Captures a portion of the wispy bedsit magic that used to mark some of The Field Mice's best work and boosts it with the lush, "Hazey Jane II"-like chamber-pop of Belle & Sebastian's first flourishes of glory.

On Around, Whirr don’t elevate themselves beyond the level of a listener; instead, they remain supplicant to their influences.

In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes.

These songs are great showcases for the group’s range. Though they seem to have settled squarely in the neon haze of the dancefloor, they’re more truly in their wheelhouse in these mellower moments. Sequencing, though, is a problem. Too often, the record plummets from a sugary adrenaline high to a last-call ballad.

New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past.

It’s the sound of Zach Bryan figuring out how to paint on a larger canvas, how to sound like the superstar he has become.

The album falters slightly when the music becomes more abstract and inscrutable, but on the whole it is not difficult to relate to Nagano or slip into the mood created by her bandmates.

It's a no-frills record that recedes into the background without much fuss, which works for and against the album's overall impact.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

Ultimately, Slime Language 2 is a label compilation and the usual caveats apply: it’s far too long, the back half is padded out with a few throwaways and hardly anyone is showing up with their best material. That said, Slime Language 2 succeeds as a survey of how pervasive Thug’s influence has become.

No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory.

This music is demanding—of your patience, of your attention, of your tolerance for cacophony—but the reward is a fascinatingly confounding journey through the fragmented mirror world.

She and longtime producer King Ed are clearly drawn to shiny, uncynical pop, and out of the dozens of songs Latham recorded for Quarter Life Crisis, that’s largely what made the cut.

As much as Golden Teacher absorb the adventurous dub sounds of the past, their exuberance can’t quite make up for the fact that sometimes they still sound like students.

Mythologies sounds like the work of an artist stepping out of his comfort zone in search of personal creative fulfillment. It might be equally rewarding for the listener if only any of these pieces were as memorable as Daft Punk’s songs.

End of Daze is a confident and comprehensive showcase for everything Dum Dum Girls do well.

There’s no harm in taking inspiration from others. But here, it sounds like McRae and her writing team hopped on the left-of-center-pop bandwagon without building out something new and wholly Tate—and it’s hard to make leftovers taste as enticing as when they were first served hot and fresh.

With their boundaries and ambitions by now well established, on Tight Knit Cabic and company largely succeed in luring the listener hazily back in time and into Vetiver's comfort zone.

Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous.

Get Back still finds McBean trying to tap into something risky and surprising, even if the results are the sometimes-egregious misstep of a mid-40s rock musician obsessed with the letdown of aging.

Like Smashing Pumpkins did at their peak, Bully tease dimensionality out of their music by emphasizing the similarity, and then the space, between Bognanno’s voice and the guitars that squall around her.

Martsch continues the sub-greatness trend of his recent work, releasing another record that fails to carry the weight of the canonical two-fer that lies at the center of his career.

This is as close as Bowie has ever come to simply "pretty good" in his storied career.

The band has... streamlined their songwriting, whittling away the unconventional turns and multiple pre-choruses that made their earlier material more interesting, leaving emotionally aerodynamic compositions free of atonal snags or polyrhythmic left-turns.

Though the restless time changes and laser-show synth overtures betray prog-rock's ostentatious influence, the tightly constructed songs here (all but two of which stay under the five-minute mark) bristle with a passion and purpose that belongs only to the truly committed and composed.

While it might be oversimplifying matters to suggest that it splits the difference between the cute, poppy Royksopp and the darker, techno-friendly Royksopp, the most satisfying thing about Junior is how convincingly they've bridged that divide.

Although they've played and recorded together in the past, here they sound as though they're still finding out how to best combine their quirks.

Tumble Bee is a welcome addition to contemporary children's music, not only because it's sufficiently involving to appeal to adults, but also because it further demonstrates that songs for kids don't have to be cloying or sanitized.