Tip of the Sphere again rejects easy definitions and expectations, growing and surprising with every listen.

There is no fight in these songs, not even the faintest stab at hope. There’s just empty moaning, and a lone, feeble guitar that chugs for all eternity in hell.

Tracey ensures the album links the UK urban music’s past and present. Which of the mixed bag of styles deployed on AJ Tracey will be further investigated in the future remains a mystery. What is clear is that he has talent and star power for days—talents that could have been better showcased here.

In the rare spots where the production is grating and the writing limp, Grande makes up for it with skill and intuition. thank u, next may be an imperfect album but it’s a perfect next chapter.

While Pursuit of Momentary Happiness draws from a bottomless well of piss and vinegar, it counterbalances those urges with irreverence and grace.

Affectionate but misguided tribute that’s nowhere close to satisfying.

These arrangements may help give definition to a tune as fragile as Vernon’s “Dedicated” but, more than anything, casting these recent songs in the same light as “Touch a Hand” or “Let’s Do It Again”--a number one hit for the Staple Singers back in 1975, but rarely remembered as well as “Respect Yourself"”--helps shift the focus to how Mavis still sounds mighty as ever.

The nine songs here follow their own innate paths, often beginning with a simple acoustic arrangement before blossoming into vivid daydreams.

He gives himself over to memory’s full sway, until the project feels a little like thumbing through a souvenir album, Chapman singing about the postcards that help remind him of places held dear.

Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation.

That tension between conception and execution makes all the good energy of Sunshine Rock feel hard-earned and genuine; scars and all, it’s the sound of somebody who has weathered battles and worked to survive.

An album’s gotta end sometime, but these songs, two of the record’s most propulsive, seem to grab us by the arm to yank us into the shimmering neon starlight--and then it’s all over. If it’s good enough, the audience will linger through the credits. King could let it linger a little more.

Glum and abrasive, Creevy’s guitars have graduated from sludge-pop hooks. On Stuffed & Ready, she uses them to shape turbulent atmospheres, pushing recklessly against the melodies.

While the palette of sounds Boy Harsher plays with on Careful can seem limited--brisk drum machine loops, oscillating synths, and Matthews’ haunting incantations--the group finds ways to make each song sound distinct.

Amid slashes of industrial noise and chilling silences, the two artists take turns offering similar surreal speeches about gazing up at a black airplane, a pitch-black sky, vomit, and a bird of paradise--sinister appeals to the unknown, to the unavoidable end times. These interstitials give Isa a dimensionality that seems to break a fourth wall of the record.

Spielbergs don’t deal in complex subjects, and they sing plainly enough that any hook heard on the first chorus can be joined on the second.

A little bit of retrospective absurdity goes a long way--if only the rest of Internationally Unknown wasn’t so pale and redundant.

These 11 songs have the overstuffed quality of roomy indie pop that can easily play in the background of an iPad commercial or happy hour at a hip bar. But peek inside: Beneath all the niceties, there’s an orb of heartbreak deep enough to pump blood into your blues.

Condon’s constant obsession with anachronism occasionally yields lovely, even compelling results. Other times, listening to his music feels like talking to friends from high school you’ve lost touch with. There’s good stuff here, but ultimately, it’s hard to be excited about something that feels so seriously entrenched in the past.

It exists in a cloud of gloom that consumes the album. And yet, there’s something endearing about Boogie’s honesty, his commitment to the established mood, and his charming vocals to go along with his rap abilities.

Weaving in and out of concrete, direct, indie-rock songwriting and meditative, impressionistic dream pop, the record takes up more space than any of Girlpool’s previous music.

They’ve made a record that captures the tumult of feeling displaced, without abandoning the hyped-up spirit that made them such a spectacle during their party-animal days.

Sunflower Bean are excellent song-crafters with a blurry point of view. But there’s some new dimension here that makes the band more than just parrots of politics and sound.

Oliver Appropriate, with its clap-along drumming patterns and stripped-back production, sounds like an elder statesman of emo gathering his fellow washed up frontmen around a campfire for a story or two. It’s a fitting ending for a band that always stood a step or two outside the scene, pointing and laughing.

Goes West feels less conceptually united than any of his work—more inspired by the contemplation of history than history itself--but this searching quality adds to its honest, meditative power. Many of the songs feel like visions left intentionally ambiguous, and the record is bound by a pensive, permeating calmness.

Her most experimental album yet, a meditative foray into swirling loops and pure drone. The physical trappings of her primary instrument largely melt away.

As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy.

At just less than 30 minutes, Highway Hypnosis is in fact her longest record, and it feels longer still.