It maintains a simultaneously sleek and sludgy quality across its 35 minutes, like a cornstarch slurry gluing the whole thing together.

Gunn is not merely the ghost animating Other You’s remarkably ornate machine. The vocal melodies here are among the tenderest he’s ever written, and they carry the same sense of inevitability that he invests in his guitar lines; they sound so natural, it can be easy to overlook their formal complexity.

Love Will Be Reborn feels at once bigger and smaller than her previous material, with each quiet rumination leading her toward grander musings on love, grief, and motherhood.

These songs don’t have the same mythical grandeur as Tyler’s best work, or the same unfurling experimentalism of Anderson’s. Instead, they play like a wandering search for peace, with both artists turning to their guitars—and to each other—as a respite against a country that seemed to be tearing itself apart.

The album is her most accomplished, arresting work yet.

Glow On is not a crossover hardcore album that looks to transcend the genre, but one that tries to elevate it to its highest visibility.

For all the struggle that inspired the record, Shannon and the Clams embrace the change with grace.

The result is alluring and spectral. It’s their best work yet. ... Reznor and Ross spend most of the album experimenting, careening through genres and hinting at a danger that’s never fully realized. They cram songs with texture, reverberating screams and screeching sirens; the busyness can feel like a distraction.

McMurtry sounds more engaged here, more focused, and more generous to his hard-luck characters.

The most striking element of Long Time Coming is the one that made Ferrell go viral in the first place—her voice.

The sentiments are never cryptic or coded; the duo simply express what’s top of mind. That face-value approach to lyrics is well-suited for a subject as universal as a global pandemic. There’s comfort in hearing somebody sing what we’re all thinking, and comfort has always been what Damon & Naomi do best.

The Weavers have no trouble sounding like themselves, but another voice in the room might have helped them flesh out some of the underexplored ideas on Primordial Arcana. Like the still life that adorns its cover, the album can be beautiful, but it’s fundamentally inert.

Aisles is most endearing when it leans into frivolity, largely because there’s little else with such relaxed stakes in Olsen’s discography.

Ultimately, it’s that breezy, impish spirit that most distinguishes 333 and its predecessor from her RCA albums.

If Infinite Granite was a debut by a band with no backstory, it’d be impressive as hell. But knowing Deafheaven’s singular ability to pull off thrilling highwire acts, their latest subversion of expectations feel less like a bold statement and more like a predictable move to gentler pastures.

Dood and Juanita works so well because Simpson sounds comfortable within this form and just beyond it.

No song here is outright bad, and much of their best assets shine through the banalities, but Queendom feels like a signpost of Red Velvet’s former glory.

Solar Power sounds more interesting when it bottles the jasmine air of Laurel Canyon folk, less interesting when it emulates that sound’s descendants in early-2000s soft rock (Sheryl Crow, Jewel) without any of the hooks or energy of radio pop.

GUMBO’! is an ambitious sprawl that doesn’t always work perfectly. But when it does, there’s nothing else like it.

Although The Baby flirted with electronic elements, it mostly stuck to an intimate indie-rock sound; in comparison, Scout sounds big.

Though the album is staid and formulaic by design, it doesn’t always color inside the lines: It feels more like background music failing up than ambient music failing down.

Draw Down the Moon most often plays like a collection of Total Life Forever extended cuts, moments of thoughtful lateral thinking tacked onto the beginnings and endings of otherwise familiar indie rock songs.

Rarely is electronic music so utterly human as on Still Slipping, its emotional draw as reassuringly complex as a grand family reunion.

Ultimately, though, Pressure Machine rarely escapes Flowers’ Brandon Flowers-ness: try as he might—and you do get the sense that he’s trying so, so hard—his usual wide-tipped brush can’t do justice to what should be finely detailed scenes.

Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.

Nas’ kingship goes down easy over Hit-Boy’s clean drums and neat arrangements, which indulge Nas’ nostalgia without kowtowing to it. ... When Nas’ rhymes aren’t clumsy, his storytelling is.

Apart from splicing “Bluebird” and “For What It’s Worth” into a Buffalo Springfield medley, Los Lobos stay faithful to these original arrangements, which doesn’t mean they’re replicating records. They’re relying on their collective strengths as a rock’n’roll band.

It could often pass for Nick Cave as produced by John Carpenter, which is the sort of gloss these Mute lifers usually repel, yet it’s striated with layers of their past and their characteristic strangeness. It’s the best thing Andrew has done in at least a decade.