Sella once stood out for a demeanor that was both wide-eyed and jaded, torn between a yelp and a sigh. In Sickness & In Flames tilts too far toward the former; the Front Bottoms have lost their bite.

Lina_Raül Refree is no Los Angeles clone. But it could be a long-lost, slightly weather-beaten cousin. Intimate, heartfelt, and solemnly inviting, it’s also a wonderful record in its own right.

Blush is a record of impressive variety, both in sentiment and sound. Some of the riskier arrows fall far off the mark, but more often than not, Hawke hits her targets with verve and style.

Given the album’s length and density, it resists close reading; if there is an organizing logic here, it is not readily apparent, although brushed drums and choppy vocal effects provide thematic through lines, and the occasional recurring motif lends a sense of narrative cohesion. But the music often unspools with natural ease.

Freeze, Melt nods to the conceptual artist John Baldessari, whose death at the start of 2020 might have warned us of the waves of bullshit to come. Its own concept is unimpeachable: Climate change does suck. Ice is a memory. Mostly, though, Freeze, Melt just feels like a nice warm bath.

On Source, she weaves together so many threads so masterfully that she instantly establishes herself as a foundational voice in the larger, ongoing story of the London jazz scene. Her debut is a stunning introduction.

Happy Birthday is strikingly raw. Moolchan’s refusal to bend to conventional song structure or recording techniques gives the music a sense of joyful rebellion. ... But as an artist whose defining quality is economy of language and texture, she falters when her songs are packed with too much sonic stimulation.

It’s essentially Bully’s re-introduction as a solo project, and these 12 songs capture the invigorating energy of the band’s 2015 debut.

Though Bent Arcana can sag in its less propulsive moments, the band generally hits the right ratio between eerie investigation and chunky jams.

The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

The original songs on Peck’s latest Show Pony EP are more vague [than Pony}.

Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.

If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill.

More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way.

The production has become knottier and more entangled, layering staccato notes with glimpses of field recordings, flourishes of breakbeats, and sweeping effects. At times, Articulation’s grandiose ideas are deflated by an overwrought execution. ... The magnetism of Rival Consoles lies in the chaotic warmth created through an intrepid play on rising and falling, conjuring a sense of turmoil that seems to become louder and more definite with each release.

The album doesn’t have enough blemishes, stumbles, or flourishes like this to give it extra excitement and curiosity. The risk level stays relatively comfortable; the payoff never really shoots up.

Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.

Each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness.

For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

He’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.

Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”).

As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction.

The maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer. Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure.

Regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.

The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments.