Though Contact is mostly a one-man endeavor, the music generates a sense of proximity, of presence. That tension feels both like an ironic reminder of our current isolation and a gesture toward a more communal future.

While the loops and beats of 1988 are as hypnotic and outre as ever, other than the cleared samples and elevated sense of personality, there’s not enough about 1988 that distinguishes it from, say, WT15.8_, released a week before, or that rises to the devil-may-care attitude of Knxwledge’s Vimeo page.

It includes some of the most striking writing of Ka’s career—the knottier verses and the blunter ones, too—and is utterly immersive, whole lifetimes of fear and pain and death and regeneration condensed into 33 minutes.

The record plays quick and dirty, with uncharacteristically crunchy production value and lo-fi aesthetics. ... Lyrically, LAS QUE NO IBAN A SALIR mostly sticks to Bad Bunny’s trademark sex flexes and party jams. But even in tossed-off mixtape verses, he retains a goofy charm.

Acquiesce always goes deeper rather than bigger. TALsounds has always been an inwardly focused project by nature, but these songs feel uniquely designed to pull you into them. The album grows darker in its second half, but there’s a warmth and safety there just like the dimly lit shot of the bedside table on its cover.

It’s both solipsistic and psychedelic, urging listeners to travel into their own depths and welcome the joy and despair they might find there.

They may have slightly diluted their sound this time around, but at least they’re struggling on their own terms. The highlights suggest there is an arena-friendly Hinds out there, still waiting to emerge in full.

In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. [Grades for seven discs: 86, 90, 63, 50, 74, 72, & 63]

Fantasize Your Ghost is more spacious [than 2018's Parts], and the duo experiments with how many cock-eyed experimental impulses can fit inside a conventional pop song.

Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast. ... RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration.

Hit to Hit’s final quarter, which the band recorded as an ensemble, takes a more grounded approach. But after a record of instant gratification, these gentler tracks have a tendency to melt together.

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.

Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power.

There are some obvious flaws. The uniformity of mood, melody, and texture means the album can drag, and while the spontaneity of the recordings is largely vindicated by the results, it also leaves some loose threads dangling. ... At her best, however, Power lives up to her name.

Whether Muzz wind up being a lasting band or a one-off diversion, this is a promising debut from three old friends who have an instinctive grasp of each other’s talents.

Hutson’s musical style finds a perfect complement in Bridgers’ subtle production.

Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural.

Small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary.

In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music.

While Neon Cross highlights the versatility of Wyatt’s gorgeous, commanding voice, she finds her comfort zone in singalong anthems like “Goodbye Queen.”

You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch.

This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense. ... For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off.

WUNNA is more than an endless barrage of boasts about his designer clothes and foreign whips; the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine.

Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.

While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible.