The Human Fear isn’t provocative enough to revitalize their reputation, but it certainly won’t do it any harm.

Consider Midwinter Swimmers, then, an invitation to reclaim the assured and commonplace language of awe. This is what “beautiful” was meant to describe.

It’s a brief rush, at a hair over 27 minutes, but covers a remarkable amount of ground. And as a blueprint for a new, pan-African pop music, it is thoroughly convincing.

Fennesz may not care much if he surprises us, but he never runs out of ways to get us.

The Night is frequently cold and lonely, but Saint Etienne make for invaluable company.

In trying to live up to the “personal album” trope, rosie opts to explore rather than define, and the emotional grooves are polished smooth. Whether you’re a new fan or a devoted Blink (as BLACKPINK fans are known), you’re likely to feel left cold.

Each piece on V​ė​jula offers a chance at transcendence, even if only for a small moment. Even the quickest glimpses into the beyond are revelatory. It’s heavy work, but always welcome and necessary.

Rome shows how precise the National’s alchemy is: If Devendorf is replaced with a drum machine, if Dessner confines himself to the piano or quiet noodling, if Berninger rambles too far afield, the whole thing falls apart. It’s Alligator deep cut “The Geese of Beverly Road” where Rome best demonstrates the band’s collective power. On record, it’s patient but stiff, held back by a lo-fi drum recording; live, it’s the massive, sweeping anthem early believers always hoped it would become.

Her frank storytelling makes “Coast” the most vivid song on Nobody Loves You More, like the account of a beachside outlaw whose levity is its own triumph. The best moments are when Deal slows her pace and stretches out like a daydream, recalling, more than any of her other bands, her sublime cover of Chris Bell’s “You And Your Sister” with This Mortal Coil in 1991.

3AM’s muted irony dulls the sparkle, leaving the cracks more visible. The album doesn’t have any disastrous lows—but it never quite surpasses that initial dopamine rush, either.

The best songs here are warmed and colored by instrumental flourishes, as with the bright guitar and piano notes on “Demons” or the opening electric noodle of “Tangent Dissolve.” .... The album’s weakest moments come when the band leans on contemplative vibes without evoking any whiff of danger or hallucination.

Petrichor’s many quick pivots are almost guaranteed to provoke occasional frustration that Shake has seized upon a great idea and then let it go. Which tracks provoke it is a matter of taste.

In Dreams isn’t at all a crash-landing, but it is a soft one, as Duster settle into a perception of themselves rather than fly above it.

“Blowing Kisses” serves as the emotional anchor of Castle’s stunning seventh album, Camelot, which feels like the sort of bold breakthrough that her peers in U.S. Girls and the Weather Station respectively experienced with In a Poem Unlimited and Ignorance.

Dorji’s music is rapturously motivational, bolts of pure feeling that at least make me want to be a better citizen of the world. It is perennially honest about the long odds of the struggles that inspire it, too, how the work of fixing this place is never done.

Kiwanuka seems content to work in an uncharacteristically understated mode, and that’s part of the pleasure of Small Changes. It’s a record that gives the impression of an artist knowing who he is—and being happy with what he’s made.

Here, Richard and Zahn have captured grief like a carved piece of obsidian—glossy, beautiful, and sharp.

An album that’s intimate in mood no matter how expansive in sound. .... Generally, the alternate takes offer little more than subtle differences, such as the lack of Indian instrumentation during the middle section of “Living in the Material World,” but the pair of non-LP songs add a dose of good cheer that’s conspicuously lacking on the original album.

Bouquet is as odd as boring gets—an album inspired by her real life that nonetheless comes off as lifeless.

The vibrant, expressive songs on Curyman II return often to this theme: how Brazil's unique cultural identity is a product of its diverse ethnic populations.

Coming on the heels of the beef, though, the regionality of the album seems more like an elaborate gotcha to Drake rather than a musical pivot sparked out of passion. That missing spirit is in the production, too clean and synthetic.

Sometimes extended improvisation carries with it an expectation of drama, where you think about what just happened and what might come next. This exceptional record fixes your attention on the present moment.

All the best songs stretch toward seven minutes and beyond. A toast to decadent culture! The evident pleasure in the construction and writing of these songs is strong enough to justify lingering on this side of the veil.

If a girl group’s main job is to supply harmonies for days and kick out songs that roll around your head like marble, their debut album, Access All Areas, achieves it all with a decidedly R&B edge.

What LIVE DRUGS AGAIN proves, more than LIVE DRUGS, and maybe more than any of their studio albums, is the band’s force as a symbiotic unit.

ny footholds you might find in the record’s craggy surface are slippery by design. But as a result, the pleasures of Space as an Instrument feel hard won, each moment of melody and peace an epiphany amid a backdrop of stormy uncertainty.

For fans who hopped off the bus, Come Ahead is interesting enough to hop back in. It’s also good enough for newcomers who may have discovered Primal Scream via Dua Lipa’s endorsement of “Loaded,” or Gillespie’s participation in one of the past decade’s better memes.

She tells these stories in a honey-rich voice that can sweep from powerfully belted notes to playful talk-singing.