Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.

Crack-Up contains his most compelling writing to date because it’s so damn relatable in 2017--reacting and retreating inwards as people and institutions fail to meet the standards set in one’s head.

He struggles to let his guard down, and ironically, operates best when he keeps it up. Tiller comes off not as the passionate lover, but as the sappy everyman—too bland and full of tropes to be the new hero pouring his heart out in a thunderstorm.

Overall, Sugar at the Gate is a compact record from a band chugging along smoothly, unspooling sweet rhythms like it is finally their job.

Coffman doesn’t necessarily transcend the cornerstones she’s sampling on City of No Reply, but she’s not aiming to.

With Witness’ confounding combination of songwriting sloppiness and sleepiness, broad strokes are the really the best Perry can hope for these days.

Droptopwop, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, is Gucci’s first post-prison project that truly gels. This is thanks in no small part to Metro.

She is in touch with love’s fragilities and understands that it is worth protecting, there is just a lot of tireless work to get it. The record is all the more beautiful for it.

Dawson grows as a singer throughout these songs, sometimes with humorous results.

The Chuck Berry template rears its head, for better and worse, throughout Chuck.

It’s the slowest and least cluttered instrumentals that feel here the most effectively expansive, capturing the scope of the quartet’s chosen themes without collapsing beneath symbolism and meaning-making.

The melancholy saunter of Henriksen’s lines is isolated and sculpted by glimmering, whirring atmospheres full of emptiness and portent. Testing different ways to contrast eloquent material and enigmatic medium, the record plays like some lost collaboration between Wynton Marsalis and Brian Eno circa Ambient 4: On Land.

Platinum Tips + Ice Cream presents a most curious contradiction: it’s a greatest-hits album designed for die-hards.

Saint Etienne never identified as Britpop, and fair enough. But with Home Counties, they give us a glimpse of what cutting-edge ’90s pop could have become if it had evolved into adult music with a more earthbound point of view.

Pixx is at her sharpest when her doubt and discontent are animated by something more acute.

After the strong, finger-picked Buckingham solo feature of “In My World,” however, the rush of hearing these two pop-rock titans team up starts to wear off. ... Granted, successful moments are sprinkled throughout the whole album.

Capacity is a remarkable record, one that proves that Big Thief are not a one-trick pony, they are the full circus.

Through wallowing in its own mire and coming out the other side, Cigarettes After Sex becomes one of those restrained, low-boil albums where tempo, repetition, and muted composition construct an entire story within the pauses between the notes and the ideas between the lines.

For all their complexities, Phoenix have typically sounded effortless. And from a stage or streaming playlist, these songs will gel with the music of their last two albums. But the work that went into them, apparently on a 9-to-5 schedule, is palpable.

The slower, more agonized songs best reveal Souleyman’s strengths.

When Somersault reaches its unfettered climax, the five-minute-plus tension-releasing eruption of “Be Nothing,” it’s clear that the project has overcome its greatest burden. Like DeMarco and DIIV before it, Beach Fossils emerged from Captured Tracks haze and established its own identity on the other side.

On an album full of radio experiments, some succeed--“100 Letters,” “Walls Could Talk” and “Alone” demonstrate the perennially fertile sound of alt-pop--and some inevitably fail.

Asking his band to change course in a dramatic fashion after nearly three decades together might be too much. But allowing themselves to get away from the tried and true could give the Charlatans a nice creative jolt to keep them going for another 30 years.

I Used to Spend So Much Time Alone curls into dark corners, exploring the depths of desperation and self-loathing that Chastity Belt only hinted at on their last two albums.

RELAXER shows us what remains after those quirks are dialed back: some perfectly nice, perfectly blank lads who have no idea why they are standing in front of you and even less of an idea what to say.

As a writer, Hackman may owe a bit to PJ Harvey, but I’m Not Your Man is the proper arrival of a bold young British force.

By aiming for the textbook definition of a big-picture pop album, Antonoff has ended up with the epitome of a vanity project: an album that revolves entirely around one person, made more enjoyable the less you expect from it.

While Waiting on a Song is casual in execution, it’s extremely intricate in construction, with each disco-string sweep, brass-section stab, and razor-sharp acoustic strum deployed with push-button precision. At times, the album feels less like a traditional singer/songwriter affair than a business card for Auerbach’s studio.