When Wallumrød emerges from the long shadows of her source material, elevate Go Dig My Grave beyond the beautifully rendered, if rather pointless, collection of covers it sometimes threatens to be.

His fourth solo album, Transangelic Exodus, is his most thematically cohesive work to date: a loose narrative about supernatural queer lovers on the run from the law. The misfit feelings surging through his back catalog crystallize here into detailed imagery, giving the album a lurid, cinematic sheen.

It’s fitting that this slightly convoluted, sometimes generic offering largely delivers on its promise, much like the larger comic world it now occupies. A fun, rap-centric album is now Marvel canon. In their first roles as bit players, the TDE roster delivers a product benefiting the whole. Their effort is one befitting the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and its blackest entry.

Beautiful Despair is a rough sketch, and its worth extends only as far as one’s interest in such a document.

The Two Worlds finds ways to communicate between these modes [fantasy and emotional urgency], interior and exterior, resulting in a portrait that feels full and honest.

If Little Dark Age is a new start, it’s a promising one.

Her fifth full-length Air Lows feels like a goth psychedelic ritual intended to plumb the depths of the listener’s unconscious; while the record doesn’t always hit its mark, the moments that do sustain momentum radiate a delectably gnostic hum.

If their debut fails to offer a consistent, forceful message the way their riot grrrl heroes once did, they have at least figured out how to capture some of those predecessors’ energy. For now, Dream Wife leaves you revved up and ready to go with nowhere suggested.

Pissing Stars feels purposefully small, a personal retreat from full-band compromise by someone who is trying to understand the world and his role in it. The result is indulgent, neurotic, and harrowing, a reminder of the complete mess we’ve made. But it’s oddly reassuring, too.

The return of synths and disco-ish atmospherics serves, unsurprisingly, to obscure the fact that a nontrivial reinvention still eludes them. But to their credit, Franz Ferdinand are persistently resourceful, and in their theatrical suave and helter-skelter choruses there lingers an obvious knack for starting fires armed only with indie-pop panache.

Vasquez’s new album, Criminal, batters down the restraints that choked back his voice in the past, letting him break from a whisper into, finally, a scream. If it isn’t his most nuanced record, it’s certainly his most decisive.

As a standalone suite of songs, like a tuxedo you only dust off every now and then, it is beautiful, but only appropriate when the occasion demands it.

Distinguished by her sure-footed stride, Quit the Curse sounds like an album by an artist who at last knows where she’s going.

This album often sounds like a studio-crafted simulacrum of a full-band performance, every element a bit too polished.

The adherence to krautrockin’ repetition remains, but the proto-punk engine has been replaced by electronic loops and glacial synths. Suddenly, a band that once sounded most at home in strobe-lit basement dives now sounds primed for a late-afternoon slot at your roving summer festival of choice.

On the whole, though, the women Craft expends so much breath obsessing over drift in and out of his songs like cardboard cutouts from a bygone era, there to be lusted after and then blamed when they don’t fit into his fantasy.

It’s easy to indulge a reverie when it’s a vivid one, and Messes invites you to lose track of time for awhile with it.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

With Open Here, Field Music rises to the challenge with a set of newly crystallized talking points, offered up along with a glorious mess of noise.

Too much of Man of the Woods is musically and thematically shallow; at 66 minutes, it’s a mile wide and an inch deep.

Khruangbin’s takes this new mode of listening and injects its own singular and developing personality into the playlisting of modern music.

Follow Them True, Stick in the Wheel continue their attack. About half of the album refines the acoustic folk sound of their debut, with lyrics emphasizing the pride of craftsmen and laborers as well as the desperation driving the poor.

Love Jail goes beyond a mere glance in the rearview mirror. It sounds vintage, but it feels current. Dommengang find some potential for escape in this music, some freedom in that absence of a destination.

P2 shows a man who is patient and relentless in honing his craft, getting closer to the debut with each track.

Oh My feels like a pocket-sized chapbook set to music: some songs inspire, some feel thin. When NADINE’s strange poetry does convince you to dog-ear a song, though, returning to it feels as creatively refreshing as when you heard it for the first time.

It’s still a joy to hear the Migos rap, which is why it’s especially depressing that Culture II ultimately feels like a drag--a formless grab bag compiled without much care.

Total Control make an EP of curveballs sound puzzlingly coherent thanks in no small part to their fine craftsmanship.

It’s a pleasant oddity in the Shins’ catalogue—neither a dazzling reinvention of the original release (see: Massive Attack V Mad Professor’s towering No Protection) nor a hastily-assembled insult to the band’s creative work .