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.

Musically, though, it is strangely hollow, full of tracks that are technically well-executed but emotionally unmoving. In spite of its high tempos, rave clichés (police sirens, canned spinbacks, a Shephard tone), and rowdy hints of donk and hard house, it only occasionally achieves liftoff.

Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight.

There are moments on Mayday that feel essential, plucked out of the ether as if they’ve always existed. These chimeras of the past and present illustrate what Gendron does best—digging up timeless sounds only to disrupt them, reenvisioning what’s timeless for this precise moment.

Forsyth’s lyrics have never been sharper, or stranger.

Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever.

Listening to these songs still feels like you’re eavesdropping on Moffat’s intimate exchanges and innermost thoughts, but now, more than ever, his narratives are firmly plugged into our unsettled collective consciousness.

For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.

The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever.

The result is worthwhile: Poetry still pulses like summer, but Dehd sounds more cohesive than ever.

Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic.

Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.

On Funeral for Justice, it’s impossible to miss—from the blood dripping off of the crows on its album cover to the screeching guitars that open its first song, it’s the proud sound of rebellion, transposed from Tamasheq into a language that refuses to be misinterpreted.

Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter.

Spell Blanket is an expansive sonic feast, swiftly—but intentionally—oscillating from minute-long loop fragments and textural studies to more fleshed-out, properly arranged songs. There’s a noticeable flow in energy, which gives the collection more of a proper album feel than a mixtape or thrown-together compilation.

Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.

Their latest is their most consistent yet, and it stands among their best.

Reasonable Woman, the singer’s 10th studio album, continues the trend of inconsistency. Over manicured synth arrangements and beat drops blown up to eye-watering proportions, Sia belts out self-help anthems that stick to formulaic, dated sounds. It’s outsized feel-good music with little worth feeling good about.

Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry.

If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.

Temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.

Fu##in’ Up makes a convincing case for Ragged Glory as the definitive Crazy Horse album, showcasing the group in their purest, crudest state, without any of the counter-balancing pop singles or acoustic reprieves that colored more hallowed classics like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma.

Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.

Both would-be singles, “Fever” and the Bas-featuring “Stealth Mode,” feel like half a record abandoned before being rounded into its ideal shape. (The former is slinking and still mostly effective, especially after it recovers from a clumsy opening line that for a second recalls his infamous, room-clearing verse on Jeremih’s “Planez.”) Elsewhere, attempts at verbal pyrotechnics become indistinct.

You still never know from one song what might appear on the next, or even where the song you’re listening to might go, and it keeps the music fresh even when it’s retreading hallowed ground.

Martin and Taylor don’t think in opuses, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy simply slows down time just long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to float away if they’re not captured immediately and cherished.

Light Verse is a lively, relatively breezy album, despite its somber subject matter. He worked with a new crew of musicians, including bassist Sebastian Steinberg and multi-instrumentalist Davíd Garza, who make sure their flourishes never distract from the pith of his songs.

The eccentric versus the consummate professional; the maverick versus the safe bet. Yet for an album called Hyperdrama, actual tension—the kind of friction that once made Justice’s music feel so vital—is otherwise frustratingly hard to find.

On Delight, Jain grasps for a joy that lies tantalizingly out of reach, bringing melodies informed by Raga Bageshri into dazzling contact with modular synthesis and digital manipulation.

English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. .... Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package.

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.

If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force.

Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life.

The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.

For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.

Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance.

Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen.

Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage.

Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. .... But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours.

It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak.

Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth.

There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed.