Normani will be known for: her Southern roots and a voice as plush as a pair of fuzzy dice.

More than 25 years later, O’Rourke and Grubbs have polished and stitched together every scrap and forgotten rarity into one final album, closing off their beloved project as finely as a tape loop.

The recordings on One Hand Clapping are appealingly raw and in-your-face intimate, making the listener feel like the sole ticket-winner to a private Macca soundstage performance.

The record’s best songs, like birth, feel hard-won and revelatory—journeys that might take place on a single physical plane, but expand psychically outward, broadening the spectrum of beauty, personhood, and existence.

But for all the softness telegraphed in her music, Allen’s third album Eight Pointed Star is spiky and hard to pin down, its familiar environment camouflaging lyrics that can be vivid and fantastical.

The two of them could’ve used nostalgia to coast on the legacy of their nearly decade-old debut to turn in a serviceable redux. Instead, Why Lawd? leans into a rawness and fear Yes Lawd! only hinted at.

Born in the Wild, much like Tems the artist, is a slow burn that rewards patience.

If Timeless feels slighter than its predecessors, it’s no less assured, its purpose no less profound: to get you moving, even in quiet moments.

An album that offers its emotional reckoning as a messy and necessary new beginning for Young Jesus.

That’s the surreal magic of Statik: pallid terror deceptively wrapped in an inviting soft-focus glow. If it’s not Cunningham’s best work, it may be his most quintessential, a true distillation of his ability to simultaneously attract and repulse.

This ability to summon intensity without a lyrical shock factor is new for Goat Girl, and they’re better for it.

I Hear You strikes a frustrating standoff between these two versions of Gou: It lacks the authentic quirkiness of those earlier hits, yet never lets loose the confetti cannons and fishbowl cocktails promised by “Nanana.”

The best-sounding version of the Charli XCX promise to make the Apollonian pop landscape Dionysian again. .... BRAT’s most intriguing moments regard her relationships with women, which she unpacks with striking candor.

This album basks in the greenness of youth. .... There is a palpable maturity, however, in the production of her sound. While staying true to her earlier Afro-fusion works, TYIT21 taps into dancehall, Nigerian highlife, and amapiano, demonstrating an expanded range, restraint, and purpose for Starr.

Whenever the album breaks out of its stream-of-consciousness flow, it shows a clearer sense of identity. Merrick’s secret weapon is her soaring singing voice.

A few of the songs on The Dream of Delphi are a little too underdeveloped and end up dissipating into thin air. But it’s Khan’s lyrics, always so full of gravity and grace, that keep the album from stalling out.

Thou are a blast even when Funck is digging into esoteric philosophy over the slowest riff you’ve ever heard, but it’s refreshing to hear them get real with themselves, jogging their music out of the enthralling but insular world they’ve created over the past 15-plus years.

He’s making songs that sound like catchy Gunna songs of the past—he’s still able to float on these laid-back, skittering ATL trap variants while reading straight off his SSENSE receipt—but they don’t feel like them.

Though actual percussion remains sparse, Night Reign grooves harder than its predecessor, which featured almost no drums. Even when the rhythm instruments sit back, there’s almost always a sense of an insistent pulse.

There’s nothing on Dark Times that’s surprising and challenging for Staples but little that detracts from what already works.

Sprawling and spectacular. .... The songs are immediate and inviting in ways that Cindy Lee’s previous discography has only hinted at.

While Frog's vocal melodies are often simple, with nursery-rhyme lightness, tuning into their lyrics make them seem more like sugar-coated pills. They establish Smith as both an objector of the failing system and another one of its many idle subjects, free-floating in the rush of disappointment.

There’s a moment of startling emotional clarity on “Shoot at Will,” a revealing track where Zayn alludes to his and Hadid’s daughter: “When I look at her, all I see is you/When you look at her, do you see me too?” But for the most part, Zayn appears much more comfortable wearing the mask of vulnerability instead of actually exercising it.

At a lean 28 minutes, it’s their shortest and most instantly rewardable—no instrumentals and none of the longform post-rock indulgences of 1998’s Terraform or 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound.

With their fluting vocals and bird chirps, her songs could fit on the soundtrack of Michaela Coel’s sitcom Chewing Gum, about a 24-year-old British-Ghanaian woman trying to lose her virginity. Through humor, pop hooks, and scenes of emotional intimacy, both works juxtapose the vibrancy of life with the drab realities of public housing.

HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.

Hex Dealer is as frenzied as it is hilarious.

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.