Hymnal is a planet of sound, teeming with life, that seems even more habitable than Fountain—a bountiful ecosystem experiencing a permanent May and June.

Billionaire may showcase the curling intricacy of her voice, but her songwriting seems less invested in striving for a similar complexity.

It’s ELO and ELP and the Cars on lithium. Roxy Music is another ingredient in the strange, gauzy casserole. It’s stylish in an uncomfortable way, like a Stereolab record by way of a hostage crisis.

Here every sound and beat is laid bare, with no heavy reverb blanketing the songs like fog. The newfound clarity produces neither thinness nor tedium, but simply a direct, unadulterated power.

He winds up succeeding, thanks to the haunting quality hanging over much of Eternally Even, reflecting the tensions of 2016.

The first seven songs kill, but the album's second half drags on longer than a Def Jam debut.

Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music.

The mercurial three-piece may now be more cohesive, consistent, and focused, but volcano!'s unpredictability is Paperwork's biggest strength.

Animals is a provocative proposition with flashes of inspired bricolage, by a likable veteran muso, but for something so fussed over, it’s a little half-baked.

Undertow finds Wolf Eyes a bit tamer than usual, shoehorning their concrète-tinged racket to more conventional melodic paradigms. They’ve mostly done away with the bluesy flirtations this time around, instead applying a wrecking ball to the spacious, lush frameworks of world music, ambient, and even reggae.

A staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.

I’m not sure any skeptics will find their gateway with the well-meaning protest music of Days of Ash. .... But if nothing else, U2 at least sound like they’re learning to trust themselves again.

So Relayted is both better than it had any right to be, given the concept, and about as good as you could expect from the musicians involved.

They’ve made the first record of their career that feels like it might teach you something over time. It is rare, and special, for a band to be this effortlessly and completely themselves.

A solid, conventional effort by an artist who once seemed so vital.

It is, if anything, even denser, more dimly lit, more seamlessly contoured [than 2013's Cupid's Head].

The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.

Sunbathing Animal's considered, whip-smart rock revivalism is a work of substantial growth from a band that already did "simple" quite well, placing Parquet Courts in their own distinct weight class.

Her follow-up, Silence Is Wild, sounds not only more assured in its arrangements and performances, but more lively for being so self-indulgent.

Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of.

Her voice has matured to a fine saw-toothed rasp, and carries with it the echoes of every hard minute through which she's lived.

In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country runs like updated material from their majestic 1998 offering, Music has the Right to Children. And like that album's namesake, these five elegantly mournful melodies creep and explore like adored but unruly children, full of wide-eyed astonishment and naïveté.

This version of NoYork! doesn’t offer any new revelations about the record, but as the physical document of that time a gifted rapper blew off a promising record deal to geek out in the studio with friends and then came out with one of the defining documents of his scene, it’s still a win.

Listeners who prefer their folk flashier or wrapped around memorable, poppy hooks might find Pratt's approach meandering or bland. But those with a more patient ear will find her a worthy and quietly distinct heir of Baier, Bunyan, and Dalton's homespun sound.

Spanning just over half an hour, People Helping People requires a few listens before its logic begins to click, but eventually the fractured music overlaps with their catalog, even suggesting new directions for their work to come.

In the end, those appearances [by Keith Fullerton Whitman, Jay Lesser, and Sun Ra Arkestra's Marshall Allen] point to the album's only downside, which is the nagging sense that there's too much straight homage/pastiche and not enough of Matmos' considerable cleverness on display. Ultimately, though, it's a minor quibble.

The production isn't a disaster, but most of the stylistic flourishes can feel gimmicky or, at worst, like dry history lessons... There's also the tugging sense that Springsteen and Aniello are trying to cover up some of the album's lackluster songwriting.

I Was Born Swimming is her most expansive and professional-sounding record to date, and on the whole, does more right than wrong. But it’s an MFA of an album. As a project, it’s admirable. As an album, it leaves you cold.