Eternal Home is as ambitious and cerebral as it is self-indulgent; but unpacking these strange, messy depths has always felt like the whole point of Marcloid’s music. All of her searching yields some dazzling results.

At heart these are songs about living with the weight of sadness, about the accumulation of severed relationships and missed connections and regrets both big and small. Change all the names and the album can still hit you like a speeding car.

While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

On her new full-length, Juno, she hones her scatterbrained Californian pop into an effervescent, hook-filled record that flirts with weighty emotions but often swerves for the safety of a joke.

While bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. ... Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them. Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones.

The truth about the 2021 manifestation of Let It Be is that Martin and his engineer Sam Okell haven’t really cracked the code either. It still feels like the awkward, intermittently exciting, sometimes deeply-moving collection of misfit toys it has always been. ... So much of the material included on the extra discs—the rehearsals, the outtakes, and the jams—is uncomfortable and fascinating. You see and hear their future together and then you feel it slipping away.

As good as these renditions are, the emotional heart of Georgia Blue lies in those alternative rock covers, songs where Isbell and the 400 Unit allow themselves some freedom of interpretation.

Little Los Angeles illuminates the same pursuit that Morby sought on more fleshed-out albums like 2017’s City Music and 2019’s Oh My God: These are postcards that magnify the ephemeral, loving transmissions from a particular place and time.

On to hell with it, PinkPantheress sculpts a digital-age paradise that exists only in an invented memory of the past, setting the stage for a career set more firmly in the present.

The album is full of these little tweaks and stamps and glitches, and they seldom feel gimmicky. “Domino” is Mercurial World at its most thrilling: the best hooks of the album paced like a video game rollercoaster, maximalist glitter rush followed by sinuous soprano descant. It’s genuinely evocative.

Her musician friends help bring the songs to life, and the best guests are the singers that emphasize the emotion in West’s performance like actors sharing a scene.

There are a couple of moments when these banalities briefly turn transcendent. ... There are too few of those bright spots, though.

As expected, Don Toliver’s latest album Life of a DON is hollow. ... But miraculously, the emptiness of it all is an afterthought—it sounds so damn good that who even cares if Don Toliver is an emotionless robot or not (he is). The hooks are catchy and slick. The beats are lush and radiant. And he has this distinctly piercing voice, with a wide range of melodies that could make an extremely basic line jotted down on a dinner napkin sound heartfelt.

Garden feels like a refinement of the same sound [on 2019’s Weeping Choir], pulling them to greater, if somewhat less accessible, heights.

While Seventeen Going Under excels when Fender looks inward, the intimacy is disrupted by scattered political musings.

It is the most technically proficient and hard-hitting music in their discography, albeit at the cost of their unique intimacy and warmth.

Geist, an album largely focused on spiritual shifts and ruptures, is a quiet, lovely, undramatic rendering of the dramatic.

Established! is perfectly placed to twang heartstrings and hamstrings alike, bursting with audacious energy, liberal sass, and mountains of soul.

These are some of Maine’s most generous and indelible songs, so much so that the album’s 25 minutes feel too brief. Like the best summers, it’s done in an instant—but the feeling lasts long after it’s over.

Hovvdy are still craning their necks back to the past, but on True Love they cruise the open road, porous and wide-eyed in the face of new beginnings.

BADBADNOTGOOD are known for turning tradition inside out, but Talk Memory is not just their finest album—it’s evidence of the historic appreciation that roots their reverence.

The compositions on Luminol are precarious balancing acts, perched somewhere between the locating sensation of pain and the dislocation of trauma.

Even if the music remains more ambitious than that aspiration, perhaps the most groundbreaking thing about Friends That Break Your Heart is that James Blake has never sounded so safe.

Levy is at her best when she’s retreating into fantasy.

Its introspection and chest-thumping are just enough to keep the stakes reasonably high.

Liminal Soul is a little more modern, and dead serious in contrast with Pure Moods’ chintzy gloss, but both albums feel designed to put you back in your body and back in the real world.

Let Me Do One More is full of high highs and low lows, but thanks to Tudzin’s extensive experience as an engineer and producer (Pom Pom Squad, Weyes Blood), the two extremes—and they are often extreme—are meticulously balanced.

These new songs are energizing for González, but they lack that sense of genuine discovery, of a songwriter being lifted away from his usual comforts. Instead of letting the drum machine reshape his songwriting, he mostly uses it as a metronome.