For all its faults, The New Abnormal might capture how the Strokes are feeling: not ready to fade out, not primed for a comeback. Right now, they’re just way too tired.

Southside’s experiments are made with enviable effortlessness: It’s a little rough around the edges, not self-consciously provocative. Hunt doubled down on his initial mission—making hip-hop and R&B in country sound hip instead of hokey—and it paid off with this collection of songs that are, more than anything else, fun.

The record often leans on familiar garage-rock tropes, so much so that it often dips into homogeneity and predictability. But the band also leaves plenty of room for McKechnie’s booming vocals, by far the band’s most impactful instrument.

With unexpected production and left-field samples, Rodriguez’s album is powered by a heady rawness that bucks the trend for theatrical concepts in today’s electronic pop nonconformists, producing epiphanies like hot stones spat from a fire. You could say it is as addictive as modern love.

TOPS are at their best when they keep digging. Elsewhere on the album, though, they’re just chilling. They’re as despondent and nostalgic as ever, but back to the kind of windswept indie rock that is their trademark.

Bruner is still getting tipsy and pondering what waits for us in the beyond. There’s growth and acceptance in that wonder—the title suggests as much— but not necessarily in the songwriting. The album lacks the anchoring power of a full-bodied jam like “Them Changes,” “Heartbreaks + Setbacks,” or even his 2011 George Duke cover “For Love I Come,” leaving us lost inside Bruner’s mind. hat isn’t always a bad place to be.

In Burch’s minimalist musical landscape, each lyric she pushes to the foreground becomes loaded with meaning. It’s as though she’s smiling knowingly as she sings, while also feeling every word.

On 925, Sorry lovingly poke fun at themselves and at rock history—but they also prove they’ve got the talent to go further than their gags.

While What We Drew is more internalized than past releases, it is not conflicted; rather, Yaeji finds clarity in vulnerability, in the pendulum swing of her humanity. Crucially, the mixtape doesn’t turn its back on one of Yaeji’s strongest traits as an artist: Her music has always been deeply social, and now it is more gregarious than ever in its gratitude for those around her.

Purity Ring, by placing the mature perspective of an adult woman in the throat of an adolescent girl, confer upon children a maturity and sophistication that most don’t possess, and shouldn’t have to. Still, WOMB is some of Purity Ring’s strongest work, a confident and singular statement from a band often imitated over the past decade.

It is slow, winding, and meditative, composed almost entirely of piano, bass, and drums, and builds outwards from minimal meanderings to overgrown thickets of instrumentation.

For the most part, they sound like they’re having more fun than ever.

The ravishing delight Tumor brings to this character is what makes their music so affecting. Yves is a performer whose roles, played with the utmost rigor, always find a way to linger in the memory.

What’s most satisfying about Before Love Came to Kill Us isn’t that Reyez whizzes across multiple genres—these days, who doesn’t?—but the skill she displays at each. No matter the arrangement, she powers across it at full force. ... Like many recent pop records, the album is overlong, and the extraneous material tends to be the kind of filler that Reyez is well above.

Though it’s as comforting as the whistle of a teapot, the music captures the feeling of storms—the atmospheric charge and churning motion—without resorting to volume or force. Being ordinary seldom seemed so wonderfully strange.

These are tightly-wound songs that highlight the band member’s obvious gifts. Sister is never anything less than adroit, but it’s also never anything more.

The rich orchestral compositions on The Caretaker sound effortless and fluid like cursive. In crafting such complex, accessible songs, Rose reveals just how ordinary it is to feel at war with yourself, to not know what you want or how to get it.

Where earlier albums achieved this feeling through lyrics alone, Snapshot of a Beginner incorporates songwriting into a wider vision, one that feels truer to the band’s intentions.

These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume five (Together) has a more hopeful sound. ... Maybe it’s because the tone better matches the animating spirit of the project, or maybe it’s simply because the pair have better ideas in a major key at the moment, but Ghosts V: Together is solidly the stronger of the two.

These two Ghosts volumes feel much more concrete and ambitious than the original quartet. Each has its own clear-cut identity, too: Volume six (Locusts) is where the dread creeps in. ... Yet without Together’s relatively rousing melodic template and pacing to propel it, Locusts often feels like its titular swarm, devouring itself for 80-plus minutes until there’s not much left by the end.

Given all the technical ground Cenizas covers, Jarr is an impressively meticulous guide. Every pluck, ping, buzz, scratch, and whistle is intentional, a bump in the tunnel as you slide down the rabbit hole. Once you’re there, he makes even the most discomfiting sounds—a frantic glissando after a tirade of keys, the squawk of a bow dragged across muted cello strings—feel natural.

It’s not so much that no one else could make this ridiculous album, more that no one but the Orb would even think of it. Abolition of the Royal Familia is a testament to their sadly singular talent.

Devotion is not a disaster, but the chasm between ambition and execution feels vast. The new ideas are ill-fitting, when they’re not derivative from the start. Beneath the processing, the album’s best moments sound oddly like a less polished version of Emotions & Math.

Walking Proof winds through moments of incandescent joy, gentleness, cathartic noise, and even unease (“Scream” ends the hopeful album with an eerie crawl). It’s as if Hiatt has emerged from a dark, uncertain period as a stronger, bolder artist, winding up with an album that encompasses a full spectrum of feeling as it rocks with abandon.

It’s a reminder that any redemption must first reconcile the lessons of our history, to learn from the mistakes that led to misfortune. It’s also a testament to the beauty of resilience; as an indictment of power, it elicits inspiration rather than depression. This is music that makes you feel less alone in your rage, a chorus to join with your anger and frustration, a funnel to channel that energy.

There is something profoundly lovely about seeing Stevens safe in such a strange, adventurous effort, supported by Brams and the rest of his found family.

Co-produced by the band and Josh Evans, it’s filled with all the markers of cerebral, studio-born rock music: drum loops and programmed synths, swirling keys and fretless bass, wide dynamics and spacey textures. For the first time in a while, the winning moments are the slower cuts. ... The artistic rejuvenation that Gigaton aims to provide still seems somewhat out of reach.

Colores’ concept is steeped in this earnest (if slightly indulgent) pursuit. Each of its 10 tracks corresponds to a different color, in a sort of sonic mood ring.