Although Doja clearly envisions Vie as her poppiest album, with ’80s pop as her aesthetic of choice, the record is most interesting when she’s ignoring such distinctions rather than embracing them.

The result is at once all-encompassing and strikingly intimate.

Le Bon fills her music with ornately carved oddities, but she’s always had an ear for pop melodies, even within her most ambitiously arranged songs.

Nobody’s Girl deals mainly in ballads—sometimes gauzy, sometimes earthy, often mournful—but that form grows stale even while it suits the personal upheaval she writes her way through. When she breaks the pattern on the surprisingly psychedelic “Lose It for a While” and the driving “Strange Dreams,” where her voice skitters with nervous energy, there’s a flash of what her emotional candor paired with more compelling arrangements could achieve.

The time between albums (seven years, in this case) gives Here for It All a certain weight that its songs don’t quite bear. In the scheme of her smash-packed discography, this is a minor work. But if only all minor works were so consistently enjoyable. The air of meh palpable during many of Carey’s recent public appearances is mostly replaced with gusto and wit (though the way lead single “Type Dangerous” flatlines in the hook is just meh again).

Twilight Override is comprised of only strange, beautiful, and threadbare originals, but the sense of glorious indulgence is straight 1970 Dylan.

Their strangest and strongest work. .... Geese’s most singularly idiosyncratic music arrives to their largest audience yet.

Real Warmth makes it easy to believe that music can be that lifeline out of the darkness, or at least a roadmap to home.

The low ebbs detract from an album that’s otherwise difficult to resist bouncing to.

Time and again in these five tracks, it sounds as if Orcutt has reached the end of potential variations for whatever theme he’s playing, like an outlaw outrunning the cops only to reach the edge of a towering cliff. But he finds unexpected ways to extend the thought, with Miller and Shelley always maneuvering to give him room to do so.

Cardi maintains a respectful distance from the prevailing trends. Instead, she plays with bursts of experimentation, adopting new flows without sacrificing legibility. .... That work [editing the track list down], when offloaded to the listener under the guise of generosity, lands instead as risk aversion.

Blurrr, Robertson’s sixth solo album and her undisputed masterpiece, is at points so beautiful—53 seconds into “Always Were,” to be exact, or four minutes, 31 seconds into “Peaceful”—that it feels difficult to breathe alongside it.

The duo’s mutual respect, selfless skills, and tender chemistry have delivered an album that is among both artists’ best.

THAT’S SHOWBIZ BABY! is a romp of a record, even if it feels front-loaded with bangers—like Addison Rae earlier this year, the album is slightly overshadowed by its hot streak of singles.

The pleasure of the people playing this music is obvious and infectious, but it’s hard to shake the idea that despite their effectiveness, the hardest-charging songs here feel incomplete, that the film score’s mandate not to draw too much attention to itself hampers the songs’ ability to fully bloom on their own terms.

Here, her cut-up vocals ground both the album’s tighter tracks and looser moments—the same timbre that seduces on one song is, elsewhere, exasperated or desperate.

Her writing is as richly fetid as ever—replete with bar brawls, murder-suicides, Afrin addictions, and serial killers—but a bright red yarn of heartbreak wends its way between these songs, little cuts coming together to form one gaping wound.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation.

The best songs on Pain to Power capture that electric, instantaneous energy, where everything collides in delightful chaos. Maruja only lose that alchemic touch when they overthink the process.

You can hear that weariness all throughout Play, which often finds him going back to his two favourite wells—wedding songs and “global” bangers—without much of the energy or good humor that made him so popular to begin with.

Though the band more or less commits to replicating their studio arrangements, their attention to detail (the whining synth harmonies on “Where I End and You Begin,” the melodramatic backing chords of “Sail to the Moon”) feels grandly ambitious, rather than stodgily clinical. At least several songs feel greater than the sum of their already formidable parts.

The one new track is “Devotion,” a showstopping slab of new-wave twinkle. Outside of a killer opening punchline (“I don’t feel emotion/It completely takes over me”), it’s uncomplicated and blissful, a portrait of codependence that begs to be read as a you’re-the-real-stars diva move. It’s a victory lap, and I don’t begrudge it. But Hot Chip are far more compelling when they’re navigating the course.

My nervous system just can’t endure 17 tracks of uncut Jens at once; it’s a giddy squee! sustained for 80 minutes. But it has variety and inspiration throughout, and it works great when taken in two chunks, one spinning a relationship together and the other gently tugging it apart.

Byrne’s recipe is comfort food, sunny nourishment in troubled times. But his determination to look on the bright side of life yields an album with no ambiguity or subtext. All the joy is right on the surface, delivered with relentless gaiety that becomes hackneyed long before the album is over.

The music on HAGEN isn’t impenetrable, though it is gargantuan.

No One Was Driving the Car is an inspired departure from interpersonal drama in favor of incisive critique, a confident step forward into an uncertain world.

Beth and Hostile have been collaborators for nearly two decades, and together they’re responsible not only for every sound on the record, but for the entire visual package, too. Their mutual force and focus give the album the pressurized insularity and cracked intensity of a one-person project.

The elements are there—the R&B-inflected singing (though Bieber’s comes out more like R&B-affected), guitars so bleary they sound hungover from last night, lite-rock keyboards, little wild squiggle fills—but the dynamism has been flattened, perhaps by other collaborators.