Sonically, at least, Son of Spergy, is in the same ballpark as a SAULT or L’Rain record, its negative space, vocals, and instruments in stunning harmony. But that prettiness can’t save the sophomoric songwriting.

Through the Open Window reveals an artist trying to find his voice and then convincing others to listen to it.

It’s not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI, but it rewards listeners who ache for more from pop artists: more feeling, more risk.

If Haram was the Alchemist’s entry to Armand Hammer’s world, Mercy is a shared vision. There’s a greater understanding of what they can create together, and a willingness to add other sounds into their combined vocabulary.

Von Hausswolff and her ensemble are patient with these songs. They linger over them, giving them time and space to develop, even when they’re nearly at the boiling point.

That sort of state-of-society demonstration, which has always distinguished Dave from his peers in UK rap, is hardly present on his newest album. And it doesn’t help that The Boy Who Plays the Harp is considerably less dynamic when it comes to production.

The shared characteristic that unites all four releases, though, is McCraven’s uncanny ability to alchemize hip-hop from jazz, structure from freedom, a collective effort into a singular vision.

On an album full of infernos, “One of the Greats” is one of the few songs to stand apart: Its ambition and vulnerability come closest to fulfilling Everybody Scream’s mission to let it all out.

There are no moments in the same area code of The Infamous or Hell on Earth. But Infinite is a decent stab at giving one of the greatest rap duos of all time one last trip around the block.

When Tremor holds your attention, it works—but sometimes Avery gets lost in his own trance, drifting away from the album’s rough pulse just as it begins to take hold.

It’s in these songs—softer and sweeter than anything in Chat Pile’s catalog, gloomier and more foreboding than anything in Pedigo’s—that their mutual empathy radiates strongest.

CAOS, title notwithstanding, is elegant and poised.

Snocaps is a return to form, its sound landing closer to the ramshackle pop-punk of P.S. Eliot than Saint Cloud’s twilit majesty.

“Promenade à deux” finally eases into something like a classic Tortoise chill-out space, albeit with a more widescreen approach, uncharacteristically graced by viola and cello. From there, beginning with “A Title Comes,” the LP’s second half finds perfect balance between signal noise and cinematic sweep, with signature vibraphone pulses and swooning guitar progressions rubbing against blissed-out Terry Riley organ tones and motorik chug.

Unlike those records [Lemonade and 30], Allen’s album is too concerned with honoring moment-to-moment feelings of hurt and betrayal to really reach for a mature overview of the breakup. But what the songwriting lacks in conceptual development, it makes up for in raw emotion and narrative thrust.

In a concise package, you get a fuller portrait of one of Springsteen’s greatest and most mysterious albums—and to this day, the one he’s proudest of—as well as candid insight into his creative process.

The slow, sorrowful material rarely summons the urgency this subject demands, nor the emotional catharsis that rippled through Silberman’s best work.

On Belong, Duterte’s re-emergence as Jay Som, she exudes the confidence of those six years quietly but well spent. What the album loses in raw shaggy experimentalism of her last records, it gains in understated poise.

Lotto gambles on TAGABOW’s ability to craft songs more compelling in their simplicity and vulnerability than their technical capabilities. By trading in their plastic sheen for a more ragged sense of real-life urgency, TAGABOW expose the tenderness at their music’s core: a refusal to anesthetize, an avowal to meet the bone where it breaks.

For the majority of the record, she sings alone, accompanied only by her acoustic guitar. This elemental soundscape pushes Diaz’s finely crafted melodies and brutal lyrical observations to the forefront more bluntly than ever.

It ["Heat Sink"] feels both longer and shorter than its 14 minutes, a trick that Palladino and Mills pull off on every track on the album; each lyrical passage is an instruction manual for experiencing nonlinear time. That Wasn’t a Dream is music as quantum theory, using the expanse between speakers to pass through dimensions.

The ultimate compliment for Life Under the Gun wasn’t “catchy,” but “punchy,” their songs direct and delivered with a stiff jaw and clenched fist. The exact opposite is true on God Save the Gun; half the time, if a song reaches two minutes, it might as well add a bridge that gets it to three.

Most of these songs aren’t offensive on their own. .... The cumulative effect, though, is exhausting, a daisy-chain of shaky half-measures that doesn’t even feel particularly committed to being depressing.

Ironically, in its militaristic pursuit of fun, Some Like It Hot often winds up feeling deeply rigid—stripped of the spunk and nuance that once made Bar Italia so enchanting.

Nested in Tangles is so powerful because it’s about what comes after those mommy-and-daddy issues—about enduring, as she puts it in that prelude, “fault lines that were never my fault” to become something better.

This dense, claustrophobic album is discomfitingly of the moment: Sudan’s characters sprint through these songs as though movement is a survival tactic, a way to push forward as the world presses down harder than ever.

Frontloading Power to the People with the One To One performances—the two sets are here, along with a hybrid highlights disc—illustrates how Lennon spent the early ’70s wallowing in the pleasures of old-time rock’n’roll. .... These "Studio Jam" passages are loose, maybe even to a fault, but they’re charming, capturing one of the greatest rock vocalists singing unencumbered by an audience. These two discs of informal jams are the ideal coda to Power to the People, which chronicles the era when Lennon was keenly aware that he was performing at all times.

There’s rarely any stylistic flair to his vocals anymore; so often, he’s doing a milquetoast rap-sing that makes him sound like everyone else in the Atlanta mainstream rap circuit.