For all the dust O’Donovan kicks up, the point is neither the destination nor the journey. It’s the leaving.

Although Cordae can be an engaging writer, on songs like “Momma’s Hood” his delivery is as dry as a teenager forced to read in class. “Jean-Michel” shows his competence as a rapper, but the song sounds like it’s reaching to be a classic ’90s rap interlude and landing at a Big Sean freestyle from L.A. Leakers.

It’s a confident debut LP from a young band seizing its moment and cutting the tension with a chuckle.

Lyrically and musically, this album is built to pursue the felicity of spirit that can come with following an expertly manicured path, which is another way of saying it goes where it wants without worrying about the weight of other peoples’ expectations. You can travel so much farther when you pack light.

Costello fans will find many delights in The Boy Named If. For one, his 32nd studio album sounds smashing. Sebastian Krys’ mix stresses the textures of acoustic instruments without walloping listeners; Costello’s guitar, as restless as a child at a symphony even on solid albums like When I Was Cruel and Secret, Profane & Sugarcane, burrows right between Faragher’s bass and Nieve’s keyboards, enunciating hook after hook.

Her vocals are as uncontrolled as a volcanic eruption, but the carefully noodled Led Zeppelin-like riffs that accompany her strums tend to diminish her dramatic performances. Still, Storm Queen possesses a magnificent tension, with each song veering wildly between catharsis and dissonance.

In its endless, flavorless drift, the album amounts to little more than a modern-day take on easy listening, with all the signifiers of lush, aesthetic experience and none of the stakes.

Caprisongs is the sound of twigs in the driver’s seat as she traverses her own curiosities and instincts; there is no man looming over the music, no weighty public narrative dictating its terrain. It is intrepid and light, the image of a woman attuned to planetary alignments but casting her own fate.

Forfolks, however, never feels showy or vain; it’s joyous, Parker delighting in the ideas he unearths as he plays along with the sound of himself. The results often feel dazzlingly complicated, as though these songs were built through some greater studio sorcery, like cobbling together various takes or recording the layers one at a time.

Sick! doesn’t recontextualize the genre in the same way Some Rap Songs did, but it’s an act of self-revolution. It magnifies a newly assured Earl Sweatshirt, skin shed and free to ascend.

The widest ranging of any of her covers collections yet, Covers pushes beyond the habitual melancholy that has marked much of her work. In bold colors and vivid relief, it illustrates her talent for radical reinvention.

Anticipated for decades, apparently made in just a few months, the album is an instant party-starter and a statement of intent. It threads together the last 40 years of dance music into a solid hour of new standards.

You could knock Magic for being backward-facing, but then again, all of Nas’s music is backward-facing. It’s charming when he revisits his own gospels, but the nostalgia act would be easier to swallow if it weren’t so resentful.

Functions less like a singles collection and more like an overstuffed double album: discursive, playful, and full of imagination.

In recent years, Burial has increasingly tried to escape the linearity of dance music by cobbling together pieces of songs into multi-part suites. With Antidawn, he makes the most of that technique; every track is riddled with fake-outs, false endings, and trapdoors. In that sense, despite the record’s heavy-handedness, there is something playful about Antidawn.

Warm, engaging, and magnetically solicitous, the Carnegie Hall show is a fascinating pivot point, showcasing Young at his most engaging and vulnerable, nailing one door shut and prying open another: It’s a last look back at the old folkie days and a tentative first reckoning with the wooly neurosis of a new decade.

This is the Weeknd’s most ambitious project in sound and scope, and the most effective record he’s put out in years. Part of the thrill comes from hearing him take himself a little less seriously

There’s so much to hear and ponder on the generous Volume 2; even if it leaves you wanting more, that absence of deeper secrets is crucial to the set’s humanizing effect. At last, Volume 2 shows the work behind the beginning of Joni Mitchell’s masterworks, at times so seemingly effortless even her collaborators wondered if it existed.

Most of LIVE LIFE FAST plays out with this kind of energy: forced, obvious, its best ideas obscured in a haze of self-satisfaction.

Scenic Drive feels like a detour because it is: Khalid announced his next studio album, Everything Is Changing, last summer. For now, though, he seems content to take a step back, sounding like he’s singing and shrugging at the same time.

The album’s most affecting moments zero in on Albarn’s close relationship with nature, one built on trust and deference.

On Barn, as on many recent predecessors, the tunes meander along the most obvious routes of the chords that underpin them, rarely going anywhere in particular, and almost never taking the sorts of audacious twists that might lodge them in your heart and mind. This doesn’t appear to be a case of Young losing his touch, but the result of a deliberate decision to prioritize immediacy over craft.

The GAS project has developed so incrementally that Voigt plundering his past isn’t unwelcome or unexpected, and there are enough subtle developments for Der Lange Marsch to strike a distinct tone. ... There’s one development, though, that has already made Der Lange Marsch the most divisive GAS album: the high-pitched beep on every other beat. Some listeners don’t notice it, others seem able to tune it out, and for many, it’s an impassable barrier to entry.

Wiki has always wielded his considerable talent to paint cityscapes with words, but with Elsesser’s production, they become transportive.

Open Arms to Open Us is adventure writ large, a rhythmical hymn to boundless possibility.

Rhinestones evokes the mystifying chaos of yearning to know the unknowable and the fool’s errand of trying to love the unlovable.

Fighting Demons is too polished to be considered a total flub and its heart is in the right place, but it’s difficult to look at it as anything more than another product falling off a long assembly line powered by dead rappers.

Where “Quantum Physics” is whispery and diffuse, “Brighton 75 Fünf” is emphatic and visceral, hammering at the edges of its central theme until they’re sharp enough to draw blood. The most thrilling moment comes when they abandon the roadmap entirely.