Tickets to My Downfall was memorable for the way it treated pop-punk like a natural palette for his emotions, but this too often feels like a concept album about rock, a stodgy record that’s too busy using “real instruments” to do anything interesting with them.

These songs capture a big part of PUP’s talent: making music that captures the sentiment of depression yet never succumbs to its lethargy or listlessness.

Famously Alive is a beautiful mess of squelchy psych-pop—emphasis on pop—that feels in conversation with the band’s abrasive, dissonant past: As Guerilla Toss turn a new page musically, Carlson turns one of her own.

Spend enough time in it, and you will sense that intelligence, fleet and mysterious, moving just beneath the surface. Something is alive in their work, and it feels like it’s always rounding the next corner, just out of your reach.

Restraint, patience, trust: time and again they make GOLD sound like an incredibly wise record.

Unlimited Love is competent and comforting—its creators rarely try to grab your attention but never totally embarrass themselves either. (Well, maybe a little during the rap verses in “Poster Child.”)

It’s a testament to the band’s ambitions and execution peaking in lockstep that Diaspora Problems can be appreciated as both a fully visceral experience and a cerebral one.

That’s how Spring feels: a lot of planning, a shrug to finish. Like OK Human, this is a product of the pandemic. Unlike OK Human, it actually sounds like it.

Uplifting music can tend to grate rather than inspire, but Koffee hits a satisfying midpoint, free of didacticism and never forced; she’s simply inviting us into her world.

Running With the Hurricane is at its strongest when Camp Cope harness the swirling turmoil and ride it towards self-awareness.

Humble Quest lives up to its name: 11 lithe songs about love, work, and family, some great, some good, with a coherence and clarity that make it feel matter-of-factly masterful.

On Melt My Eyez See Your Future, Curry again retools his sound, trading livewire energy for introspection and vulnerability. The album lacks the vividness of his past releases, but its concept offers a glimpse into Curry’s roving mind.

Working within a framework isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but there are cracks in the formula. Mostly on the production side, which is incredibly played out. ... Still, even with the stale sound of the album, Durk is such a complex and colorful writer that it’s worth it to stick it out.

The sound of Warm Chris is sparse and oblique, and trying to anchor yourself in Harding’s lyrics can feel like organizing a narrative from the shape of passing clouds. But that’s also where its brilliance lies, what makes this some of Harding’s best songwriting yet.

The contemporary energies thrumming along the music’s surface highlight the deep connections the record effortlessly draws—a series of starbursts connecting William Onyeabor to Gloria Estefan to Loose Joints to Grace Jones to a beat that picked up before recorded history begins, somewhere in West Africa, and never stopped.

Labyrinthitis delights in rupturing the elegance of its own facade.

Sonic Youth were always a very social band—supporting fellow musicians, self-releasing records with fans in mind, and generally making people feel part of an informal club that the four members provided a soundtrack for. In that sense, In/Out/In is as Sonic Youth as it gets.

Forever misses some of Ventilation’s bite, even if the gentler tones are fitting given the new album’s themes.

From a carefully selected set of softly rounded shapes and muted tonal choices, Villain wrangles a surprisingly varied selection of instrumental tracks that flow together like the interconnected parts of a suite. All seven songs are shot through with an abiding sense of mystery.

This World Is Going to Ruin You cannot simply be pegged as a lateral move or a leveling up: It explodes Vein.fm’s sound into seemingly dozens of different directions.

A brief and blistering collection that finds their dark arts at full power.

Sonescent slips between Reynols’ brilliant Blank Tapes, where you imagine musical shapes coming from re-recorded sleice, and Ned Lagin’s immersive Seastones series, where there’s so much music you have to tease out the hidden figures.

The Great Regression has fun pointing out the world’s contradictions, subverting its vulgarity, questioning its systems. At its peaks, it feels like an antidote for the ennui of ceaseless catastrophe.

If Frank represents a culminating moment for Fly Anakin, instead of just another brick in his discography, he finds subtle ways to show us.

It feels rare to hear an album that’s so experimental, that aspires to stretch itself out across genres and play with form, and that attains exactly what it sets out to achieve.

Continuance isn’t an overhaul of the blueprint established on Covert and Carrollton, nor is it straight-faced fan service. It’s a space for two rap veterans who are comfortable enough with their chemistry to continue prodding at their margins.

Tana Talk 4 never feels languid or dull, but it lacks the freshness of Tana Talk 3 and the sense of forward motion that propelled The Plugs I Met 2.

Crash is Charli’s best full-length project since Pop 2, a canny embrace of modern and vintage pop styles by one of its most sincere students.