Precipice is not without excellent hooks, and the ones on “Crying Over Nothing,” “Not Afraid,” and “Heartthrob” let De Souza’s star power shine through. But when a record’s great moments are just that—moments—waiting on them is tedious.

He’s still what everyone says he is: an Appalachian man with a penchant for storytelling. Snipe Hunter is his first record to capture and celebrate the depth behind that.

Arriving at a particularly abundant time for lyric-driven indie rock drawing on folk and country, New Threats From the Soul stands proudly on its own.

The songs are defined less by sounds or ideas than by their sanded-down edges: plodding beats from Nottz and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, histrionic Marsha Ambrosius hooks, putative passings of the torch.

Despite its big tent and low stakes, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is a record only Tyler could make: retro but not nostalgic; tender but steely; jangly yet slick.

It’s austere, formidable music, but by fitting within a tight 40-minute package, it endears itself to listeners who might not know much about drone music.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

The dizzying list of production credits somehow results in a flattened terrain where stock, hyper-efficient rage and trap beats drone in the background, helping to ensure that the few opportunities for Sheck Wes and SoFaygo to do Opium-karaoke are wholly unremarkable.

Beside Myself is dramatic and daring, the agreeably messy sound of the kind of radical freedom that might not change our sinking world but can liberate the willing mind.

It’s hard to point to any weak points on black british music, but a few songs feel less distinct: the breezy Afropop of “S.O.S.” sounds a bit anonymous next to the rest of these songs (admittedly, it also sounds like a potential hit), while the submerged sound of “Tiger Driver ’91” veers uncomfortably close to Drake territory.

Whether it be for a lazy day under the shade or a muggy evening of shared, muted physicality, Tuff Times Never Last welcomingly meets you in the moment.

Lyrically, the songs cling to familiar themes of loyalty, betrayal, and soured romance, but the writing feels hollow. Repetition, once a rhythmic weapon in his songwriting, becomes a crutch and registers as filler.

Alex G is playing with new toys that make records sound both more organic and expensive—banjo, accordion, mandolin, actual string sections. This puts Headlights right where it should be, in conversation with major-label debuts from the likes of R.E.M., Elliott Smith, Death Cab for Cutie, and Modest Mouse.

For most of its 50-plus-minute runtime, Bieber appears, finally, entirely unencumbered. .... When Bieber dissociates into safe territory, alongside rappers Gunna, Sexyy Red, and Cash Cobain, on a trio of totally adequate but otherwise impersonal, paint-by-numbers R&B love songs, the specter of an algorithmic Spotify playlist looms. .... SWAG’s riskiest and most unexpected, are its most rewarding.

Different Rooms’ greatest coup—and what sets it apart from Honer and Chiu’s previous collaborations—is its command of form. The whole album speaks in parallel.

There’s no separating Wet Leg from the brazen humor that gave them their breakthrough. But this record is as dazzlingly earnest as it is wry, displaying the staying power of a band that will outlast a sense of novelty.

Let God Sort Em Out coasts on the history they share with each other and with us, settling for good enough.

In opener “Freedom.” Kesha fugues over twinkling piano and synths, singing “I’ve been waiting for you/Everything’s changed now.” But the simmering disco bass and house-gleaned aesthetics suggest a much more powerful mission statement, and the song devolves into middling party-pop.

Yowzers is a tighter, more intimate affair, an invitation into the inner circle.

It would have been far easier to ignore these complications, play the lovable oddball, and put together an entertaining tour of his home city for outsiders. Instead, Wauters seems to have gone searching for his hometown and found his own reflection.

This album is less obvious in its social critique and more traditional in its instrumentation—for every nitrous oxide canister or cheese grater, there are several more gongs, steel tongue drums, cymbals, glockenspiels, and tubular bells.

Different Talking doesn’t stray from Frankie Cosmos’ predilection for short songs—only two tracks of its 17 pass the two-and-a-half-minute mark—but Kline and the band make each feel like a universe in miniature.

That ecstatic sense of possibility—of being many things at once, of following your impulses in all directions, all the time—is the animating force of Virgin.

Even at its most outrageous, Princess of Power suffers less from silliness than from safeness.

While do it afraid doesn’t have the snap and verve of the more structured Ten Fold, there’s a charming coziness to its loose sound. These open-aired songs evoke backyards and block parties, the rhythms gentle as breezes.

On Inyo, he sings translations of Spanish poetry, tells the tale of the California water wars, and cites in the credits a book called The Mexican Corrido: A Feminist Analysis. While these selections might make Tracks II sound like a fans-only buffet of curios, the magic is in how much it all plays to his strengths, how intuitively these outliers stand among the classics.

Scratch It buzzes with a chattering methamphetamine sleaziness, as much Vegas as it is Nashville. The TNN studio lights that frame this record are so hot, they make the music sweat.

Like the best artists from the South, Goodman renounces perfect symmetry and leans instead toward the crooked and out-of-focus. These are qualities embodied by the characters who populate her songs.