Groove Denied can’t help but feel like a minor effort. It’s essentially his answer to McCartney II—the sound of a veteran artist with two beloved bands under his belt reveling in the freedom to indulge a latent fascination with the latest gadgets.

Lux Prima works better as a journey than a destination. It never sounds better than when going nowhere fast, its charmingly anachronistic sound at odds with the sharply engineered hustle of the modern pop world. Karen O and Danger Mouse have dreamt up a vividly imagined world, and it’s a pleasure to get lost in it. With a little more freedom, it could have been divine.

Certainly, some--even those who have found pleasure in its makers’ earlier work--will find it too severe, too unrelenting. But Kevin Martin has long made it his mission to go deep and dark, and Solitude goes deeper and darker than he has ever gone before.

The story of a young female songwriter pushing back against the sexist songwriters on her major label and modern pop’s oppressive beauty standards is an impressive one. The cautious Sucker Punch could do with more of that insurrectionist spirit.

A different kind of hero’s journey through the musical mind, Psychodrama feels less like a platform for clout than a starting point for self-help and paradigmatic change.

The Nagoya-based band’s second album, PUNK, is terrifically over the top.

On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.

Fifty percent of the lyrics are bad (“Back on my bullshit, devil emoji”) and the other 50 percent are also bad, but then they get stuck in your head and ultimately turn good (“Tell me your darkest secret shit you wouldn’t even tell Jesus”). ... Death Race For Love feels like the real Juice WRLD, wearing his influences and heart on his sleeve, putting his ups and downs into the music in real time.

Dido’s fifth album, Still on My Mind, guides her even more into the path of serenity and easy listening electronics, with odes to marriage and motherhood that bask in their comforts.

Foals’ problem is that they have the same ambitions as just about every other large-font rock band these days and thus the same pitfalls. Making apolitical art feels borderline negligent, and yet it’s easier than ever to feel desensitized to the doomsaying when everything just seems to get incrementally worse.

Inferno shimmies with the vigor of a man who can keep this up so long as the tunes, one a year if necessary, keep coming. Just don’t press him. As “One Bird in the Sky” reminds listeners, “I eat only when I eat.”

Waterhouse scrambles our expectations of old-school musical styles while underscoring how much pure listening joy can be found in these elements. Yet Nick Waterhouse can’t really make them add up to much beyond themselves. His references remain references.

Taken as a whole, it’s hard to imagine the audience who enjoys every corner of this album. It’s even harder to imagine the artist Morris really wants to be.

In aggregate, none of this feels like a departure--it’s somehow a step backward and forward at the same time, mining roots as a way to age gracefully.

It’s neither a live album nor an album of its own, yet it’s also not a set of demos for a forthcoming record. Instead, it’s a vivid snapshot of a particular moment, preserving a time when he had yet to fritter away his good will, and capturing Townes Van Zandt when it still seemed like he was on the verge of great things.

Fierce as Donnelly’s writing can be, it’s empathetic to the core.

He delves deeper into his personal life more but he is just as sharp as been across his last handful of releases. It isn’t so much that these songs are better; they simply render a more complete picture of him, one he’s been working toward.

The album deepens and expands upon the imagistic nature of Lange’s lyrics and cosmic synth-folk, using found sound and his own sonorous, humming voice to tease out the complicated harmony of love and power at the heart of Kincaid’s short story.

Sometimes Ashworth sounds like she’s yearning to startle her own music’s hypnotically pleasant surface, and there are times you wonder if the gauziness of shoegaze is doing her a disservice, hiding her in plain sight. But SASAMI is a powerful first effort, and Ashworth is a compelling presence.

Roving at will across other genres, Cross is able to wholly remake the horn in his own image.

At turns both acerbic and unguarded, GREY Area feels like the grand culmination of everything Simz has been puzzling out to this point. She’s a preternaturally gifted lyricist, a prodigy who recorded her first raps at nine and released her earliest tapes in her teens; it simply took a while for her to apply that acuity to her songcraft.

Mushonga glides effortlessly between synth pop and dubstep, interlacing flute samples and vocoder flourishes without gilding the lily. Here, the intricate details embellishing her music do more to enrich the whole than draw attention to themselves, just as individual stars complete a constellation.

At 14 tracks in roughly an hour, Wasteland, Baby! falls prey to the humdrum, all its power wrung dry.

If Durand Jones & the Indications was the party, their second album and first since signing to Dead Oceans, American Love Call, is the slow dance.

The album rewards repetition, in listening and in execution.

Forsaking the earthier vibe of later Trux records like Veterans of Disorder and Pound for Pound, White Stuff feels like an extension of Herrema’s work with Black Bananas, thriving on the tension between old-school authenticity and modernist manipulations.

On Death Becomes Her, Angel-Ho beautifully transmutes any past anguish into a colorful network of global sonics, a bold statement of trans femininity, and a rallying cry for resistance. At once, Angel-Ho shatters binaries and encompasses dualities.

On her confident and intoxicating first full-length, Good at Falling, she lets go of any lingering self-consciousness and makes the transformation from hesitant outsider to unlikely pop star.