It’s sentimental, wry, curious, and highly synergistic: Even if the dialogue has its lulls, the silences never feel awkward.

Gives the impression of an overwhelming fullness, a life force captured in a riot of barely controlled waveforms.

The shifts within and between tracks lend Deface the Currency a sense of perpetual surprise: Even after its contours become familiar, the particulars of the improvisation remain lively and kinetic.

It’s clear that the pleasure isn’t in the novelty of these two forces aligning. The pleasure is in the groove, in the quiet confidence of Liv.e and Riggins making such a curious record, in the way it sneaks up on you and commands your attention.

COLD 2 THE TOUCH honors Angel Du$t’s tradition of fast songs and feisty spirit, but it also affirms that they’ll never settle for retreading ground they’ve already stomped on.

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.

Highway to Heavenly is a worthy addition to one of indie pop’s most consistent discographies. Thirty years on, their music is as fresh, creative, and catchy as ever.

On The Great Satan, Zombie sounds torn between wanting to revisit the boo-metal sound that made him famous and wanting to continue coasting on the gibberish trucker-rock of his later years. What this record suffers most from is a lack of direction.

He is still a charismatic performer and a naturally talented singer with a tone that can switch quickly from crystalline delivery to a rum-soaked rasp in his upper belt. When he channels the latter, The Romantic reaches its better moments. .... But even when the album finds its groove, it never really delivers the romance.

Marathon is an unequivocally beautiful album. But it’s beautiful in the same way as the colors kicked into the sunset by a refinery—it’s unnatural, uncomfortable, a byproduct of labor.

Maybe he’s lost the spartan immediacy of his earliest records, but he’s gained a sense of camaraderie that makes his music feel nourishing.

My Days of 58 is a weird Bill Callahan album, and a good one.

The Mirror is more about fresh adornments than drastic reinvention. And that’s OK because the album still showcases many of the best qualities Meek has been pursuing outside of his main band.

Where “Damascus,” “The Manifesto,” and Sparks-assisted pinger “The Happy Dictator” play to their unlikely collaborators’ strengths, the bombast of songs like “The Plastic Guru” and “The Shadowy Light” teeters into folly.

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.

The music is skilfully marshalled: sober and lucid even while hallucinogenic and deranged.

At its best, Ca$ino is the most reflective Keem’s ever been. He parses through how California and the Vegas Strip have poisoned him and his circle, but his warring pop star and rapper sensibilities leave his reckoning in a garbled tonal mess.

I’m not sure any skeptics will find their gateway with the well-meaning protest music of Days of Ash. .... But if nothing else, U2 at least sound like they’re learning to trust themselves again.

A quarter century later, her same old razzle-dazzle feels a little repetitive, yes. But it’s also an insistence that the room we found can swell even bigger, that even in these dark times there’s humanity and humor at the heart of it all. Can’t hear that enough.

On her new record, luck…or something, she’s as familiar as ever. That’s largely because this is music you’ve heard before: fizzy, centrist pop, precisely positioned at the crossroads of autobiography and universality.

It’s a shame this album suffers from the same bloat that befell other recent Dessner projects: The last eight tracks on their own would be the band’s most rewarding record.

Charli is one of the definitive pop artists of our time, but in soundtracking a classic story, she never fully transcends our moment.

Despite underwhelming stretches, the album retains enough moments of personality to breathe life into even ordinary lines.

To Whom This May Concern might feel scattered to those wanting her more characteristic, sensuous R&B. But the album does a good job of flaring in different directions while keeping close to Scott’s artistic core.

You’d have to be in a particularly loose frame of mind to listen to it top to tail; but there is enough of the Beach Boys’ singular genius—perhaps the expression in pop of a musical mind pulled to and fro by the heavy weathers of psychological torment—to deliver. This is the Beach Boys at their best, their worst, and most frustratingly human—just like we want them to be.

Laughter in Summer serves as a summary of Copeland’s career, but it’s also a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.

Love Is Not Enough is never not invigorating (save for “Beyond Repair”), but its more vicious songs are such refreshing evidence of Converge’s vitality that every departure from that energy feels like a pulled punch.

Caroline Polachek fares best of all Harle’s features; in both “Azimuth” and “On and On,” she iterates a dancefloor diva more at home at Camelot than, say, either the Paradise Garage or Pacha, and Harle really sounds like he’s having fun honoring her commitment to the bit. Other vocals fail to emulsify.