For all the sonic risks and boundary-pushing distortions of previous records, SABLE, fABLE is the more daring album in Bon Iver’s catalog.

There are bound to be uncomfortable moments listening to someone else’s therapy, but there are also passages of profound beauty and clarity amid the maelstrom.

Even tracks that circle around a hazily imagined apocalypse—“This summer might be your last!”—can’t summon more than half a head bob. There’s enough energy pumping through these songs to move the 32-minute album along, but it feels like you’re slouching through the moving walkway at an airport. “Hi Someday” is an exception.

Where Saba’s previous music dwelled at length on emotions and scenes, these songs whisk past like a montage. No ID’s liquid production drives that fluidity. Backed by Saba and Pivot Gang members like Daoud and daedaePIVOT, he layers in drums, keys, and vocal loops that interlock and split apart like twisting gears.

A victory lap, the most fun “I told you so” you’ll probably ever hear. The title is a red herring, because no one would confuse Sonny Moore for an artist like Andy Warhol. He’s just Skrillex, writing some of the most ridiculous dance music ever made and making even purists fall for the wubs. If that’s not Pop Art, I don’t know what is.

Her lyrics mostly return to subjects she has revisited so many times that, on Jellywish, she also reflects on her weariness of talking about them: grief, death, and mortality. Here, though, even these topics are part of the record’s life-affirming warmth.

Derivative as it is, it’s all performed with care and craft, a frictionless blend of styles that feels a bit uncanny, like music you could imagine in a faux Urban Outfitters at Starcourt Mall. But there’s a sense The Crux aspires to something greater.

Folky and pastoral, with recorder solos and mandolin excursions and proggy journeys-in-song, Forever Howlong is as ambitious as anything this band has done.

It’s ambitious, stadium-sized, and risky—the sound of Hollis wringing his newfound star power for all it’s worth. Hollis’ two brief stabs at building up star’s world through balladry feel extraneous by comparison.

Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? .... To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us.

Deep in its mesmerizing glut are some astonishing works of synthesis. Sound bristles, foams, bursts, and oozes, lashing its acid against aya’s newly ferocious vocals.

The hooks on “Alibi” and “Keep It Alive” hit with scream-along jollity, even if Cabral’s punk turn means we get less of the fairytale quality that made her earlier work bewitching—and even if the drums sound curiously flimsy at times, crushed underfoot

End Beginnings shows an understandable desire to crack open the Sandwell District aesthetic, but the album too often struggles to express these ideas with the tyrannical clarity heard on, say, the malignant deep freeze of Function’s Isolation, or Sleeparchive’s Elephant Island, by which O’Connor and Sumner were so influenced.

Plenty of songs on Lonesome Drifter tell multi-layered stories, but the longest one stretches barely beyond three-and-a-half minutes. The laudable economy of language resembles his fellow Texan Townes Van Zandt. So, for the most part, does the mood.

Dan’s Boogie is not a facsimile of its predecessors. It is funnier, wiser, though the stakes are perhaps a little lower. .... It all feels effortless, like he’s been doing this for his whole life, which he basically has.

It’s a collage of striking songs from a band that may have shied away from making some tough calls about what to cut and what to lean into during the long process of self-recording.

What’s remarkable is how wide a net Holley and Lee cast. Maybe it’s a sign of his broad appeal or the importance of the work he’s creating, but there’s something like fellowship in these songs, a sense of remembering together.

Where Hanoi drifted toward jazzy abstraction, Bogotá sees the band run wild over a much sturdier foundation of gritty grooves and DIY basement-club beats.

As often as the band has pushed in new directions, it’s never abandoned the core dynamics of its songwriting, a fact that Lonely People With Power underlines. Fifteen years into their career, having long transcended any given genre, set of influences, or fan expectations, Deafheaven sound, more than ever, like nothing other than themselves.

Forever Is a Feeling turns the most transcendent, hopeful, horny moments of a young lover’s life into maddeningly safe background music. It’s so frustrating, you could scream.

It’s as if O’Brien set out to make the paragon of a modern My Morning Jacket album and succeeded in both style and sound, only forgetting to leave room for the surprises that actually gave their early works ineffable power. It’s boring.

Glory is rich with beauty, but the band—Hadreas; longtime partner Alan Wyfells; producer Blake Mills; and drummers Tim Carr and Jim Keltner, bassist Pat Kelly, and guitarists Meg Duffy and Greg Uhlmann—twists it just enough to let in flashes of the strange and idiosyncratic.

Tough, impressive, astonishingly good debut.

After album opener and slow-burn stunner “Canada,” “Sandcastle Molds” breaks the mood; the rollicking drumbeat, nervous blues licks, and dissonant climax feel muddled and a little overdone when compared to some of their more relaxed songs. But the next few tracks get the album back on solid footing.

I Said I Love You First is quite scattershot, an odd collection of songs that sound like other songs, incongruous spoken interludes, and one random reggaeton track (“I Can’t Get Enough”) first released in 2019.

It gives clarity to what’s so magnetic about their creative partnership: that, in the grand wilderness of America, these two unusual musicians found each other at all.

At just half an hour, this is a slight album, despite moments of heart-bursting ambition that at times leave you wishing for more to sink your teeth into.

No distinct group voice emerges from these 12 tracks, no clear sense of where they hope to head now. But there are enough revelatory moments, both solo and shared, that this lack only suggests itself once the album is done, when its pleasures have finished unspooling.