What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete.

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.

There are places where Vertigo Days might benefit from a sterner edit. By and large, though, the guest spots and experimental excursions feel less contrived than the stylistic zig-zags of records past, and more the natural consequence of a band engaging with the world.

“Violet” is one of a handful of moments where the comforting atmosphere starts to crack—it hints at a more compelling album actively at war with its own themes.

Their album is a celebration of harmless indulgences: dressing up, going out, getting swept into the drama of a song. In Painting the Roses’ one-stop discotheque of the mind, more will always be more.

Rather than lurching between styles, they mostly stick to whirlpooling guitars and a newfound supply of silvery electronics—sometimes pulsing, sometimes throbbing, sometimes seemingly on the brink of short-circuiting.

Ambient music is sometimes associated with reverent stillness, but one of the best qualities of The Blue of Distance is its constant, pulsing movement.

JT plays like an album of first takes. It’s multifaceted in its messiness: a leather hide wrapped around a tender heart. That loose quality plays up the differences between father and son.

Cheater is concise, well-paced, and thought-through. Its chaos is held together precariously, a ride that feels at once dangerous and secure. Though you know exactly what to expect, you keep getting back in the line.

There is a good album here. The band’s more characteristically brief songs are flawless, but there’s a lesson in this album for punk bands who may want to explore pop: It ain’t as easy as a great hook.

Home works as a sensual mood-setting exercise, but less so as a distinct creative statement.

Isles has sparkling moments but it’s all a bit constrained, like a potted plant on a window sill that craves the natural wildness of a garden.

What Cooler Returns lacks in heft it makes up for with unadulterated kicks.

This is very comfortable music, but Meek threads strange disturbances into its weave. Residing alongside the blankets and stars and blue jays of his lyric sheet are darker things—faces forming on the ceiling, broken tongues, swimming pools full of turpentine.

Ashnikko’s latest mixtape, Demidevil, is a showcase for her newly refined confidence, a step towards the pop powerhouse she’s capable of becoming.

The album’s most tolerable songs fixate on the physical, a pulsating goo of slow drums and reverbed descriptions of skin mashed against skin.

The band reach peak drama on “Station Wagon”—an ambitious number that might have overwhelmed their tastes for unadorned punk just a few years ago. ... “Station Wagon” encapsulates the band’s development as songwriters, shouting back at the bombast of youth and the perilous chore of moving beyond it.

Though Wallen’s idea was to split the album according to theme, things aren’t quite as delineated as that. Even at his most boisterous, Wallen is given to introspection, and he can make the straightest love song gnarly.

These songs not only sound great—mostly acoustic in their arrangements, crisp and warm in their production, and lively in their performances—but that sense of camaraderie draws out something essential in Vile’s singing and playing. at’s okay. It’s sweetly minor, much like the other songs on here. That might not be enough to sustain a full album, but it’s lovely for an EP.

Trost sings evenly and with an appealing clarity but little emotion, letting her voice tangle with the various layers of sound until it’s just another signal on the switchboard.

Heaux Tales unfurls a patchwork of origins, outcomes, thrills, and disasters of coital indulgence in her most cohesive work to date. Sullivan strategically activates her regal voice with stories that are sharp, intimate, and addictive.

Even though the tempo barely tops 100 bpm, all the far-flung fusions of Asian pop, Nigerian reggae, and Korean boogie leave Khruangbin’s set feeling a little like a busy touring schedule on the international festival circuit: both awe-inspiring and exhausting.

Self Worth is a relentless album that never really pulls back, but maybe that’s a function of survival for Mourn, who will probably always write songs with teeth bared. They’ve straightened and polished them on Self Worth, but their bite remains formidable.

Viagra Boys have a gift for making listeners wrestle with choices that might be deal breakers if the music weren’t all so ludicrously entertaining.

Plastic Bouquet marries their remarkably timeworn voices, entwining threads from country-folk, 1960s British pop, and even rockabilly to stitch a retro flare into their modern lore.

The songs on Whole Lotta Red are urgent, immediate. While they seldom trade in anything like autobiography, they cut close to the bone all the same.

As an album, Tim Melina Theo Bobby is maybe even less concerned than usual with coherence, which tends to create the atmosphere of a singles collection. If there’s a unifying theme, it’s about time and boundaries, the things that separate concepts like then and now or you and me. Musically, this can sound like a walk through Joan of Arc’s tangly, overgrown garden.

With this much creativity, it’s unfortunate that the band falls into predictable patterns on wordless bridges or codas that start to feel samey after 10 songs. The spidery instrumental “Singalong,” on the other hand, is a smart sequencing choice to mix up the album’s flow, while “Big Trouble” has the most notable tweaks to their formula.