The result is a thoroughly dazed album that conjures a daydream so immersive (if not always so idyllic), it precludes any intrusive thoughts. The instrumentation on Sundays feels sun-baked and toasty in its fuzzy beach towel of distortion.

On paper, the decision to mix the raw invention their early work with the melodic catharsis of jazz and gospel sounds fascinating, while Closer Apart’s weirdly gorgeous companion video makes a case for Okzharp & Manthe Ribane as an enthralling visual act. But the album itself feels frustratingly limp, making you wish Okzharp & Ribane had stayed true to the kinetic force that lit up their EPs.

The beauty of Death Lust lies in how Williams makes them all sound like part of the same continuum of disaffection, and how he approaches each mode with a pop songwriter’s ear for concision. Chastity's debut full-length is a brief album, with 10 songs clocking in at 31 minutes total, but the terrain it covers is vast.

On Power, Lotic re-harnesses their production proficiency toward a trickier goal than what they’ve attempted in the past. In the center of their elaborate electronic constructions, they’ve staged their deeply human terrors and triumphs, and traced the way the power structures of the world flow around them.

While deeply impressionistic, Lamp Lit Prose inverts its predecessor’s emotional black hole, largely thanks to its revival of airy Bitte Orca-style compositions and a pick’n’mix guest list.

If Alice Bag was wondering back then whether her Chicana resilience could last, then Blueprint is proof that she’s only grown more powerful.

If the objective of this excursion is simply to make a funky, spirited, low-stakes caricature of a dangerous, indomitable industry, though, then the album was worth the wait, the bloat, and the occasional cringe.

You can start to see trajectory to Container’s LPs after this fourth edition, though the changes are deceptively subtle considering how unruly any specific release is. What’s never changed (and likely the reason the series remains so consistent) is simply how much fun Schofield makes all this mayhem sound.

Gordon’s most impassioned singing on the album helps here, too, but it’s the pair’s frame accuracy that makes the track so dramatic. The results are far from predictable, but they serve as further proof that Body/Head are fully in control.

Human Love is Deafheaven’s subtlest, prettiest music, and it aims for a different kind of transcendence. For all the influences their music conjures, you’d never mistake these songs for any other band.

Ultimately, while this crowdedness [from guest appearances] prevents Supreme Blientele from feeling like a definitive statement from Gunn as a rapper, the album can still function as a fine entry point to the fast-growing catalog of an ascendant rap cult hero.

Byen feels a little safe and complacent by comparison. Perhaps because he has spent the past decade upending his listeners’ expectations, this largely successful attempt to string together a cohesive set of nu-disco tracks has the odd effect of making him seem kind of predictable.

If the album makes for an occasionally uneasy listen, that only speaks to its authenticity: Anyone who’s ever lain awake at night wondering where their life is going will feel a cringe of recognition in these songs.

Uniform Distortion abounds with displays of James’ fiery fretwork, but he rarely wields his other signature weapon--that angelic croon that trembles with vulnerability yet can soar high enough to rattle satellites. In the fleeting moments when it does surface, the effect is doubly stunning.

I’ll Tell You What! is a masterful album of precision and imagination, one where footwork resounds with the potential of a rewritten rule book. It is also astoundingly alive, its energy and originality a reminder that visionary ideas and emptied minds can outlast feeble human mortality.

Palo Santo is a promising sophomore album because it evolves past the sound of the band’s debut. But at its low points, the record lacks the bite to drive home the razor’s-edge duality of sacred and profane that Alexander seems to thrive on.

Welch sounds content and resigned, recollecting the stormy Saturdays of the past with a Sunday-morning penitent’s shrug and a born-again sigh. How small, how beige, how disappointing.

On Sixth House, by embracing the spirit of their best records without leaning on those releases’ do-or-die, hard-luck intensity, they’ve found a way to settle comfortably into their strengths.

I’m All Ears renders flattened communication as poignant, striking not because of the novelty of being made by teenagers but because it speaks with such commanding precision to the experience of a teenager in 2018.

The band’s most streamlined, expansive, and melodically sharp release yet.

Themes for Television’s highlights effectively double as a showcase for Jewel’s impressive sense of arrangement and mood-setting.

A triumphant counterpoint [to YOL2]--a record that feels like pure, reckless release.

All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation--but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career.

It can give you new respect for the rigor, compression, and balance of some of his other albums from the period. It is at times, as Coltrane’s son Ravi pointed out, surprisingly like a live session in a studio; parts of the music sound geared toward a captive audience. That may be the best thing about it.

It’s remarkable how many of Scorpion’s 90 minutes are musically engaging. But the kind of juvenile navel-gazing that leads someone to write a line like, “She say do you love me, I tell her only partly/I only love my bed and my mama, I’m sorry” is less compelling when it’s coming from a 31-year-old father than a would-be college kid trying to make a name for himself.

In reaching out to others, Georgopoulos is discovering his own voice for the first time.

Its intentions are noble. Yet the album’s sentiments are often bogged down by cloying lyrics and worn-out arrangements. At times, the music feels conspicuously out of character for a band that has historically made tactful, if occasionally bland, rock’n’roll.

It might be too humble for its own good, but The Now Now is the rare commercial sojourn that feels like a product of real fascination.