Abstract as most of the sounds on Glass are, and as unstructured as the improvisation is, there’s something considered at its heart. The tones, though still sharp as glass shards, are infused with a warmth that slowly permeates the final moments of the piece.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.

Given Ought’s radical inklings, you wish they dared to make these lovely songs say or do something a little more righteous, to twist them into more adventurous shapes. However, Ought achieve this spectacularly on the blue-eyed soul of “Desire.” It towers over Room Inside the World like the album’s lighthouse.

The album’s a tad awkward, like many projects steeped in the mild tea of sincerity, but By the Way, I Forgive You is the necessary next step in a shrewdly managed career. Brandi Carlile requires no forgiveness from us.

The spirit was willing, but the editorial hand, which could have redeemed the project by jettisoning the filler, was weak.

There is very little happening within his verses right now, and even as he’s pivoted toward the personal, he’s still doing impressions, sonically and stylistically.

If lacking the conceptual heft of past releases, Wait for Love is a richer, more versatile experience.

Brighter Wounds, Son Lux’s fifth LP and second since guitarist Rafiq Bhatia and drummer Ian Chang entered the fold, has loftier ambitions than Lott’s prior work.

The resulting sound feels new, to be sure, but mostly in the sense that it’s not fully ripe. Though challenging and, in its best moments, quite exciting, Music for the Long Emergency ultimately resembles a first draft. Its most compelling ideas are knotted up with its worst, and the whole thing could use a thorough edit.

Twin Fantasy is not a perfect record—the latter half is bogged down by soundscape-y passages and spoken word, for one thing--but that only validates it as a powerful document of teenaged pain and longing.

Chris Dave’s accomplished chops demand that he should be the star of his debut--but too often he’s lost in the firmament.

Their second album, Rock Island, shows Palm working harder than ever to unburden themselves of the influences heard on those earlier releases, from Slint and Sonic Youth to Battles and Animal Collective.

The visual [video] gambit falls uneasily between a critique of hip-hop’s relationship with corporate sportswear brands and, once again, a flimsy attempt to muster up attention. Pure Beauty plays out in a similar fashion, committing wholly to neither SHIRT’s appealing raw rap chops nor his grander concepts.

Although the record has a number of aesthetically appealing moments, Dead Start Program never quite coalesces.

With Crooked Shadows, Carrabba aims to bring together his competing production impulses. Unfortunately, the results are all over the place.

When Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be.

His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.

It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry.

Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.

The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes [fantasy and emotional urgency], interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.

If Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one.

Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.

If their debut fails to offer a consistent, forceful message the way their riot grrrl heroes once did, they have at least figured out how to capture some of those predecessors’ energy. For now, Dream Wife leaves you revved up and ready to go with nowhere suggested.

Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too.

The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.

Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.

As a standalone suite of songs, like a tuxedo you only dust off every now and then, it is beautiful, but only appropriate when the occasion demands it.