Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

Whatever pleasure can be generated from Bellamy’s admirable melodic sense and overblown hooks is negated by Muse’s insistence that they’re profound rather than fun.

Rather than feeling stark and severe, there’s an elegant grace in the simplicity. It makes a listener lean in to find an unexpectedly warm embrace.

Chrissybaby is 16 songs long, which might be more of this particular pleasant, low-stakes mood than you need at one uninterrupted stretch.

In spite of their surprising stability, this iteration of the Fall is strangely lacking in audible camaraderie, and on Sub-Lingual Tablet, the distance between frontman and backing band feels more pronounced than ever.

While written with absolute precision and poetic skill that rivals the best rappers currently working, Chance's words tumble from his mouth effortlessly, as if he's already done with the verse by the time he recites it, looking to what's next.

Remember My Name as an album isn’t going to change lives.

Through little fault of Goatsnake’s own, listening to Black Age Blues can sometimes feel like watching wizened blues musicians play the music of their now-distant youth. The style is familiar enough to be comforting, but it’s also inherently trite and redundant.

Romanticism occurs in the distance between what might happen and what does, and listening to Before the World Was Big feels like walking through this exalted liminal space.

Now, she is after a larger quarry: the contemporary chamber ensemble. But she does not quite capture it on The Clearing.

For New Alhambra, his seventh and latest release as Elvis Depressedly, he's crafted a utopian sort of indie-pop, an ecstatic evocation of the second coming, professional wrestling, and radical positivity.

There is no doubt Peace Is the Mission will suffer some criticism from dancehall purists, those exhausted by EDM and people who hate Diplo (a hate that he has certainly worked overtime to earn), but their maturation is palpable across the album's nine tracks.

Full Communism is an album-length exercise of that responsibility. Downtown Boys have two horns and plenty of aggression in their arsenal and, as they play, they force you to acknowledge the world around you.

Much like footwork, you get the impression his music evolved to cater to the demands of athletic dancing bodies. Consequently, it makes a certain sense that attempts here to temper Shangaan Electro’s frenetic pace don’t always come off.

On Carnation, he tries and fails to be something other than himself.

This is a huge, sturdy record, built for arenas and it's richly and carefully enough constructed to endure the extensive exposure Welch's heartache is going to get over the course of this summer.

Like their peers and forebears, Valet create simple music that feels expansive. Only here, the swirl of fuzz and echo isn't an exit from terrestrial woes, just a comfortable place to take stock for a moment.

The savvily sequenced Algiers ebbs and flows between moments of gritted-teeth tension and furious release, its solemn, confession-booth ruminations offset by heart-racing, steeple-toppling rave-ups.

There seem to be so many questions stirring inside SOAK, and yet Before We Forgot How to Dream douses them in so much prettiness that they lose their spark.

It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done--moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists--and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.

For the most part, it settles somewhere unusual, if not original.

At long last, a real sense of identity has begun to coalesce in Rocky’s work.

She’s not an ostentatious player, although she certainly has the chops; she seldom solos and usually avoids the fussy filigrees that demonstrate technique as much as they serve the song.

Tthere’s a palpable narrative here, a sense of loss and stillness, and it reanimates Dalton, if only for a moment. It’s good to have her back.

As a whole, Have a Nice Life stands as a decent collection of songs that, while palatable, casually floats by in a sea of average beats by Jesse Shatkin, who produced much of the album.

This is Nielson's most accomplished album, though it's not his most direct, or brash, or explosive.

It’s this unabashed ambition that makes You Should Be Here resonate long after one has internalized its motivational urges ("Can't nobody love somebody that do not love themselves") and tender observations on the mechanics of relationships (see the wistful "Unconditional").

They’re modest songs for modest moments, occupying the space between the hookup and the breakup, of getting hired and getting fired, that manageable lovesickness, regret, and anxiety that underlie just about every URL and IRL interaction.