Twenty-plus years after its initial release—and commemorated here with a gargantuan 13-piece box set that exhaustively pieces together its rocky origins—it has never sounded so enduring.

She commits to pop music’s campiness to convey the way love and heartache magnify even the most fleeting memories into heart-wrenching melodrama. It’s an interesting pivot, but much of the music feels too aimless to effectively deliver these intense emotions.

The result is some of the most direct, spontaneous music in James’ catalog. Tracks feel less like songs or compositions than tone poems, mood pieces that flow naturally from one to the next, like clouds changing shape high overhead.

From a less confident artist, her writing might sound trite, but vocal experimentation is Fohr’s strength. The malleable and arresting delivery at the album’s core pushes the music forward, often reinventing itself mid-song.

The album’s improbable feat is that, even with its inherent tragedy, Cotton Crown is somehow an even breezier, more agreeable listen. It’s not often that sorrow goes down so easily.

Like many albums recorded over many years, at various studios with different producers, This Side of the Island can feel a bit scattershot and piecemeal. .... Still, his ragged charisma holds it all together.

The production is more ambitious, the songwriting more accomplished. If JENNIE has the most robust individual musical identity of the quartet, it’s because her songs have a crucial element the others’ lack: They sound good.

If Alter Ego presents LISA as the most generic embodiment of a pop star, then it is no surprise that its best songs rely on tried-and-true formulas.

Summer is a season of extremes—exhilaration and malaise, heat that can feel more oppressive than the cold—and All Worlds is best when it leans into them.

MAYHEM may have played better if its tracklist were whittled down from 14 to, say, 10. Still, it is among Gaga’s strongest ever full-length statements.

It’s more restrained [than 2022's GOLD] but just as urgent: a pen scratching out a manifesto rather than a rallying cry through a megaphone.

Thundering, itchy, pneumatic new record.

The arrangements on Tears of Injustice skew closer to that style than the rock’n’roll on Funeral for Justice, and it’s poignant to think of the sad circumstances of Tears’ creation leading the artist to seek out the sounds of his youth.

On Luminescent Creatures, Aoba’s exquisite and entrancing eighth album, she and Umebayashi further broaden their horizons.

Deep Sea Diver deftly modulates their energy over the course of Billboard Heart, whose front half zigzags through cinematic scene-setting and jittery accelerations, and whose back half mellows into a more pensive slow burn.

By stripping away the experimentation, Sinister Grift is a reminder of something that’s always set Lennox apart: He’s an exceptionally gifted songwriter. Nearly every track on Sinister Grift feels like it could’ve been written at any point in the last 50 years—or even longer ago.

Even at a lithe 31 minutes, it serves as Hecker’s most diverse work, an unfixed landscape that moves from shadowy to frigid to transcendent with ease. The song titles and album notes leave no real clues as to which films each track was actually intended for.

Shygirl’s ability to cook cutesy, juvenile references into grown and sexy club candy shines on “Wifey Riddim.” Its vintage lunchroom table production, evoking Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” or Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl,” gets a refreshing update with the addition of hip-rocking Jersey club breakdowns.

This isn’t an album about clearing one’s mind. It’s raw and frenetic, a blistering and desperately beautiful soundtrack to the mounting chaos.

On choke enough, that highly skilled performer comes into her own as an artist. The title track is easily Oklou’s best to date.

Her supple singing and the lively production keep Jupiter from being a slog, but the hazy symbolism sours the experience.

Locks lets the past speak by keeping the grit and the grain in his samples, conjuring the dust of the archives. Like Madlib, another jazz-influenced samplerist, he leaves the seams in his loops and builds meta-rhythms from the clicks of his edit points.

There’s no harm in taking inspiration from others. But here, it sounds like McRae and her writing team hopped on the left-of-center-pop bandwagon without building out something new and wholly Tate—and it’s hard to make leftovers taste as enticing as when they were first served hot and fresh.

Saya is more of a restoration: filling in the cracks of Gray’s music, redrawing her in bolder shades and more vivid hues—indigo, flesh tone, spring green.

Horror lacks some of the DIY immediacy of Strange’s first two records. A new degree of studio polish is palpable. .... But with Antonoff’s blockbuster-coded fingerprints on the record, the hooks also go bigger than before, and Strange’s heart and fierce desire for connection bleed through.

Powers narrates these vignettes from a distant storyteller’s perspective, and a gap emerges between his authorial point of view and the intimacy of the home video material. This dissonance is certainly haunting, but when the album’s final track arrives in a montage of the VHS clips strung together over heartfelt piano, its affecting ambience feels somewhat abrupt. But the record’s final moments remind us that these songs still spring from a singular voice.

In an effort to make everything sound as massive as possible, the team obscures some of Fender’s more pointed moments.

The lucidity and beauty of this music feels hard-won, something to revere and cherish.