By staying the course after their risky pivot rather than retrenching, they’ve done their heroes one better.

A solid, consistent return that sounds like the band never left.

The album is easy to let play through, but sometimes hard to feel intimate with its complexity. It makes for music that’s wonderful to live with, encouraging repetition while allowing for unconcentrated listening.

On its best songs, he trades his breezy pop chops for earnest, soul-seeking Americana.

As an exercise in baking their sound into a decadent dessert, Vol. 2 is pretty convincing--and, more importantly, totally satisfying.

The versatility of core members Auscherman, Kevin Krauter, and Keagan Beresford--each of whom writes, sings, and swaps instruments--affords them chances to try on different masks, a huge strength despite some inevitable flat results.

Take issue with Styles’ taste at your leisure, but there’s no denying his comprehensiveness. His vocal performances are invariably the best parts of these songs.

Just as this album highlights Williams’ most existentially despondent musings to date, it is also the most fizzy record Paramore have ever recorded.

Lovely Creatures presents the definitive display of these anguished labors and sweet fruits they bore over twenty years--an unmovable feast, immortalized.

It’s both sharp-tongued and warm hearted, an LP-length memoir that dabbles in political manifesto. But it comes over like an album Ali made for himself, and he sounds better off because of it.

Aside from its more sociopolitical shortcomings, Everybody refuses to stop and evaluate why it exists in the first place. A lot has been made of Logic’s technical skill, but it can’t really be considered proficiency if it isn’t efficient.

Morningside is what happens when a bedroom pop record gets too big for just a single room, but all the while never loses its intimacy.

Their sophomore LP Powerplant sounds a little more like everyone else, echoing second-wave emo sourness (“Your Heart”), Britpop jangle (“She Goes By”), and classic alt-rock loud-quiet-loudness throughout. But Tucker and Tividad are wise enough not to abandon what makes them distinct--that unsettling magic that exists between them when they sing, the harmonic equivalent of The Shining’s Grady twins.

The album’s relaxed charm makes it an easy, endearing listen, but some of its collaborations don’t transcend their novelty.

It may not be their definitive show of force, but it’s a dazzling spectacle nonetheless.

Three albums in, it’s yet to be determined just where the younger Jeffes aims to take the group, but there’s a rigidity to The Imperfect Sea that approaches ordered desolation.

Although it has its moments, the end result is predictably uneven. Blondie’s commitment to tense and jumpy pop remains, even though Harry’s voice is more grounded some four decades after the band’s debut.

By putting old sounds into different contexts, Nite Jewel’s albums work as an exploration of a happier nostalgia. Because she takes a specific sound as her point of departure this time around, Real High is her most focused work yet.

These sublime ensemble recordings reflect not just the result but the process of deep enlightenment. Coltrane, performing with ashram members, illuminates Hindu devotionals with meditative Indian instrumentation, a sparkling Oberheim OB-8 synthesizer, droning Wurlitzer lines, and full-bodied singing evoking the Detroit church choirs of her youth.

Satan’s graffiti or God’s art? tries to make a masterpiece from spray paint, but for every cool mural, there’s a splatter of obtrusive tags.

Slowdive offers maximum-volume shoegaze too, better than the band ever has before.

Her early folk tendencies and pop structures served a similar purpose, a means to explore the off-kilter rhythms and ambient melodies that lulled her into a trance as a child, pulling us in along with her. Halo suggests a self-realization that is often breathtaking.

While it’s a quieter record than its predecessors, and her ceaseless questions and lacerating self-doubt would seem like the opposite of asserting an artistic identity, Shelley’s absence of imposition only emphasizes her enviable patience and burgeoning tenderness.

While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass.

With Best Troubador, Oldham reflects the format’s most expressive tendencies—to filter an artist’s work through the lens of your fandom. Through these songs, Oldham’s appreciation for Haggard seems to stem less from his innovation within the genre than for his patient evolution and longevity.

While in•ter a•li•a has plenty of motion and heat, it needs friction and resistance to light a spark.

In Spades clocks in at just 10 songs in 36 minutes, but feels as expansive and substantial as a double-album statement.

Audacious and spectacular high stakes.