Despite the glossy guestlist, The Lost Boy remains Cordae’s show. At 15 songs, it could have used an edit, another voice in the room telling him to tone it down. But still, it’s an assured debut.

A project conceived in noble intentions but hobbled by confused, muddled execution.

Somewhere underneath all the high-gloss, ornamental swirlies and lacquered doilies are haphazardly camouflaged well-written songs.

Where Little Red saw Katy throwing herself into the occasional ballad, Honey is reduced to a pure set of dance music; within these aesthetic limits, though, it may be her most varied record stylistically.

Robots is decidedly lowercase music, more a piece of his puzzle than a picture on its own.

Though NV is credited with handling the majority of the album’s production (Deradoorian, in turn, is the record’s principal lyricist), she keeps a loose grip behind the boards, allowing some of Deradoorian’s psychedelic krautrock inclinations to slip through. The results are mixed. .... But Deradoorian shines as a lyricist.

To their credit, they mostly remember in the second half of the record, where the songs become more modest and refined, the writing more confident and precise.

It's not Reznor's best or boldest work, but it's a promising first step down a new path.

White's natural eeriness and Jones' diffident eroticism certainly fit a sound built around mystical melodrama and chilly Euro heartbreak, but their voices are such complimentary opposites that they turn out to be what gives Rome much of its distinctness, keep it from being just another record collector (or film collector) exercise in getting everything period-perfect.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

At times he nodded toward mainstream trends. “Way Down” soars like a jetliner; “Moody Blue” co-opts every soft, hazy sound of AM pop in the mid-’70s. But the striking thing about Way Down in the Jungle Room is how it stays true to all the music Presley claimed as his own in ’68.

Overall, Sad Sappy Sucker feels as if it was sort of put together in a hurry, despite it having sat around in the warehouse for seven years. The album part has plenty of good songs, though, and any completist will want to hear it.

Rather than attempt to write jokey lyrics, as they did on Confident Music, Stephenson and Moore are more content just to vibe out, with far more engaging results.

The most Chisel-sounding record he's released as a solo artist, returning to stripped-down arrangements and, on "The Angel's Share" and "Little Dawn", his fascination with repetition.

The time between albums (seven years, in this case) gives Here for It All a certain weight that its songs don’t quite bear. In the scheme of her smash-packed discography, this is a minor work. But if only all minor works were so consistently enjoyable. The air of meh palpable during many of Carey’s recent public appearances is mostly replaced with gusto and wit (though the way lead single “Type Dangerous” flatlines in the hook is just meh again).

Ultimately, she makes Faded Gloryville sound not so much like a place of diminished opportunity, but endless possibility.

Setting aside the occasional meandering instrumental break, there are enough genuinely charming and well-crafted songs here that you can sort of understand what they're aiming at.

Ultimately, Junip keep their distance, offering a comforting hand on your shoulder rather than a full and unreserved embrace.

Dead Meat’s sound may be a throwback, but it’s so tunefully crafted that it charms the way it did the first time around.

Urban Turban feels especially emblematic of a band that's fully liberated itself from any commercial or audience expectations and shifted its experimental ethos into overdrive.

The beats are just fine, but they lack the risk or innovation that could potentially make them truly engaging.

They've operated as FIDLAR since 2009, and released a couple of EPs prior to this collection. That time was spent honing a brand of hopped up, surfy garage punk that comes with more variety than you might expect.

Snoop sounds in great shape and like he’s having the time of his life.

Yes, the three discs of Golden Era are a zone of throwback pleasures. It's a chance to listen to one of rap's best voices run on, with breathless speed and breathtaking control, over the kind of effortlessly funky beats that sadly don't get much attention in certain quarters these days.

Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting.

Koima is a beautiful album, and at times beautiful to the exclusion of anything else.

Rife with suspense, drama, and a grisly cast of characters, Voyager's probably more likely to ignite your inner playwright than get your foot tapping, but it's still a cathartic rush all the same.

Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy.

Yet as awkward as they sometimes sound, the Go-Betweens are still writing consistently gorgeous pop songs, and Oceans Apart proves they aren't content simply pleasing their most die-hard fans; they're back to making albums that, in a better world, appeal to everyone.

Held in Splendor is a good example of a record that successfully executes the tropes of psych--it sounds like it could’ve been recorded in 1967 without directly ripping off any artist in particular--without every truly transcending them.

Much of the album charms. What’s missing, despite a team that includes some of pop’s most sought-after collaborators, are memorable songs that stand up to the sky-high bar the Chicks set for themselves all those years ago. Without a clear target, their formerly devastating blows just don’t quite land the same way.

Though many of the songs convey images of earthiness and of dirt, there's a beauty that helps the collection soar above the ground.

Carnell captures his negotiation with vulnerability in the process of its unfolding, and his relationship with his sonic language feels in-process as well--a generative path, to be sure, if sometimes an uneven one.

Instead of crashing rock and roll and electronica head-on, his integration is a more subtle mix. He's not a pioneer by any means, but Volume Two is testament to his more nuanced approach. On this, his third album, Warren allows the guitars and "real" instruments an equal say, and ends up with music that sounds incredibly intelligent in light of many other clumsy cross-breeding musicians.

Soma sits still, paralyzed by the weight of a sound that’s too big for this promising band to manage, at least for now.

Samia’s voice alternates between plainspoken and liltingly melodic, occasionally suggesting doubt and ambivalence. But an edge often enlivens her bittersweet, uneasy lyrics.

It's just satisfying to see a band trim the fat and wind up even bigger.

At its best, Bottle It In pairs music with message to create a new tension in Vile’s work.

These new songs are shadowy and spacy, a little bit lost, maybe even a tad sexy despite themselves--all brighter and richer than their predecessors.

As with generations of Swedish popsters before them, Sambassadeur excel at picking up sounds from the U.S. and UK and refining them to their catchy essence.

House of Spirits doesn't bring much in the way of sonic surprises beyond a few drum machines and synths, but it does find the band making subtle changes to its M.O., delivering a set of songs that's less urgent, but--in a freaky-yet-endearing way--more personal.

Madson finally strikes an equitable balance with Level Live Wires, a tightly constructed soundscape that hangs together more cogently than anything he's conceived to date.

A solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.

For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable.

It may not be as instantly gratifying as Pleasure, but it's more sophisticated and self-aware.

It’s fascinating to watch Shakira take big swings and extend her dominance, but there’s a little piece that’s missing: some small token to show what made her such an icon in the first place.

Marks the first time the band's sound has taken a step backwards.

Although these pieces are wrought with meticulous detail, they're rarely memorable.

Amid last year’s dual hubbubs about their newly sharpened rock songs and their subsequent crash, Live at Maida Vale preserves the memory of the pugnacious, strapping quartet at the center of it all.

MC4 falls short of Wave Gods, but is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over Excuse My French.

Its few missteps are well balanced by a handful of blissful, seismic bright pockets.

Dive might not be the most ambitious instrumental record you hear all year, but it almost always sounds good.

Their caustic, candid wit--especially in the face of such misery--keeps 30 Year Low from sounding too self-indulgent or self-pitying.

Bermuda Waterfall was written for his friends, whom he memorializes on "Hangin On" for being so thoughtful as to wonder when he might be coming to a party. That's the type of inconsequential, commonplace interaction that sometimes means the world to an individual, and Savage’s ability to locate an oasis of connection in a desert of heartbreak is what makes Bermuda Waterfall endearing rather than irritating.

Just as you'd have to be made of stone not to enjoy at least some part of a Monotonix gig, anyone who likes garage rock would have to be an obstinate stickler for originality not to enjoy the best parts--that is, the majority--of Where Were You When It Happened?

The "Americana" tag sticks thanks to the general country-rock tropes and all the natural imagery, but as usual the group excels at blurring the edges of an already blurry genre with spacey (but never indulgent) psych leanings, controls set for the heart of the sun but anchored comfortably down to earth.

While JoJo sounds great on big ballads and floor-filling tracks alike, Mad Love. lacks a cohesive sound. The abrupt genre shifts are jarring at turns, but paradoxically it’s this malleability that should be key to JoJo’s continued success.

If anything, if the record has a fault, it’s that sometimes the non-stop restlessness can distract from the subtler aspects of the songwriting, but generally, Sampha is able to deploy the intricacies of his production style to great effect.

Ultimately, What the Brothers Sang is a tribute to what the brothers sang, not necessarily how they sang it.

For the first time in the group's decade of existence, they've made an album that doesn't entirely live up to their reputation.

As a whole, More Chaos is a lateral move, not a step up.

Taken as a whole, S+@dium Rock ultimately feels less like a document of an historic homecoming event and more like the sort of bonus material that comprises the extra disc of a deluxe reissue.

There's no overall sense of narrative to Order of Noise, but the depth of the production leaves itself open to interpretation.

Best Behavior is a strong record on its own merits, perhaps more so if you feel a sort of investment in Dinowalrus after hearing %, but it leaves something to the listener's imagination in order to make it truly exciting in addition to something sturdy to build upon.

Crime Cutz's weakness lies in its lack of diversity--you spend a lot of the record hoping for something to take them even further over the edge, but they continue to pull back until the very end.

There's not too much here to knock the sprinkles off your ice cream cone, but Twice is an impressively consistent and well- crafted collection.

If not all of Lullaby’s fusion experiments succeed, there’s enough inspired alchemy here to earn Plant the right to bring it on home.

All told, it may be the best set of songs Rouse has yet to offer.

An unusually linear Mountain Goats record full of powerful moments that not even the eternally moving Darnielle can scrape into the whole it deserves.

It's not a casual purchase, but the band's most dedicated fans and soundtrack heads will be thankful for its creation.

You get the feeling their intent was to make a one-take road dog album. At that they've succeeded. But Local Business also marks the first time the band seems like it's holding something back-- like there is a Plan B.

Listening to him navigate those raw emotions while staying the diamond-encrusted course makes for some of his messiest and most mature music yet.

Hidden amidst the LP, these sounds have a transformative, palette-cleansing effect, but even divorced from that context they still make for a marvelously effective mood-setter.

inc. is both faithful to its source material and clever enough to twist it into new shapes, but at least for the time being, no world is unlikely to bring the Ageds out of the shadows.

Planet (i) is bigger and bolder than Squirrel Flower’s previous work, augmenting Williams’ alternate tunings and folkie charm with grand gestures and abrupt tonal shifts. ... Like I Was Born Swimming, Planet (i) grows a bit listless towards the back half (“Desert Wildflowers”), and some of its song fragments don’t quite land.

An album with a sharp ear and a positive, inclusive atmosphere.

This sort of brevity and emptiness makes the tail end of the album, already short at 26 minutes, feel throwaway and hasty. It's hard not to feel, therefore, that this would have made a much better EP, losing some of the shapeless songs that drag down the momentum and charm of the record.

All the more for you to swim around in. And those peaks certainly take you higher when the builds have been teased out to the limit.

The digs may occasionally seem claustrophobic, the host a bit eccentric, but it’s still a stay worth remembering.

While it's nice to envision Western acceptance of non-Western music, it's nicer to imagine the universe's collective ass jiggling sympathetically to the best moments on Dirty Bomb--music so thoroughly uprooted that its traditions exist only as pivot points; fragments of sounds we know mashed together so intuitively that we barely recognize them.

There are glimmers here not only of the band that they were but also suggestions of what they could become.

Electric isn't quite electrifying in the way that Very and Introspective and "What Have I Done To Deserve This?" are, but nearly every track has a moment or two that ignites seemingly long-gone enthusiasm.

As the headiest entry in the Blanck Mass catalogue, In Ferneaux is more edifying than satisfying; abandon all hope for bangers, ye who enter here. But taken holistically—and repeatedly—In Ferneaux reveals the intellectual and emotional journey as the reward.

There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment.

There’s no laundry list of injustices or outrages to be found here: just an uber-compressed pop rune that muses on the sheer, disorienting helplessness that results from realizing that we’ll never be able to help everyone. Maybe, just maybe, stolid songcraft can be rescue enough.

Mullen’s personality goes a long way in setting him apart from the pack. The same goes for Suffocation as a whole, whose staying power on ...Of the Dark Night is undeniable.

Her voice has a warmth and a quaver that can wring pathos from even the most conversational lines, and the production by Brad Cook (Hurray for the Riff Raff, The War on Drugs) furnishes her with warm, lived-in atmospheres. Every track has something to sink into, like the pinging, playful background vocals throughout “Pick,” or the airy, breathy coda of “2+2.”

Christs, Redeemers feels comfortable and somewhat safe, with song structures that are practically standard and a few techniques repeated often enough to become predictable.

Dead is a frustrating record, one that finds the band on the cusp of making something truly great. While consistency and better production do work in Ascension's favor, some of the spontaneity of the first record would have been rendered even more powerfully here.

Ghost demonstrates well enough Ferreira's versatility, certainly her stylishness, but even more than those, it shows her empathy.

Under the cloak of Triple F's blatant crossover appeals, he slyly exceeds expectations by making a record better than it really needs to be.

Despite these superficial similarities [to their 1995 debut album], repeat spins of Strange Little Birds ultimately belie an older, wiser reincarnation of that youthful rage, not just a cheap retrospective.

Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and specificity that make them compelling.

Help Wanted Nights finally finds Kasher challenging himself again, imposing constraints and seeing how well he can work within them.

It doesn’t all quite land. ... But with the glow of “Doomscroller” acting as a foil, even those lesser songs still manage to productively contribute to that contradictory posture of solidarity-oriented striving that suffuses Formentera.

Heavy Trash never get too heavy on Midnight Soul Serenade. It might be Spencer's lightest and breeziest album to date, a testimony to his stick-to-it-iveness despite the advancing years and changing trends.

It will please fans looking for Another Gucci Mane mixtape. Everyone else will likely find it a bit spotty. Certain songs fall into familiar--now six- or seven-year-old--formulas. His vocals, no doubt out of practice, sound a bit rusty. But most of all, it just feels unfinished, rushed.

The matter of failed romance is central to Sour, a nimble and lightly chaotic grab bag of breakup tunes, filled with both melancholy and mischief.