When No Birds Sang is the rare metal album whose greatest virtue is its delicacy.

While Minaj is still rapping valiantly—especially as Red Ruby Da Sleeze, a new persona introduced on the Diwali riddim-sampling single of the same name—the album’s intention is muddled through its scattershot production, which sounds less like genre innovation and more like an insidious ploy to worm its way into as many crevices on TikTok as possible.

Although it’s replete with period photos and memorabilia, 50 Years of De-Evolution doesn’t quite capture the thrilling sense of otherness Devo conveyed at their peak. Heard within the vacuum of their own catalog, Devo seem more eccentric than revolutionary.

A lot of the weaknesses come down to the lyrics. .... His singing is the most unaffected element of these new songs: bold and melodic, equally clear and prominent in each edition.

There are no real songs to speak of—just scenes, which flow together as seamlessly as fields glimpsed from the window of a moving train. The album is clearly meant to be experienced as a single piece of music, and the pacing is immaculate.

Santhosam could use more songs with this level of intentionality—songs that reach beyond proclamations of self-love or dancefloor hedonism to meet the richness and complexity of Ragu’s sound and aesthetic.

Hayter continues to traverse a biblical, deeply American landscape, surveying both its fire and brimstone and its transformative music. Saved! understands both of these qualities—consequently, rage, wonder, and beauty all churn just under its surface.

Lenderman and his band elevate his dreamlike narratives into something joyous, collective, and free.

A dense and star-studded collection that sounds like the millennium’s most expensive karaoke party.

A case can be made that the 1978 world tour is the genesis of Dylan’s latter-day incarnation as a restless and mercurial road warrior. That knowledge doesn’t change that, as an album, The Complete Budokan 1978 isn’t just a drag, it’s often dorky, too.

The music is spare, laser focused on those incandescent gospel melodies that feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on ways to minimally ornament them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and otherwise) audience. Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It shows her power in a different light.

It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.

What Abstract does bring to the table, though, is an ear for sticky, misshapen melodies and a rap producer’s sense of pacing, which keeps Blanket moving so briskly that its periodic clumsiness doesn’t bog it down much.

New Blue Sun is the most emotionally direct music André has ever made. The methods might be oblique, the instrumentation often unclear, the man himself occasionally missing in action or off on his own pursuits, but the sense of intermixed sadness, loss, and peace that permeates this music is impossible to miss.

As welcome as it is, the Party of Five disc winds up emphasizing the curious nature of Up, as the point where interpersonal tensions collided with broader cultural shifts.

On the more diaristic songs, the narratives aren’t as vivid, the rapping isn’t as nimble, and the songs lack momentum.

Rather than in volume and intensity, Sings Dylan finds subversion in its very form, as a covers album that celebrates and estranges its source material at once.

What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates.

Hadsel is a new beginning for Beirut that sounds like old times, a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life.

Ragana have spoken about consciously balancing their individual styles on their records—Coley’s more elaborate odysseys next to Maria’s quieter and more minimal compositions—and that melding of aesthetics keeps Desolation’s Flower riveting.

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.

In a world where artists have been reduced to brands and data points, Aesop Rock asserts his multiplicity. The record boasts some of his most fully realized songs.

Rather than sounding as if they’ve been optimized by a digital studio, his beats tend to impart the illusion of different objects crashing to the ground at varying distances. They’re loose, anxious assemblages that leave plenty of space for the ear to play in.

Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges.

Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique.

Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.

There’s palpable joy in the songs’ anthemic structures and Medford’s bright, confident delivery, even though there are reminders that this self-awareness was hard-won. Medford makes the crying and bleeding sound fortifying nonetheless.

The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years.