This is an inspired collection of songs, even if you do get the feeling Hopkins prefers to spend his late nights alone.

Melbourne, Florida is an exciting progression to old fans, and a solid entry point for new audiences.

Eat Pray Thug isn’t lacking in ideas, just focus, and there are long stretches where it’s much harder to connect to Heems’ persona.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Even those who decided years ago that this album was going to be great will be hard-pressed to find a great rap record here, only a sporadically enjoyable one.

Throughout Ripe 4 Luv you can sense that it’s taking every ounce of discipline Cook has to play these pop songs as straight as he does, so he can be forgiven for indulging a little kitsch at the finish line.

Acollection of songs that may not necessarily venture into any new sonic territory for the venerable band, but ultimately doesn’t really need to.

At times, White’s knack for simplicity lapses into the slightly generic.

It’s harder not to fixate entirely on the formal elements of the music, rather than the things that might make it personal. That leads to records where you listen to and admire them from a distance instead of getting immersed in them.

While Jack Ü doesn't exactly roll the ball forward, or do much else to make listeners rethink the principal actors here, it's dumb, loud fun from two architects of the dumbest, loudest fun of the 2000s.

Policy's highlights maintain a precarious balance between classicism and cataclysm, but the album often tips too far in either direction.

The quieter work here may suggest a way forward, but Wild Strawberries has a transitional feel.

This is music that proudly exists as sonic information, music that invites you to meditate on how a simple tone with a halo of white noise, pulsing along in medium tempo and working through different melodic combinations along a major scale, makes you feel.

After clocks in at a solid hour--and it's an hour you'll feel, because while After boasts a stacked lineup of well-crafted songs, it's a choppy ride to make it through them all.

None of the songs on Shadow of the Sun sound new, but the familiar sounds create an atmosphere of safety that allows the more unexpected elements of the record all the more noteworthy.

Ultimately the music becomes another mask, another thing Barnes is trying to untangle, in a great chapter in the lengthy, wonderfully ornate Of Montreal compendium.

You've really got to fight to make your way into You're Better Than This, to carve out a little room amidst its unstable rhythms, its twining guitars, and Maguire's screams-of-consciousness. But that's precisely what inspires such devotion in Pile's growing cohort.

If not all its experiments yield consistently entrancing results, Comb the Feelings is the sound of Grooms basking in the first radiant glimpse of a future that, not too long ago, it didn’t think it’d live long enough to see.

The complementary pieces are all keystones here, and stylistic variety--the focused punk-vibe grit-and-grind of P.O.S., Dessa's smooth venom, Cecil Otter reining in agitation, Sims and Mike Mictlan rounding out the rewind-demanding punchline barrage--is what keeps the album alive even when the words start to blur.

This obsession with connecting and disappearing in rapid succession is fitting for a record that finds Purity Ring trying to stake their claim at pop's center but ultimately retreating within themselves.

While the songwriting may be on autopilot, Gallagher’s decision to self-produce Chasing Yesterday was a smart one, resulting in an album that feels both intimate and expansive.

Though Krill aren’t quite ready to let go of the anxieties that inspired them to write their eccentricities in excrement in the first place, Fist suggests that there is light at the end of the sewer drain.

In spite of the formalism, individual tracks on Quarterbacks are a sharp jolt. Together, they blur to make the album more of a mood piece.

Though the busy, Reichian loops help decorate the retro palette, it's the sort of intricacy that can encase art-pop in bulletproof glass, demanding admiration without meeting us halfway. At its best, though, O Shudder's timeworn skill is to combat looming adversity with verve and rhythm, emptying the mind through the body.

This record reads like an object lesson in how former glories are sometime best served by becoming a malleable part of the present.

The result of so much suspicion is an album that’s somehow both loud and timid--all clamor and no soul.

Ultimately, what’s most disappointing about What Happens Next is not that it will in any way tarnish Gang of Four’s legacy--if their vanguard reputation could withstand Hard and Mall, it can withstand this. Rather, it’s the unshakeable feeling that, if Gill had released this as some newly branded collaborative project, no one would question why it wasn’t a Gang of Four album.

Future Brown feels overwhelmingly like a bunch of intriguing ideas left to drift off inconclusively.