Unlike her boisterous debut album, it is a calming listen that lends itself to journeys into inner space, even if the lyrics can sometimes be distracting.

On this pristinely preserved live document, the entire underdog-comeback narrative of a Rocky movie plays out and repeats itself in recurring five-minute intervals.

She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before.

Fatherland is a significantly simplified effort, a work of gentle, singer-songwriter consideration largely haunted by lost loves rendered as exactingly as still lifes.

Lahey’s songs thrive on idiosyncrasies, not generalities, so it makes sense that sexuality for her would be one part of a person’s character, not the full portrait. Still, while the singer’s first full-length is consistently likable, it is most lovable at its especially individual turns.

What makes Take Me Apart so stunning is its meticulous attention to detail, with new layers revealing themselves on the third or 37th listen. Its sonorous breadth is mesmerizing.

Without sacrificing her ear for detail, she’s engineered an album that sparks a bodily pleasure alongside her music’s continued cerebral delights.

This valiant yet flawed endeavor feels more like a false start than a dead end, if the Blow keeps watering the ideas seeding the back half and stays away from karaoke.

On Multi-task they’ve honed their sound to the point where it’s hard to imagine them playing anything that doesn’t take sharp turns or hit abrupt stops.

The diluted authorship leaves him floundering amid songs that manage to be overly complex and fiercely indistinct at the same time.

At times, it seems like as soon as one record has left the turntable, he’s reaching for its successor’s replacement. Still, nothing here feels hurried or rushed. Tracks flow naturally from one to the next, their elements complementing each other the way two siblings might finish one another’s sentences.

With Four Tet’s ninth album, New Energy, Hebden does something unexpected: He revisits previous sounds. There’s the low-key warmth of 2003’s Rounds, the free jazz at the heart of 2005’s Everything Ecstatic, the friendly thump of 2012’s Pink, the sprawl of 2015’s Morning/Evening. Downtempo nodders, beatless passages that flow into big bangers—he synthesizes all this into his most accessible listen since There is Love in You.

Neō Wax Bloom is an insanely ambitious inversion of the comfort of repetition, and the whole album spills forward to unnerving effect.

At first, Ibeyi’s bright rhythms can feel deceptively stable, their harmonies uninhibited as they dip into dissonance, but they are deliberate in revealing the depth of their sadness.

This is where Tell Me You Love Me improves on Lovato’s previous albums: It gives you enough space to see Demi as something other than a no-holds-barred belter.

The album zeroes in on what the band did best (and what sounds best today), its non-chronological sequence making songs recorded several years apart sound as if they sprung from the same session.

Being grounded, after all, is what Wolfe was going for. That you have to work in order to appreciate what she went through to get there is what makes Hiss Spun so intriguing.

While Always Foreign is by no means a happy record, it’s still a joy to listen to, driven by the same belief in community, evolution, and possibility that earned their debut EP the title of Formlessness.

These are pleasant songs, but Twain and Lange’s perfectionism meant even the weakest cuts on The Woman in Me and Come on Over were weapons-grade pop.

When it works, it’s brilliant as ever; when it doesn’t, it can feel unknowable, disjointed, a series of red herrings taking the approximate shape of a song.

Visions of a Life is an expansive trip. Devoutly 4/4 and unsyncopated, it nonetheless carves out raucous passages in which to burst open.

La Confusion offers uplift in a time of global insecurity.

Younger Now blends pop-rock and pablum country fare that is so restrained, so thinly produced, it seems like her lovably goofy personality was hobbled throughout the recording process.

Centre could be categorized as Frost’s first distinctly American record, and it’s a frightening, prophetic portrait that commands undivided attention.

His music is both a challenge and a balm, the starting point of a conversation and a place you can go to meditate on what’s been said.

And yet, however thematically mired in misery, Cold Dark Place plays out as a triumphant march into the darkness: one man’s pain, collectively conjured and conquered.

Roll with the Punches never falls, or even falters, exactly; it’s just a series of punches, whether of the clock or in the air, landing with consistency and specificity and only occasionally drifting into anonymity. To paraphrase Morrison himself, it doesn't pull any punches, but it doesn't push the river.

Fanon believed that romantic love was possible--that, above all else, was why love was worthy of critique and dismantling. Sumney, for his part, seems to have gone down a different path: diving into the bleak void in search of answers, giving us sumptuous music along the way.