The thrills of The Path of the Clouds are far richer than most true crime fiction, but like the best examples of the genre, it leaves you breathless.

His raps land firmly within the established pockets of beats, but each song is so distinct and JPEG’s writing is so fluid and witty that no two moments within the album’s humid atmosphere sound the same.

Lily We Need to Talk Now is wall-to-wall hooks. She draws on the entire history of pop-rock heartbreak anthems and ties it together with sugary-sweet vocals and a witty, whimsical sensibility.

He’s settled into the comfort zone of songs that will haunt weddings for years to come, like “2step,” in which he raps about “Two-steppin’ with the woman I love.” Even at his most passionate, Sheeran sounds as threatening as a meringue peak. ... Sheeran’s reliance on clichés is especially unfortunate during the album’s back half, which is where he placed a majority of the songs about death and fatherhood.

Intra-I is the soundtrack for a new generation of music lovers to grow with. Cross hasn’t just connected his instrument with the soundsystem culture that informs his music, he’s made it an integral component of that tradition.

While you could put on I Don’t Live Here Anymore and take comfort knowing that the War on Drugs have Beach House’d their way to another terrific record by simply refining what works, there are a few songs that test the borders of the band’s classic little world.

If This Is How You Smile was the complete house tour of Lange’s psyche, Far In is more like an afternoon barbeque in the backyard. It doesn’t tell as complex of a story, but you’re more than happy to hang out in the sun for a while and enjoy his company.

The band known for continually surprising listeners ultimately falls short, mostly hiding behind unexceptional, diluted alt-metal. Instead of letting this bold idea guide the way, it’s offered up as an apology affixed to the end of their least ambitious collection yet. Mastodon, once transgressive in its refusal to be put in a box, has shaved off its sharp edges and crawled inside.

My Morning Jacket is their least adventurous album yet. When they riff, they’re squarely within a July 4th classic rock block; when they vamp, it’s the fog-lit, psychedelic soul that’s invigorated their most recent work. In either form, they occasionally hint at their soaring, festival-ready populism, heady instrumental exploration, or fluency with the American songbook, but never the fusion that once came so organically.

The Antibes version is excellent but this set is more compelling, both because of the personnel and how Coltrane extends the composition.

Fun House embodies all Duffy’s gifts at once, bringing their virtuosic talent into their own wheelhouse, on their own terms.

Whatever Actually, You Can may lack in pointedness, it makes up for in raw energy. Yet with all of the intensity and musical bedlam at work here, the brief sections of calm somehow resonate the longest.

Throughout Cracks, Giske appears to be striving for an alien, private vocabulary with an instrument saddled with 175 years of tradition and tropes. Against great odds, he succeeds.

It can feel like discovering an old roll of film in a vintage camera, or like going to a dive bar and messing around with the jukebox. While it aspires to be the heart on your sleeve synth pop of the past, it’s most successful as mood music to soundtrack the present.

-io’s sonic mass is enveloping, making for an album that’s both difficult to approach piecemeal and hard to swallow in one sitting.

The chain reaction these nine songs generate together produces enough fog and smoke to keep the spell going strong—and to keep whatever secret she’s trying to tell us just on the other side of the speakers.

Una Rosa, isn’t a neat bookend to the period in between, nor is it a balm or salve. It’s better, truer to the joy and pain of the past that flicker into the present like unwelcome thoughts.

More willing than ever to flex their jazz chops, the Vanishing Twin of Ookii Gekkou sound best when settling in for the long haul, exploring the nooks and crannies of their pluralist fantasia with a microscopic attention to detail.

Compared to the rest of their catalogue, Sympathy for Life feels broadly accessible.

Every song is midtempo, chugging along with the dreaminess of everyday life. If you want to glean something deeper, you have to lean in.

Blue Banisters sprawls and elaborates past the point where we can place our own projections onto it. We know too much. But at its best, this music offers an even more rewarding thrill: It manages to entertain, enrapture, and even surprise because of how well we know Lana Del Rey—and how much there is still to learn.

What’s fascinating is how he breaks out of the fugue. Where he once overpowered songs by stretching his tics into main vocals or going on dazzling, hyper-technical runs, his best verses on Punk are in step with the album’s often delicate production.

A genre-spanning collection of extraordinarily detailed interludes, asides, and transmissions, the record gets at emotion in an oblique fashion, remaking your desires as it plays.

Eternal Home is as ambitious and cerebral as it is self-indulgent; but unpacking these strange, messy depths has always felt like the whole point of Marcloid’s music. All of her searching yields some dazzling results.

At heart these are songs about living with the weight of sadness, about the accumulation of severed relationships and missed connections and regrets both big and small. Change all the names and the album can still hit you like a speeding car.

While they revel in disorientation, Mod Prog Sic marks the trio’s most direct appeal to the pleasure center.

On her new full-length, Juno, she hones her scatterbrained Californian pop into an effervescent, hook-filled record that flirts with weighty emotions but often swerves for the safety of a joke.

While bidding for timeless and universal appeal, Finneas sometimes comes up with hollow platitudes. ... Occasionally, he hits on something more stirring, like on “Love Is Pain” when he recalls waking in tears from a dream about his parents’ death—demonstrating the very real consequences of getting older rather than vaguely fretting about them. Finneas’ exercise in restraint has its limits: These subdued songs are surrounded by highly produced, pointedly topical ones.