Stripping it all back, she leaves nowhere to hide, relinquishing her self-protective grip on control on a gentle-sounding record that is anything but.

Worldwide fortifies Snooper’s sound by forcing the stiff loops of a drum machine to warp under the weight of their ricocheting guitars. Studio time didn’t kill the punk band. It granted them space to play faster and looser without losing any of the fun.

Seven years on, the leering, all-encompassing grime of SickElixir melds dozens of Roberts’ subsequent discoveries and revelations into a brutish, unhinged gestalt; its clamorous swagger makes “Tasser” look like a curio.

For perhaps the first time in the Bajas’ catalog, there are parts of Inland See that can get stuck in your head.

The emotions are big and the choruses are bigger, but the production is too washed-out to risk actual vulnerability. It’s music to sink into, an electronic dreamy mush that’s somehow equal parts Foster the People and Mazzy Star.

Whatever vision Martin and Shellback set out to realize here is not really serving her strengths and, intentionally or not, appears to signal a disinterest in evolution.

Through the Wall makes its case without grandstanding, proof that command can be quiet.

he Art of Loving reminds me of Leslie Feist’s exemplary pivot to coffeeshop pop and lounge jazz on her albums Let It Die and The Reminder, but Feist also had her wild youth as a Broken Social Scenester behind her by then. Dean’s meticulous replicas are nearly impeccable; it’s high time she starts throwing some paint around.

What makes it work so well is that this anarchy is not an anything-goes anarchy: These songs are so carefully composed, so intentional, that every cyborgian burp and steel snare fits perfectly. Everything and nothing tramples each other.

Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them.

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

Le Bon fills her music with ornately carved oddities, but she’s always had an ear for pop melodies, even within her most ambitiously arranged songs.

Nobody’s Girl deals mainly in ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes earthy, often mournful—but that form grows stale even while it suits the personal upheaval she writes her way through. When she breaks the pattern on the surprisingly psychedelic “Lose It for a While” and the driving “Strange Dreams,” where her voice skitters with nervous energy, there’s a flash of what her emotional candor paired with more compelling arrangements could achieve.

The time between albums (seven years, in this case) gives Here for It All a certain weight that its songs don’t quite bear. In the scheme of her smash-packed discography, this is a minor work. But if only all minor works were so consistently enjoyable. The air of meh palpable during many of Carey’s recent public appearances is mostly replaced with gusto and wit (though the way lead single “Type Dangerous” flatlines in the hook is just meh again).

Twilight Override is comprised of only strange, beautiful, and threadbare originals, but the sense of glorious indulgence is straight 1970 Dylan.

Their strangest and strongest work. .... Geese’s most singularly idiosyncratic music arrives to their largest audience yet.

Real Warmth makes it easy to believe that music can be that lifeline out of the darkness, or at least a roadmap to home.

The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to.

Time and again in these five tracks, it sounds as if Orcutt has reached the end of potential variations for whatever theme he’s playing, like an outlaw outrunning the cops only to reach the edge of a towering cliff. But he finds unexpected ways to extend the thought, with Miller and Shelley always maneuvering to give him room to do so.

Cardi maintains a respectful distance from the prevailing trends. Instead, she plays with bursts of experimentation, adopting new flows without sacrificing legibility. .... That work [editing the track list down], when offloaded to the listener under the guise of generosity, lands instead as risk aversion.

Blurrr, Robertson’s sixth solo album and her undisputed masterpiece, is at points so beautiful—53 seconds into “Always Were,” to be exact, or four minutes, 31 seconds into “Peaceful”—that it feels difficult to breathe alongside it.

The duo’s mutual respect, selfless skills, and tender chemistry have delivered an album that is among both artists’ best.

THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! is a romp of a record, even if it feels front-loaded with bangers—like Addison Rae earlier this year, the album is slightly overshadowed by its hot streak of singles.

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

Here, her cut-up vocals ground both the album’s tighter tracks and looser moments—the same timbre that seduces on one song is, elsewhere, exasperated or desperate.

Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation.

The best songs on Pain to Power capture that electric, instantaneous energy, where everything collides in delightful chaos. Maruja only lose that alchemic touch when they overthink the process.