It’s a shame to see a band with such clear skill and experimental prowess release an album as doltish as Fishing for Fishies, especially considering that, not so long ago, they managed to release five good albums in a single year. There is very little joy involved in listening to these nine songs.

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 best moments on this record arrive when Harding’s playful approach to words syncs up with her playful approach to sound. The logic driving the end result may remain hidden, but its allure is undeniable.

Let’s Try the After may be inspired by forward movement, but it feels directionless, preoccupied by searching without clarifying what was lost.

Some of these big numbers, however, rely on cheesy tropes that lack a degree of empathy. ... That’s not to say that Bird isn’t powerful in more vulnerable moments.

Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience.

When left to his own devices—as on the chopped-and-screwed “Roll” and the Jersey club-indebted “Pure Gold”--Girl Unit rests on formerly niche sounds that have been adopted by more mainstream-facing artists.

Hornsby plays with elegance, at ease with both his traces of hipness and essential squareness. It's a confidence that arrives with both comfort and age and it's what unifies all the disparate elements of Absolute Zero, shaping the album into a testament to the full range of Hornsby’s gifts.

SOAK’s honesty, combined with her considerable musical gifts, ensures that Grim Town is always a nice place to visit, even if you’d never want to live there.

He turns his history over and over in his hands, and he relays his findings, tactile and intangible. The record is rich with observations of the world beyond his windows.

Collins crafts a pristine portrait of early-’70s AM radio by taking inspiration not only from the period’s definitive artists, but its discarded pop detritus, too.

Despite her obvious skill and charisma, some of the album’s 11 songs are burdened with overwrought production, awkward turns of phrase, and ham-handed rapping.

Despite Invitation’s cinematic and often successful composition, Broderick succumbs to the passivity she’s supposedly working to renounce. The songs are ambient rather than immediate, more decorative than they are distinct.

As they pare away at their sound, Wand move further away from psych-rock and closer to true psychedelia.

Homecoming is an important document of those [Coachella] performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity.

Despite the occasional nod to rock formalism, All Time Present achieves a scope only hinted at on Forsyth’s previous full-lengths.

LSD sound like an algorithmic midden of pop music. ... More than anything, this album is both tired and wired, like drinking Red Bull after a fifth Red Bull.

Fontaines D.C. are fueled by neither IDLES revolutionary fervor nor Shame’s festering disgust. They’re not raging against the current state of affairs as much as lamenting the local communities and culture in danger of being steamrolled by the march of modernity. As such, Fontaines D.C. are very much a post-punk band reclaiming a certain pre-punk innocence.

On his own, he’s not a particularly compelling songwriter. The album aspires to cult-classic obscurity and lands in the realm of the tolerably generic.

While Sulphur English is their least welcoming album, it is also their most rewarding. ... They’ve delivered a cohesive vision of internal destruction, all the more explosive for everything they’ve left behind.

The arrangements on PERSONA are busy and convoluted, and many lyrical highlights are buried in meta, self-referential schlock rock. ... PERSONA is not a failure, but it’s tough to call it a triumph.

Though BLACKPINK can sing and dance with precision, the production of Kill This Love is also weirdly dated, like it was crafted earlier in the decade and then forgotten in a time capsule for five years.

In other words, it’s strong and considered enough to mean big things to more people than just Pierce. Even the best Drums albums surround a few highlights with filler, though, and Brutalism falls even harder into this pattern.

The results are as reassuring as the memory of your favorite counselor picking up a weather-beaten acoustic guitar by the light of the campfire.

Thirty years in, the Chemical Brothers are still digging their own purely escapist sonic rabbit holes. At a time of great cultural and global insecurity, there's never been a more tempting time to get lost in their sensory overload.

This tune-up album, at the very least, restores the underlying feeling of his signature stuff. But there, too, lies its flaw: it’s a hollow effort lacking in any real distinguishing characteristics. The album never becomes more than the sum of its sounds.

Many of the songs on The Quanta Series were released in previous years as singles. Sequenced into an LP, they carry more dramatic weight.

It’s neither bootstrapping origin stories nor rock’n’roll fantasies so much as the grim realities facing Moctar and millions of others around the world that give Ilana its considerable power.