The disc ought to have the proud, few Loincloth faithful weeping with joy, but more importantly, it leaves room for a broader audience to hear what the fuss was all about.

The impulse to cast off cultural standards dictating how music should sound dominates IRISIRI, which seems most interested in articulating femininity outside the constraints of patriarchal expectations.

Lane’s most compelling songs come out of her acknowledgements of imperfection and her impertinence toward the status quo.

Musically, The Next Day isn't as radical or dreary, as it bounces around from style to style, casually suggesting past greatness while rarely matching it. The production is clean and crisp, almost to a fault, leaving little room for the off-kilter spontaneity that highlights Bowie's best work.

Though neither a high point nor a low point in her freewheeling, four-decade career, Banga has the same charm of Smith's best albums: It flits with the impressionistic fascinations of a single mind.

Where SS1 felt rambling and uneven, there is a clear sense of purpose to SS2, applying the cohesion of Barter 6 to SS1’s pop promise.

While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs Holy Ghost of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness.

Conway holds his own with the Philly vet, spitting, “I get to trippin’, get the blick and this AR in my hands/Every bullet in the cartridges land/The stick look like a guitar in my hands, drummin’ like I’m part of a band.” Lines like these are why Conway is known as an adroit lyricist, and what makes this album so compelling is that it allows us to have a look at the man behind the virtuosic wordplay.

Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.

Birds & Beasts doesn’t necessarily surprise, but it crystallizes this band’s essence, particularly as they find their footing after the shocking loss of Leib.

This Land is the first place where Gary Clark Jr. doesn’t appear hemmed in by the past. The album may be informed by old sounds and forms, yet these familiar tropes feel fresh thanks to Clark’s idiosyncratic splicing.

10,000 gecs is something like astral projection, allowing you to ever-so-briefly shake off the constant doom scroll of life for a hot second of unencumbered fun.

Though the pieces are fleshed out with other small touches—other horns at the periphery, and uncanny wordless vocals--the foundation of the album rests on the power and warmth Stetson and Neufeld generate by themselves.

Matters of mistrust, isolation, and uncomfortable togetherness dominate Tramp, rolling through every track like a sick, creeping fog.

Throughout Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift sometimes mutes the messy adolescent impulses that gave these songs their spark. But elsewhere, she divests from fantasy archetypes—the knight on a white horse, the helpless child—that once limited her. Think of the new Speak Now as a call and response between who she was and who she is.

Now, by denigrating this Ya-Ya's reissue as a commodity and by questioning the album's canonization in general, I don't mean to imply this set doesn't cook. Even if it's not larded with 20-minute workouts, Ya-Ya's is manna for guitar freaks, thanks to the fiery interplay between the immortal Keith Richards and inarguably the greatest lead guitarist the Stones ever boasted, Mick Taylor.

For a genre that wants to evoke mysterious, uncharted territories, it's beginning to show signs of predictability, and while Odd Nosdam hews admirable results from it, it's just about time for an increasingly defined border to be pushed outward, into more nebulous territory, again.

On his eponymous debut, Mikal Cronin proves he can hold his own.

This is all-out openness and clarity, which, for better or for worse, is just a little more grown-up.

Whether you find dance music far too repetitive or you live for old Traxx 12"s, you will remember Dance Mania's tracks, as they are among the catchiest and most brazen of their kind, alternately hypnotic and disruptive.

Ultimately, she makes Faded Gloryville sound not so much like a place of diminished opportunity, but endless possibility.

Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present.

As a sincere love letter to NOLA, new breed certainly succeeds. But as a further example of the kind of musically adventurous statement that Richard has already proven she’s capable of, it falls just shy.

Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable.

Raveena’s luminous sophomore album, Asha’s Awakening, is a throat-clearing moment for the singer, drawing on both Western and South Asian inspirations and collaborations for a blend of dance-friendly R&B songs and soothing ballads, each of which stands on her distinctive, quiet strength.

Blank Face turns away from the ambitious fusion of To Pimp a Butterfly, instead doubling down on a smoked-out atmosphere that points the listener’s focus toward rapping. That puts the onus on Q to hold attention for the duration of the record’s hour-plus running time, and he does so.

What makes Siberia so great is that it thoroughly succeeds on both counts--proving once again that, for Polvo, all those years out of the game are to be measured not in inspiration lost, but wisdom gained.

She isn’t breaking ground in pop by disregarding its supposed borders. But where post-genre stream-baiters pull their numbers by anesthetizing distinctive sounds, King Princess pulls hers by playing up their contrasts.