If Sheezus was Allen at her most ironic, Allen’s new album marks a return to sincerity--and its assessments of motherhood, failing relationships, and infamy are penetrating. Sadly, these potent themes are often diluted by antiseptic production.

On so sad, her traumas are too often muted by abstraction and unspecificity. Li is clearly an artist of stormy passions—four albums in, she still seeks the flood of love before she reaches for the life preserver.

What’s surprising--and thrilling--about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.

On Lost & Found, Smith is defining her own destiny. In the process, she confirms that she is special and rare, an asker of impossible but necessary questions.

Powers has forged a sound of his own, too: scattershot and emotional, attention deficient and frantically detailed. As its filigree twists expand into every available space, Insula suggests there are still acres left to explore in this increasingly virtual territory.

The lyrics can sometimes sit at the surface of a feeling, and you wish the stories said more. Still, Shannon in Nashville feels humbly victorious.

Bonet lets her imaginative, polymath inner child run free--but she never loses sight of adult reality.

The songs are the most intriguing ones to emerge from this Wyoming project thus far. ... A lot of the energy that "ye" seemed to be gasping for fills the lungs of this project, and it’s humbling to consider how much this material might have enlivened West’s own album.

It feels like he’s constantly remixing himself, taking apart ideas from as far back as his 1978 debut Earthquake Island and using new technology to augment and re-contextualize them for the present era. In a perfect Fourth World twist, the music remains entirely grounded in the now while also sounding like it’s been floating in the cosmos for eons.

The band has spun joy out of its frontman’s gnarliest experience, making metal that sounds sensuous, bellicose, and jubilant at once.

Throughout the record, each line is given its own story. Every vocal feels deeply considered and felt, yet nothing is over-rehearsed. She knows precisely when to dial in and when to dial back, when to fully commit to her longing and when to step back and shake her head at it.

If LUMP is a commentary on the commodification of art and the self, then its final minutes suggest the duality of music as a commodity.

Listening as Prass struggles through the muck, what’s clear is that The Future and the Past is really about the present--about finding ways to push through each day without giving over to despondency. This ship may be going down, but these songs are another set of buoys fighting to keep it afloat.

“Rats” and “Witch Image” get their strength from smoldering licks and stacked harmonies plucked from the Ozzy Osbourne playbook, providing metalheads with a welcome break from all the mid-tempo durdling. Given the unremarkable tracks that follow it--particularly “Helvetesfönster,” an ostentatious, baroque instrumental reminiscent of Medieval Times muzak--the latter might as well be the record’s closer.

Dream House forsakes even the grandiose manipulations of their EPs for a placid, empty surface. It looks good on paper. It will sound nice while you cook dinner. Then you’ll forget you ever heard it.

Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength.

Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.

More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness.

Unclear messages and unspooled melodies break new ground for Hval, and she inhabits it with grace on The Long Sleep. It’s as penetrating a work as Blood Bitch and its predecessor, Apocalypse, girl, but more humble in concept and more suspicious of its own claims.

It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers.

If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life.

Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests--but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition.

This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away.

Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic.