Synthesizers appear sparingly, but contribute to weaving tense and expansive atmospheres, further deepening the emotional breadth of their music.

Foxgloves fits the mold and goes down smooth. Even as he approaches 80, Hurley’s ability to synthesize different strains of American traditional music and twist them to fit his own idiosyncratic vision is as sharp as ever, and the effortlessness of it all testifies to many years of practice and refinement.

It’s still a fundamentally flawed album, and those flaws were symptoms of a larger ailment within the Band. Perhaps that explains the overriding nostalgia on these songs, that sense of having something beautiful and essential. Cahoots is a eulogy for a Band that was already in the past tense.

A rousing, unabashedly sentimental album that’s even more explicitly about recalibrating fading dreams than its predecessor.

Crain and company use Ra’s music as the platform for some of their most accessible, pop-adjacent music yet. They’ve never sounded so interested in melodies, chords, and song structures as opposed to hypnotic loops. This rigorousness belies the album’s stoner-bait trappings, and if these interpretations are usually unrecognizable until the melodies come in, they’re at least honest and thoughtful about how to bring Ra’s music into a synth-centric context.

The resultant record [Toy] is a mixed bag. Bowie and his band gel well. ... But these seasoned pros often fail the material, losing the ramshackle charm of the originals. ... The 1990s albums reissued here, however, tell the story best.

The only lull is around halfway through, when a stretch of minimal house and techno tracks threatens to pull the set’s pleasantly eccentric mood down to stone-faced seriousness. Still, it’s a slight moment among an otherwise vibrant mix that offers an enlightening peek into Lanza’s singular world.

Nostalgia and intimacy suit Frahm’s compositional style, which relies on tugging at the heartstrings. But at times, the surfeit of feeling is overbearing.

Against the preceding volumes’ most attention-grabbing moments, they may risk getting lost in the shuffle, but perhaps that is part of their charm, too: The whole fifth volume feels like an Easter egg in a video game—a sparkly basket of jewels collected from the crevices of Arca’s more imposingly monumental works.

kick iiii contains some of the most contemplative songs in the series—like the Oliver Coates collaboration “Esuna,” a mournful swirl of strings and plaintive vocal harmonies—but the widescreen intensity of “Alien Inside” fuels two more of the set’s boldest songs.

Pairing the risk-taking instinct of her best music with the swaggering confidence she projects as a kind of cyborg diva, it is the best of all five albums in the set, and one of her strongest full-lengths to date.

The first three proper songs delve into crisp, clipped percussion arrayed into loping dembow rhythms. All three feel like clear extensions of KiCK i’s “Mequetrefe” and “KLK,” but they also stand on their own. ... The shift midway through from glitch beats to turbocharged four-on-the-floor is the rare case where Arca’s maximalist instincts miss the mark.

Eventually It’s All Smiles starts to run out of steam. Its songs are ambitious compared to radio pop, but too safe to really stand out; it’s a cinematic album in search of a climax.

Still in search of “a most elusive truth,” but using all of her talents to bring herself and her listeners ever closer to it.

The back half is the water that tames the front’s fire, and together, Morgan’s warm embraces and cooler thoughts attest to her full emotional breadth.

What is unexpected is how Wilson sounds almost anonymous here. As he drifts through his greatest hits and personal favorites, he doesn’t invest his playing with much personality, so these smooth sounds are about as memorable as a piano twinkling away in the background of a department store.

Throughout these songs, Doiron shines as a vocalist. She has remarkable control over her voice, folding simple sentences like origami to reveal surprising detail.

More than a remix album, then, Source ⧺ We Move is like an expansion pack to Source’s electric, eclectic universe, opening up paths and byways that shed new light on Garcia’s work while staying true to her vision; a modular musical adventure that is best enjoyed in context.

Hartlett crafts Ovlov’s breeziest record yet. It’s still wooly and doused in fuzz, but the band sounds more lucid than ever before.

This music is demanding—of your patience, of your attention, of your tolerance for cacophony—but the reward is a fascinatingly confounding journey through the fragmented mirror world.

Henki might be Richard Dawson’s strangest album to date. But his ideas are fertilized by these songs’ peculiar twists and turns; the more Dawson and Circle lean into their eccentricities, the more their music resonates.

Deciphering the Message helps connect these dots. But it also plays like a fantasy come to life, a dream set at the Blue Note, with long-lost titans beaming in from the afterlife to sit in with the young blood, like proud parents watching their children surpass them.

It has a distinctive blend of magic and might, the sound of a band who knows they’ve hit their stride and still gets giddy at the noise they make. It’s a bar band delivering communion.

While Monument is probably one of their best albums, the narrative beneath their deeply carved patterns remains as elusive as ever.

On Windswept Adan, Aoba expands her repertoire of sound and brings collaborators into her vision, yet she still holds on to the wistful imagination that allows her to dream up private universes.

Now she has an album that ups the stakes and nuance of her artistry. Not just in telling a story over the course of 12 songs, or by making a record that interacts with more modern musical ideas, or in how she’s using her voice with newfound multitudes, but by being bold enough to share it all so vulnerably, with the entire world listening.

Thrills are few and far between amid this hour-long morass. Bloodmoon suffers from two problems that seem as though they should preclude one another: It is thin on fresh ideas and unexpected twists. Its hard rock-meets-hardcore permutations are familiar to anyone who has ever heard, say, Evanescence and Breaking Benjamin.

Ranging from the tightly wound “Brown Earth” to the sprawling “Christmas in My Soul,” it is the album of hers I would recommend to newcomers. The surrounding records are also strong.