As a set of tracks for DJs to pick from, Rojus offers plenty of potential. As a front-to-back listening experience, it's almost paradise--but not quite the album that it wants to be.

Cry Cry Cry can be heard as an equal to At Mount Zoomer or Expo 86: a solid record, throwback indie rock by default, powered less by defiant belief than muted reliability.

The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.

ATAXIA has moments of all three, running the gamut across funk, feverish entertainment, and frustratingly dry-eyed experiments. Throughout, however, it remains startlingly original—a powerful piece of work from a sonic adventurer of rare intellectual clarity.

Lambert balances her high-spirited romps with more contemplative numbers, cooling off long enough to reflect without flagging Wildcard’s momentum.

Her respect for her craft shines throughout the record, a surprisingly joyful release ostensibly about a bad business deal.

CHAI’s more explicitly political efforts unfold rather predictably, their messaging losing power as they paint in broad strokes. .... CHAI’s music resonates more when they get more personal, like on the sparkling album closer “Karaoke,” which conveys their tight-knit connection.

With SIGN, Autechre have managed to do something that machines can’t do nearly as well as humans: surprise us.

Solo ultimately reveals little we didn't already know about Vijay Iyer as a pianist, but to hear him explore these facets of his sound on his own, with no one to lean on, is still interesting. The central suite is where the album and the artist truly shine.

Christs, Redeemers feels comfortable and somewhat safe, with song structures that are practically standard and a few techniques repeated often enough to become predictable.

Sutherland is a massively charismatic character, and it’s hard not to get caught up in the elation that he so obviously feels when he gets from finding the perfect groove. That feeling permeates every corner of the album, but it comes through strongest on two particular tracks.

I’ll Be the Tornado is as accomplished and confident as a band can sound while sorting their shit out in public.

The Same but by Different Means is surprisingly seamless for a 22-track record. Like a Ouija board session, each track here feels part of a collective effort to access a realm outside our own. Sometimes, it leads to sustained moments of connection, like the radiant tropicalia sunshower of “Curtain of Rain.” At others, it yields sudden, surprising moments of rapture, like the beautiful melancholic chorus of “Hard to Say Bye.”

The spirit of Southern California, and Lu’s subtle experiments with its musical tropes, form the sly engine of Blood, her first full-length album; with an ear still to the elegantly eerie avant-classical compositions of her past, and the chamber-folk philosophizing that anointed Church, she goes more volubly, more unmistakably Los Angeles with the record.

The songs of Help Us Stranger often succeed only because they succeeded before, decades ago, as better songs.

Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity.

Per usual, the group’s love for mini-narratives can sometimes clutter the music and cause an interesting idea to outstay its welcome. .... But the overall mood is agreeably potluck, a diverse spread of beats and rhymes to nourish the soul.

If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional.

Alela Diane hasn’t upended the form, but that probably wasn’t her intent. What she needed was a port in a storm, and About Farewell is a very sturdy bulwark.

The sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone.

For an album whose highlight is a song about the urge to extend beyond the limits of your own experience and find solace in collective acceptance, it all feels surprisingly timid. Apollo XXI is centered on the interior self, but it’s not self-centered--it just seems a little weighed down by Lacy’s still-palpable reluctance to claim the spotlight his talents warrant.

You couldn’t say that WOW is about anything. Instead, it’s defined by its aesthetic cohesion, a beautiful sense of formal seriousness that holds court over the record’s surrealistic menagerie.

The record doesn't abandon the moody sprawl of the band's last few full-lengths, but it does help restore urgency to an aesthetic that seemed in danger of growing soporific.

Fierce as Donnelly’s writing can be, it’s empathetic to the core.

If there isn't a Deerhunter sound, there's a Deerhunter perspective that runs through their work, best summed up in "All the Same"—"take your handicaps/ Channel them and feed them back/ Until they become your strengths." The weird era continues.

On “Loser’s Hymn” and the closing “Dins El Llit,” they keep the pace brisk but downplay the drums, and the results, a kind of dance music with its head in the clouds, are both invigorating and meditative--like the album itself.

The band’s fourth album, Of the Sun, doesn’t so much directly address the state of the world as vividly conjure the day-to-day sensation of existing within it, forever teetering on the tightrope walk between luminous ugliness and awful bliss.

Without romanticizing their lives, they do manage to find something meaningful in that pursuit, even if it’s just another song to stave off the darkness.