The album’s hypnotic quality grows ever more romantic and tense with repeat listens, a prescient-feeling experience that matches a zeitgeist: strung-out maintaining in the face of impending doom.

If their first album, 2015’s Momentary Lapse of Happily, was intimate as a dorm-room performance, Driver feels bigger, like it’s performed from a stage. Knipes uses the emotional force of their suffering to propel expansive, layered arrangements that make room for head-bobbing melodies, chilly synths, and guitar solos.

Staking his place as a fully formed singer, composer, and producer with All Our Knives Are Always Sharp, Njoku unsheathes his blade.

The more time you spend with Ambassadors, the more clearly that commitment and joy comes through.

Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.

While Get to Heaven's ceaseless terror and heavy arrangements can be overwhelming, more power to Everything Everything for attempting to offer a nuanced understanding of a broken world at a time when a lot of their significantly less imaginative British indie rock peers say worse than nothing.

Ultimately, the picture that emerges on Twentyears is a simplified version of Air that swaps out most of their quirks for only their most palatable qualities. It’s a lite version of the band, and a frustrating missed opportunity.

This is heavy stuff and as fun as it can be, Cashmere is an unabashedly political record, careening from one geopolitical issue to the next the way that most rap albums treat boasts. Ultimately, though, its most impactful moments lie in the simple act of representation.

La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.

Where his solo debut, Yr Atal Genhedlaeth, was a relatively subdued, Welsh-only affair, its successor takes unseriousness as seriously as any official Furries effort.

Director's Cut provides a unique opportunity to do an A/B comparison between a late-career artist and her younger self. But which you'll prefer likely depends on whether you favor a more assured artist working within her strengths, or a brash younger artist delighting in the defying of pop conventions.

On the right day, at the right time, the album's powerfully claustrophobic intimacy is more palatable; on the wrong day, at the wrong time, in the wrong frame of mind, White Chalk may be the longest half-hour in the world.

Thug's best songs are carefully structured, even if they appear effortlessly thrown together, and the most effective moments tend to be subtle, sidling up to the listener.... But the album's true highlights don't arrive until its close, with the one-two punch of "Draw Down" and "Wood Would".

Subwoofers are admittedly very cool, but by volume 4 (“Subenstein (My Sub IV)”) of K.R.I.T.’s magnum opus of adulation for the bass speakers, the conceit has worn a little thin. Still bumps, though.

A decade after making her solo debut, Stevenson has found her sweet spot as a singer-songwriter.

Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.

It's to Lambchop's credit that their music avoids comfortable resolutions. Instead, it hangs there, no moral, no judgment.

While certainly not on the level of The Days of Wine and Roses, this reunion record could be considered that debut’s rightful follow-up, at least in spirit.

We are hearing someone who risked his physical and emotional well-being searching for catharsis with “Two” and “Bear” and “Every Night My Teeth Are Falling Out” and discovered freedom in acceptance. Green to Gold might feel peaceful, but it didn’t come easy.

As is typical in periods of self-discovery, Hideous Bastard is rife with growing pains. But surrounded by a trusted community, and in a few sparing moments of clarity, it hints at real beauty.

Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all.

Musically, Saturnalia, named after the Roman festival where slaves and masters switch roles, is a concentrated dose of their usual badassery, never straying too far from the territory Dulli explored on the last three Singers albums, and even includes many of the same collaborators.

It works best as group therapy, a 30-minute reprieve from the pervasive judgment of adulthood.

As it is, the more Auerbach changes things, the more they stay the same.

Big Ideas plays like an eclectic compilation of scattered thoughts from her journal. Songs grapple with big questions but offer few answers.

Raised in a library of music and having already dissected his influences, Rollie takes confident first steps as Cadence Weapon.

It is the sound of Iron & Wine returning home, ending one chapter and beginning another.

As a whole, Bestial Burden highlights Chardiet’s ability to re-draw the boundaries of her own artistic approach, ripping out its guts and creating something new out of the decaying remains.