This is the anti-colonial, anti-complacency guitar album of the very young year so far.

Orcutt and Fratti understand each other, and their collaboration might be the most relaxed, generous music either has made.

At times, it can feel like the album is revving off into too great a number of sonic paths. “CAME HERE FOR THE LOOT,” for example, combines trap and hardcore under bold bars that unexpectedly play out like an Opium label track. But elsewhere, her stylistic combinations add up to something greater than the sum of their parts.

Hemmed in by a cluttered mix and NIMBYish paranoia, this album will test even a loyal fan’s investment in its creator.

The occult themes and enigmatic samples would be irrelevant if the experience of listening to Inferno weren’t so scintillating. But the elevated subject matter seems to have animated Eoin and Sandison, too; everywhere you listen, strange and thrilling things are afoot.

Beauty Land sounds just a bit sharper than Mendez’s usual. The toy piano plinks on “I Wanna Feel Pretty” and “No Evil” ring out with a steeliness that gives Beauty Land a starker profile than his previous records, as if there were late afternoon shadows framing every rough-handed strum and blot of keyboards. The difference is subtle, but it’s unmistakable.

Blue Morpho’s transportive ambitions are ultimately a vessel for O’Brien’s innerspace explorations.

Most of the noisier and more heavily manipulated tracks appear on the album’s less accessible A-side. For heady listeners, this will be a field day; for others, a test of faith. Stay the course. The luminescent B-side, a release valve for the intensity of Heavy Water’s first half, contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard in recent memory.

She may have strained in her studies, but her playing belies none of it, which is relaxed and supple and careful and patient.

the color of rain proves that music isn’t just in aja monet’s words; it is the words. She’s become an instrument, in turn tapping deeper veins of selfhood.

I’m People is his best effort in nearly a decade precisely because the music sounds emphatic, insistent, unselfconscious in its celebrations. Taylor doesn’t try to force the miracle; he just lets it be.

The album has an ASMR sense of stereo space, full of louvered shapes you can almost touch. Counting Sunsets is very pretty, but there’s always something tense to give the beauty character, like the wowing frequency stuck at the spine of “Sunset VII.”

Leaning into anonymity over intimacy, Li captures the anxieties of feeling outpaced and misplaced while the rest of the room keeps dancing on.

Its 11 tracks are crawling with morose R&B melodies that feel beamed from Take Care’s deleted scenes, almost capturing the fun multi-regional slant of 2020’s Dark Lane Demo Tapes. But Drake’s writing still feels smoothed over and starved of evocative detail. His ideas oscillate between half-baked and colorful, saved by a few spurts of inspiration.

The key difference to Knats’ self-titled debut, which was released in 2025 and dealt in similar jazz fusion trappings, is A Great Day in Newcastle’s scope and ambition. Here, the group marries jazz-kid experimentalism with taut punk, sprawling worldbuilding, and social commentary.

It’s a delight to hear Mollestad rein herself in—she’s never sounded more assured.

Sweetness is part of what makes Long Wave Home so consistently dazzling.

While REDSTAR WU & THE WORLDWIDE SCOURGE may not embrace an explicit narrative framework like Owusu’s first two records, it charts a linear journey from dystopian despair to cautious optimism.

It’s a maximalist riot where he doesn’t just leech off musical trends but absorbs them into the kind of insecure, heartfelt, drained, and charmingly corny Drake party songs that are in short supply these days.

Justin Vernon sings on three songs, “Flood,” “Keep Away,” and “Glow,” and his voice pairs well with Saleh’s falsetto while transporting him into Saleh’s world. .... Of Earth & Wires’ emotional journey takes shape through these intentional collaborations and musical references.

On ICEMAN, we get a few teaspoons of nourishing hilarity, but mostly it’s a long platter of the cold, lumpy self-pity that made us push our chairs back in the first place.

On both sidelong tracks, they take their time to establish a vibe, each member finding the right time to add another layer.

There are no sour notes here; it’s a lovely listen from beginning to end. But you may sometimes get a sense of déjà vu, either because so many of the songs draw from a similar set of sounds, or because you’ve actually heard them before—six of the album’s 14 tracks came out on other records in the past few years.

Probably Rostam’s most compact and thematically cohesive project, with almost all of the nine tracks on the 30-minute album leaning toward folk and Americana. After the explosive energy of the first two tracks, things calm way down.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

MR COBRA solidifies her as an avant-garde curator—not only of sound, but of broader pop culture and camp touchstones that shape the public imagination of what a woman can be.

Lavender Networks is a step up on the “approachable” scale—even if it still has enough ideas for a dozen albums by a less adventurous artist. It’s a (relatively) digestible, catchy release that seems destined to invite more people into Marcloid’s digital dayglo world.

This is still quintessential Broken Social Scene—brokenhearted love songs, striking images set in dream logic, longing for connection while admitting the faults that prevent it—even if it necessitates a new level of patient listening.