Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot.

A handy 4xCD compilation (disc four a fascinating set of outtakes and unreleased material) that captures the good Captain’s cagey albeit failed move towards mainstream rock acceptance.

The biggest disappointment here is that Modern Times is probably Dylan's least-surprising release in decades-- it's the logical continuation of its predecessor, created with the same band he's been touring with for years, fed from familiar influences, and sprinkled with all the droll, anachronistic bits now long-expected.

As she reimagines the through line of modern-day romance and heartache in jazz, Salvant is at her most versatile and expressive on Dreams and Daggers, choosing songs that wholly capture and embrace the full spectrum that is love—from the initial yearning to the relentless ache and betrayal.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

Overall, That! Feels Good! stays focused on a mission that never feels like a chore. In its relatively brief 40-minute runtime, Ware takes her task extremely seriously, but she’s unencumbered by its immensity; actually, it seems to unleash her.

Soul’d Out is the real deal: a portrait of a pop label at its imperial peak, presenting its unmediated vision of Blackness for a rapt audience.

As Hartzman’s lyrics delve deeper into a rich, suburban mundanity, her bandmates respond with their most dramatic and explosive performances.

With LEGACY! LEGACY!, Jamila Woods positions herself to join the battle, bridging the gap, once and for all, between our unresolved past and the promise that awaits us all on the horizon.

It’s still a Napalm Death record through and through--which means shredded eardrums and tinnitus for days. After all this time, we’d expect nothing less.

Opens with a six-track attack that's rare for any genre, especially contemporary R&B.

About half of it works reasonably well, though the end result is somehow closer to Low-era Bowie or Eno's Taking Tiger Mountain than anything truly contemporary or avant-garde.

Thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin.

RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential.

Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages.

Despite how much better-left-forgotten material is being offered up here as essential, there's still more life in the real Nevermind than anything that's attempted to replicate its attack since.

Most of the album, though, is absolutely irony-free, and better for it.

Joy isn’t merely happiness felt, it’s happiness earned, and Wild God is a remarkable portrait of a man putting in the work required to cross the threshold.

M3LL155X (pronounced 'Melissa') builds on her previous work, exploring ideas of dominance and submission and drilling down almost completely into the self. Instead of obfuscating her soft voice with layers of effects or singing in that cartoonishly frail and breathy falsetto, twigs prowls confidently over M3LL155X.

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

EELS is relentless, hooky, and thematically looser than the band’s full-length debut, 2023’s When Horses Would Run, which reveled in the mythos of the American West. This is music of fine details and huge sentiments.

On Jennifer B, plot twists play out like a delicious art school scandal. Just when you think these orchestra enfant terribles will stick to their notation books, Jockstrap scurry to the bridge and chuck every page into the Thames.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

Because the interludes outnumber the actual songs, it is difficult to call this Florist’s most accessible album, but it is certainly their most physical. ... ou get to explore each of those components: the band members convening, the songs falling into place, the woods themselves. It’s best experienced as a whole, but some tracks stand on their own.

Rather than holding up a torch, Heart Under adjusts your eyes to the pitch black.

Olsen suggests that nihilism and optimism are closer than you think, that what feels like knowing yourself is almost always revealed as delusion. On All Mirrors, she glories in that tumult, and the sparks that fly illuminate her bravura turn.

Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures.

I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it.