Braxton has evoked the spirit of ’90s R&B without ever sounding like she’s simply throwing out nostalgia bait.

Despite its heavy conceptual burden, No era sólida never crumples under its own weight. It shows rather than tells, guiding you through its prickly, unstable moods with a mystical sort of grace.

From King to a God would be considered a solid effort from most MCs, but it's clear Conway has his aim set higher.

The Universal Want troubleshoots wisely—keep the tempos at a brisk jog, dabble in Afrobeat, Motown, and cinematic soul rather than prog, and watch the clock. Whereas Kingdom of Rust felt like twice its hourlong runtime, Universal Want is Doves’ first filler-free album, floating by like a warm breeze.

It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

Though Emotion is refined, it also isn’t different from Dessner’s other production work—it’s still musically reticent, covered in fog. Its clarity originates in Georgas’ ability to process what she’s feeling, and spending 40 minutes in her head as she figures things out doesn’t feel suffocating.

American Head handles this heavy subject matter with a light touch, framing its stories in a magic-realist sunset atmosphere that lends even its gravest songs an earthbound charm.

Re-Animator still holds its own against their other music; at their most traditional, they remain smart songwriters, and even their weaker lyrical moments are more thought-provoking than their peers.

There are moments on Detroit 2 that feel special, but Big Sean himself rarely has anything to do with them.

On Help, his latest album, Timothy works with a number of collaborators from the London scene—Mr. Mitch, Vegyn, and Lil Silva to name a few—to create a piece of music that takes equally from modern jazz and UK bass. With their help, Timothy sings the song of a community that he carries within him, voicing their past oppressions even in his most abstract pieces. Timothy constructs a vast castle out of his reference points making music that feels filled with the spectres of the past.

Despite the wobbly sequencing and foggy structure, the album is a bright flare from a promising talent. McKenna doesn’t simply pay homage to his musical heroes; he jerry-rigs the history of British rock to ask how we got ourselves into this mess, and how the hell we might get out.

For the most part, Gilberto’s voice finds the pocket, and when she’s front and center, the arrangements expertly draped around her, Agora is a rapturous listen. It’s not the star’s finest work—for newcomers, 2000’s Tanto Tempo remains her most engaging set—but in a time of personal distress, Gilberto embraces the familiar comforts of her graceful sound.

Awake in the Brain Chamber is best when Curtis is at his most vulnerable—giving himself a pep talk in the call-and-response chorus of “Everything Starts,” muttering “I want to give up” all too believably throughout the chorus of “Talos’ Corpse,” before amending himself—“I want to give up, but don’t.” They sound like they have much more to give.

The album oscillates between emotional registers, balancing profound quiet with strummy, emphatic pleas about how we might better comport ourselves in the world; there’s a sense that even at their most gentle, these songs are transmitting something deeply earnest and hard-won. This is as true of Read’s lyrics as of her arrangements, which are newly rich and rewarding.

Bar the rare moments of clunky electronics, almost every sound, touch, and shade on Fall to Pieces feels like it had to be there, in blessed contrast to the rambling dead ends, failed experiments, and misjudged covers of Tricky’s recent records. Fall to Pieces is an audacious cri de coeur that ultimately finds strength in adversity where others might fall apart.

Loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet.

Gold Record captures both sides: The yen to collapse the spaces between people, and the acknowledgment that some spaces are too cold to cross.

From the driving blues line in “The Cowrie Waltz,” the lush soundscapes heard on “Ancestral Duckets” and “Bop for Aneho,” and the celestial soul claps that emanate from “Zane, The Scribe,” Georgia Anne Muldrow, once again, engenders her own Afrofuturistic realm, one that is heard, seen, and felt in the here and now.

Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.

It may not rival his classic albums—and it never deludes itself into thinking it does—but Got To Be Tough captures Hibbert as committed as always, still giving it all he’s got.

Fun while it lasts, but somehow less than the sum of its parts.

Whole New Mess has a singular power. The songs are spare but still feel electric, and despite their lower volume compared to All Mirrors, you couldn’t necessarily call them quiet. Their slow-strummed chords and finger-picked patterns are at times deliberately brittle and blown-out. Whole New Mess amplifies a different source of loudness.

The album suffers from the same primary problem that plagued the original S&M: Metallica’s best songs, intricate and ambitious though they may be, are not actually well suited for the additional orchestrating they get here, precisely because they are plenty symphonic already.

For Owens, loops—both electronic and lyrical—are a grounding presence, like a chant uttered in a meditative state: a simple phrase or pattern that functions as a conduit to another world. With Inner Song, Owens seeks to take the listener to a place of healing, finding solace in the shelter of a repeated chord progression.

ENERGY is a manic attempt to relight the fire, as well as a confetti-strewn soundtrack for a world tour that never was.

Smile asks less of us. The confessions on this album feel like calculated dodges, every tepid disclosure immediately followed by triumph. ... Despite all her garbled platitudes, she remains a master at executing proven chart-topping formulas.

A shoegaze album with a rare scope and an even rarer sense of fun and imagination.

The new album marks a retreat into a nostalgia-act comfort zone—one which suits Nas, even as it yields diminishing returns.