Ocean’s no extrovert, but he’s an intersection for a wide array of listeners, and Felt exhibits a porousness that could also attract new and more varied fans of Suuns. Perhaps, in the end, we’ll all want it weird.

Icarus Falls, as a high-concept pop album, is fine. It shows off Zayn’s reluctant charisma and love-song-ready voice amid R&B ideas that are fully immersed in the present, for the most part for the better.

Buoys is a sad and wistful album, though in a non-specific way.

These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.

You can sense the band proudly embracing its transitional nature, rarely attempting to push beyond its self-imposed boundaries—a triumph by existence alone, an itch they had to scratch. And if it’s not necessarily the music that Blood Incantation will be remembered for, it is precisely the kind of risk that shows why they’ll be remembered.

Sice, Brown, and drummer Rob Cieka were flexible and fluid musicians, capable of following Carr down whatever twisting pathway he was carving out of the pop landscape. Remove any component from that formula and it wouldn’t be the same. The proof of that is right here in this well-intentioned but watered down comeback.

At 14 tracks, Hysteria is a longer album than Echo, and it doesn’t always maintain its intensity. The push and pull between ballads and bolder songs sometimes sacrifices the momentum. But the wider lens, which allows Sparke to dial up both her indie-rock sound and sweeping songwriting, is still impressive.

The whole is stronger than the sum of its parts.

When backed by such light-touch production, these mantras can feel like a first draft whose final hues haven’t been colored in. At its best, though, this unforced approach manifests in Levy’s gift for stream-of-consciousness narratives that spin out as if propelled by their own internal velocity.

Most listeners with a soft spot for those early-90s Lemonheads records will get a good spin out of The Lemonheads.

What’s missing from Panic is some kind of levity or the cutting humor that once personalized Hutchison’s self-loathing.

His evident love of his source material and the material's alternative-era continuity make Takes a vanity project that's much better and more universally appealing than what we usually mean by the term.

Though there's a nice sense of humor throughout, there's just not enough meat on the bone to inspire any sort of real investment in the majority of these songs.

As a legacy product, it justly preserves these 16 songs, some of which are as good as anything she’s ever done. But it’s hard not to wonder if this is really it. Part of the issue is structural. SOPHIE is roughly comprised of four sections of four tracks each, with the strangest works up front.

The problem with Buck the World is that it's largely inconsistent. There are 15 producers over 17 tracks. Sometimes it clicks, but other times it feels forced.

Strange Pleasures works on a much more modest scale, content to subliminally scoot its way in, to serve as connective tissue between the Cocteau Twins and Chromatics on a mixtape, but not as the main attraction.

There are shortcomings... When Smoosh are good, though, they're really good.

With the oddball charisma toned down and the lens zooming in on Kelis' melisma-adverse vocals, one is left with the sense that all of these songs could be bigger and more distinct, but it's hard to pinpoint how exactly. This drawback is also ultimately the album's draw: Given time to settle in, many of these songs are among Kelis's most charming, ingratiating themselves with surprising ease.

It's a tantalizing glimpse of how great solo Harvey can be, but unfortunately, a good deal of the rest of the album is simply unmemorable.

For the first time in Atmosphere's long career, the stakes feel low, and Southsiders feels both pleasant and noncommittal, like it isn't even convinced of its own right to exist.

When you're operating within a strict template, you have to find some distinctive way to fill it out--a felicitous phrasing here, an unexpected chord change there. Without those elements, there's little on Sun Structures to remind you that you are, in fact, listening to a new band called Temples.

There's still a sense of discovery, now paired with playfulness.

Where Hanoi drifted toward jazzy abstraction, Bogotá sees the band run wild over a much sturdier foundation of gritty grooves and DIY basement-club beats.

When they're satisfied with rocking the fuck out, they do it exceedingly well, but when they try to acquire the adult answers, they'd do well to chill out and enjoy being young.

It's as if a bunch of people have gotten together to try and create a communal experience they don't quite believe in. It's a little depressing here, but elsewhere, the sense of irony serves the album well.

It's pretty boring and one-note, but if Georgopoulos' indulgent, decadent tendencies produce the occasional dud, it seems a small price to pay for the intrigue of looking forward to what he’s going to do next.

These small acknowledgments of past triumphs reverberate throughout Kicker: The Get Up Kids have finally reopened a dialogue with their younger selves.

Once producing dense, complex music that rewards each additional listen, Dissolver's content as comfort food for rockists, too quickly sating the listener.