Free Humans is a passionate rebuke to both fatalism and futurism. It’s the sound of four cosmic souls resolutely staying put—not wanderers but wonderers, still in love with their own bizarre planet, and baffled by the senselessness of leaving it behind.

Róisín Murphy aims her tracks at the stars. With Róisín Machine, she’s become one.

It’s an overwhelming amount of material. ... The Dream Factory songs unearthed from the vault are staggering.

It seems unlikely that Monk and his quartet would have known about what was happening in East Palo Alto, but they’ve clearly been buoyed by the crowd’s youthful energy, and they deliver some of the fiercest, most spirited versions of their core repertoire in response.

They’re not attempting to radically shift your notion of what their music can be. For those of us who have stuck around, that’s just fine; a Deftones album that effortlessly twists their familiar components into a few genuinely new shapes is plenty exciting.

Thematically, Tickets to My Downfall is hardly a departure from MGK’s past work, but the new surroundings lightens his music up considerably even amidst the hormones and histrionics. With Travis Barker on his side, he might win over skeptics accusing him of trend-hopping, but the best part of Downfall is that he doesn’t take the whole endeavor too seriously.

Unlike her song-based previous albums, All Thoughts Fly is instrumental, performed entirely on pipe organ. Its lush soundscapes find transcendence in the eerie and the sorrowful, much like Sacro Bosco itself.

An album so profusely inventive, so alive to the possibilities of sound itself.

It’s a record that justifies and even demands the extra space to explore; Moore and co. take their sweet time to sculpt squalls into riffs and lure extended meditations into melodic focus, like a roving crosshair that finally locks on its target.

The new deluxe edition of New York contains live versions of every track, glizted-up arrangements of the Reed standards “Sweet Jane” and “Walk on the Wild Side,” one non-album instrumental, a long-out-of-print concert film, and a number of demos and rough mixes. These works in progress largely serve to show that Reed got it right with the album’s final version.

Ultra Mono charges into the discourse like a hobbyist at a rally. It’s not listening, just shouting. Not radical but restless. Not bad, just unnecessary.

The occasional clumsiness of ACR Loco is easy to forgive in light of the album’s musical pleasures. After a deep dive into their back pages, A Certain Ratio found a powerful formula: paying heed to where they came from while keeping the door open for more all night parties in their future.

Even as its musical forms and source material remain familiar, Renegade Breakdown is a work of knowing misdirection, a way of staking out new creative territory that’s challenging, idiosyncratic, and proudly uncool.

Most songs are stuffed with diverging melodies and dense instrumentation. But Dupuis is such an adept songwriter and accomplished singer that the excesses are part of the appeal.

The Ascension is, by design, kind of a drag: a dark and emotionally distant mood piece whose lyrics rarely touch on the specifics necessary to anchor the music, and whose music is rarely exciting enough to elevate his words. ... The Ascension fares best when Stevens looks inward.

Find the Sun can’t necessarily be described as a confident album, but its creator’s willingness to document her spiritual growth and present herself as vulnerable feels uniquely brave and honest.

A staggering and potent amalgamation of numerous genre influences, but it also has moments of information overload, where its boundarylessness becomes too much.

The resulting sense of chaos redoubles Boris’ wrath and gives it a welcome depth, the sense that it’s here to stay because it’s been here all along.

Recorded with a full band, Western Swing moves away from Wall’s unvarnished veneration of the Wild West and swings wide the barn doors. This here’s a party.

The Times feels genuine and unforced—an organic expression of whatever he was feeling at the time, in all its weirdness and contradiction. In other words, it’s prime Neil Young.

Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.

It’s the rare box set where the rarities feel integral to the compilation’s impact, tying up loose ends and illuminating areas previously shrouded in darkness.

There’s no question that van den Broek is an energetic and capable musician, but those qualities feel irrelevant when they show up in songs that might appear on a bad Shuggie Otis covers album. Anyone can make music that sounds like soul, but not all music has one.

BREACH, Lily’s first album for Dead Oceans, is a scruffier, more far-ranging record about developing a self in your twenties.

Host proves the duo can reinvent themselves within a static framework; by revisiting the sounds of their ambitious, albeit thinly produced debut with bigger and bolder instrumentation, they’ve emerged from the afterglow of 2010s virality as a more robust and rooted ensemble.

The best songs give Arrington the room to sprawl out and flex those ever-charismatic vocals, nearly untarnished by the sands of time.

Dapperton’s potential shines when he pushes himself, when it sounds like he’s making music for self-expression and fun, expanding his vocal range and messing around with reverb. He loses it inside of self-imposed pop formulas and strained symbolism.

With Cantus, Descant, Davachi has arrived at maybe her purest distillation of those ideals. The attention to detail is itself a kind of time warp; in its patient hold, the music becomes something entirely new.