One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

It makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.

Strength of a Woman finds its power in going back to basics. As a whole experience, it luxuriates within the magisterial hip-hop-soul queendom she formulated in the ’90s and the attendant themes that trace back to wronged-woman blues.

Morning After challenges listeners to assemble their own puzzle, pull fragments from it, and draw their own conclusions. Trust, aloneness, insecurity, hundreds of nights worth of feelings: dvsn puts them all in the air for you to grab at any moment.

Nothing on the EP would sound out of place amid the dreamy desert blues of the band’s 28-year-old debut album, She Hangs Brightly.

All the Things may only mark the first step in the Milk Carton Kids’ transformation--but, in eliminating so many of the constraints they once placed on their music, they have already crafted the richest, most accessible songs of their career.

It’s when Fujita moves unaccompanied that he ascends to a more contemplative and numinous realm.

The Anteroom is full of skittery electronics with hints of ambient and house textures that work as both as a marker for how outside of the margins Krell operates and how narrowly he deviates from his own previous innovations in the underground.

Molina's songwriting here is much stronger than on last year's Axxess and Ace, but he's abandoned some of the guests who helped make the album so affecting when he opted to record in Scotland, rather than the U.S. ... making The Lioness a decidedly more resigned and less passionate affair.

Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

Let the Festivities Begin! is music to dance to, to roll a joint to, to solve a decades-old mystery to, but it isn’t a masterwork that unfolds with multiple listens. It’s exactly what it promises, and that’s a party.

If it doesn’t achieve the long-promised outcome of “filler-free” Foals, Life Is Yours unexpectedly thrives when it reintegrates the studio trickery that used to weigh down previous side Bs.

Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be.

And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.

The production is more ambitious, the songwriting more accomplished. If JENNIE has the most robust individual musical identity of the quartet, it’s because her songs have a crucial element the others’ lack: They sound good.

Fancy Some More? feels like a rowdy, well-earned celebration and reaffirms the main ideas PinkPantheress has gestured toward for much of the year: Heavy reference doesn’t inherently go hand-in-hand with a lack of ingenuity.

DEADLINE achieves the bare minimum, but instead of being a show of style and substance, its music and credits—Diplo, Chris Martin, Dr. Luke—come across more like a demonstration of A-list power.

Without a singular narrative to tie it all together besides Hamilton's lovely but noncommital exhalations, it's a little too easy to lose interest.

While the best moments of his previous two solo albums felt like little more than stripped-back versions of solid Hold Steady songs, We All Want the Same Things is more subtle and strange.

It's one of his best, a mostly single-minded return to the on-the-mic fierceness and computers-go-tribal rhythms that first made his name.

God Help the Girl is a spirited expansion of some of Murdoch's best ideas, but until the film finishes shooting--set to start next year--we'll probably just have wild-ass guesses like mine as to the real story.

Few rappers could bring such an engaging sense of energy to a project so focused on preaching to the converted.

Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights--“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance.

Its best moments are stellar and exhilarating.

With Herbert, I've always been happy to consider the political content of the records to be a clever bonus, while the music as a purely sonic experience is allowed to stand on its own. I listened to Plat du Jour five or six times without paying attention to the song titles and not having read the online methodological descriptions, and this one didn't hold up quite so well.

So yes, on Minotaur they continue draw deeply from 60s soft-pop; if you've enjoyed the Clientele's last few albums, you're guaranteed to enjoy at least 6/8ths of this mini LP.

Unfortunately, Supergrass doesn't really ever harness any of the momentum they create on individual songs to make a truly great LP.

Young God's version is rattled and haunted, with guitars and voices that sound damaged and weary.