Despite the pensive lean of Howerton’s lyrics, 90 in November is decidedly a pleasure listen.

Recorded in the London studio that Al Doyle set up during the pandemic, it’s the first Hot Chip album to be written from scratch by the full band all in the same room, and its sound reflects that pooling of energies, full of exuberant dance rhythms and arrangements that burst at the seams.

Bleed Out deconstructs the tropes of action movies just as it lovingly recreates them, letting us have our cake and bludgeon our enemies to death with it too.

Adding more voices to the mix turns the monolithic Big Mess inside out. What was once a foreboding haunted mansion is now a carnivalesque fun house; not a place to linger or live but rather a wild ride that’s worth one spin—but maybe not a second.

This flow between music and message animates the record and complicates its plainspoken lyrics.

Unfussy, fun, and occasionally even funny, it is also their most purely pleasurable album in nearly two decades.

In some ways, this feels like a segue, a hint that adult contemporary is the center to which Lovato will ultimately return. But it doesn’t undermine the album’s essential spirit. Planning for forever when every day is a fight—that’s defiance.

Get Fucked is everything you want a Chats album to be: fast, crass, and loaded with more instantly quotable Aussie idioms than Crocodiles Dundee and Hunter put together.

A minor record that would be far more engaging if it better embodied its author’s eccentricity.

While his guest vocalists don’t always make the most illuminating guides to Miszczyk’s maze-like terrain—a jumble of non-sequiturs and disconnected images, the lyrics on many songs feel like placeholders for more engaging songwriting—their voices lend texture to his gravelly analog synths, tape-warped effects, and hazy psychedelia, rounding out his retro-futurist universal with a crucial sense of human presence.

Hour of Green Evening might have benefited from more of that wilder teenage thrall, but for the most part, what the music lacks in rowdiness it makes up for in emotional complexity.

The problem is, he’s not a compelling enough presence to hold his own. Seven years into a career spent flipping familiar references into crowd-pleasing shapes, it’s still not clear who Alexander really is, beyond the sum of his influences.

As a concept album, Traumazine is uneven. But as an embodiment of the phrase “healing isn’t linear,” its significance couldn’t be more clear.

Despite the burst of creativity that inspired it, No Rules Sandy lacks urgency. The songs that do sharpen into concrete images evaporate rather than carry their metaphors forward.

The funniest, most mind-twisting album Birchard’s ever made.

It’s all fittingly scathing, but there’s whimsy under the surface, especially in Dwyer’s berserk vocal performances. His taunting, sneering voice cycles through loose impressions of iconic punk singers—Henry Rollins, Iggy Pop, Ian MacKaye, Johnny Rotten—without ever assuming a final form.

Despite these flashes of wit, the band’s Achilles’ heel is Baron-Gracie’s generic songwriting, which becomes most apparent when the tempo slows.

As Chopper reaffirms, Kiwi Jr. may never be the kind of band that deals in linear narratives or grand conceptual statements. But like the background bit actors that fill out the frames of a big-screen epic, their songs amass minor details to major effect.

The album is so structurally and thematically similar to that series [Streams of Thought], it often becomes difficult to see the difference. ... But regardless of its scope, Danger Mouse and Black Thought bring good things out of each other. At Cheat Codes’ best, it’s electrifying to see the ways their respective obsessions with history and time inform the whole.

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls.

The Last Slimeto suppresses the knottiest and most uncomfortable aspects of his music, the moments when it feels like you’re hearing him process his darkest thoughts in real time. As a result the album is easier to digest, the songs less likely to stick out on a playlist, but at the price of the individuality that has made YoungBoy impossible to replicate.

Funk Wav Bounces Vol. 2 simply demonstrates competence. Harris may say that this album is powered by fuck-you juice; it is as threatening as an Erewhon smoothie.

Tuttle and his backing band reconnect with the naturalism of the energy around them, harnessing an ever-present whimsy. Sprawling and varied, Fleeting Adventure uses instrumental music as a way to convey imaginative transcendentalism.

With fleet-footed beats, breezy woodwinds, and impassioned lines in Yoruba, Fireboy invites the world to the lively sounds of his hometown.

Remixes may dominate the 24-track collection, but the group’s original work wins out in spirit.

Mostly, though, it's nuanced and mature, with a slickness that sometimes drifts into banality and makes you crave a reprieve in the form of surprise gastric sounds or cavalier testicle jokes.

Barbieri’s dualities—holy and profane, ancient and newfangled, ecstatic and doomed—give Spirit Exit its potency.

Friendship do not engage in world-building, instead calling greater attention to the world in which we’re all just passing through. While always endearing, over the course of Love the Stranger, they can just as often feel constrained by a documentarian approach.