Most of the noisier and more heavily manipulated tracks appear on the album’s less accessible A-side. For heady listeners, this will be a field day; for others, a test of faith. Stay the course. The luminescent B-side, a release valve for the intensity of Heavy Water’s first half, contains some of the most beautiful music I’ve heard in recent memory.

Vince Staples has movement but lacks velocity, which casts his words in the most intimate light imaginable. ... Even if you’re looking for the booming pastel energy of Kenny’s recent collaboration with TiaCorine or the breathless vibes of his work on Vince’s FM!, Vince Staples still has plenty to recommend. The sonic palette is grayscale without being boring, stoic without missing bounce.

The result is at once all-encompassing and strikingly intimate.

Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating.

Disbanded in their prime before they grew stale or flat, they still feel pregnant with promise, tantalizingly unfinished; like an actor cut down in youth, they've remained an irresistible lure to the imagination of pop romantics ever since.

MAYHEM may have played better if its tracklist were whittled down from 14 to, say, 10. Still, it is among Gaga’s strongest ever full-length statements.

Our Love is a very assured record, from its unconventional, austere arrangements to its unrelenting focus and thematic consistency.

Nearly every proper song on Currents is a revelatory statement of Parker’s range and increasing expertise as a producer, arranger, songwriter, and vocalist while maintaining the essence of Tame Impala.

Dream All Over recalls the most crucial lesson of all underground rock music: become your own sound, and create a universe for it to exist in.

And yet, as loaded as the subject matter is, it does amazingly little to diminish Hatfield’s bright spirit. Even on this, her angriest record by a landslide, the singer retains the intrinsic tunefulness that’s marked every record she’s made since she was a teenager.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

A shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.

It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.

There are no great musical innovations here, but that’s not to say the songs aren’t affecting: Anaïs Mitchell is a compelling, earnest rumination on the desires and possibilities that arise when you start looking for significance in small moments.

On A Danger to Ourselves she turns the camera on herself and the lens becomes a mirror, revealing an artist even less inhibited than before.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

Heavy Ghost is, in Stith's words, "more like life:" sometimes challenging, sometimes confusing, but, in the end, rewarding.

Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.

With who told you to think??!!?!?!?!, milo both asserts his place within the lineage of underground hip-hop and argues for its continued relevance.

An innate sense of contrast amplifies the music’s force. Showing utmost respect for empty space, they know precisely when to pull back—to emphasize the cracked edge of Busch’s voice, or leave room for a silvery tendril of guitar—and when to flood the zone with pure, cleansing fire.

Pre Pleasure takes its time unwinding and occasionally leaves too much unsaid. Some songs drift away, setting a mood rather than communicating an idea. But when Jacklin allows the two to work in tandem, she excels.

Ultimately, it’s not the hazy discontent that makes Everyone’s Crushed indelible but its livewire sound.

ny footholds you might find in the record’s craggy surface are slippery by design. But as a result, the pleasures of Space as an Instrument feel hard won, each moment of melody and peace an epiphany amid a backdrop of stormy uncertainty.

Even though many of the characters are heartbroken or wracked with anxiety, Williamson navigates modern life using timeless tropes that lend Time Ain’t Accidental an immense, gratifying confidence.

While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.

Do Make Say Think have presented us with their best work yet, a varied and unpredictable album capable of imparting the chill of the winter and the warmth of celebratory joy to you without ever presenting you with a human voice.

Everything is intricately wrought and calculated, perhaps in an overly accommodating response to fears of linearity. This fashionable awareness lends an almost palpable weight to the sound. It succeeds in adding depth and texture to the album, but sometimes overshoots the mark.

With Harmlessness, the World Is a Beautiful Place have accomplished a rare feat: a lofty, loaded album with the grace and momentum of a far leaner one.