What Legacy+ offers is a merging of Fela’s legend, Femi’s unrelenting struggle, and Made’s extension of the genre: three generations of Arobeats in one place.

If A Billion Little Lights doesn't always awe quite like it should, given its considerable zeal and craftsmanship, it's because of that familiarity. The album has a big heart and big ambitions to match. The only thing missing is the very thing these songs long for the most: the thrill of discovery.

As the Love Continues comes off as a reminder of the emptiness of all things and the importance of finding meaning anyway. It’s a hymn to melancholy, and a strike against infinite sadness.

Working with producer and multi-instrumentalist Josh Kaufman, Jenkins keeps the album focused and breezy. In just over half an hour, it features one perfect song (the dazzling “Hard Drive”), five excellent ones, and an instrumental coda.

Times is a pristine album of frictionless bangers, but these songs are so controlled that they never come close to catharsis.

The dewy-eyed sound of Who Am I? appeals to a younger generation, confirming that modern Britpop doesn’t always equate to aggressive young men—it can be gentle goths with their friends, writing songs for kids hoping to figure out who they are. All Pale Waves have to do now is figure out the answer to that question themselves.

Carpenter’s bandmates mostly help him resurrect an old sound instead of crafting a newer, fresher one, yielding distinctly diminished returns.

On the whole, Ounsworth’s candor gives New Fragility a necessary charge as he leans into balladry.

In directing his anger inward, slowthai loses some of the urgency and incisiveness that made his debut so compelling, along with the contrast that made that album’s vulnerable moments so striking. But he’s undoubtedly honed his craft, sounding slicker as he retreats from placard rap to the journaling process that got him started in the first place.

Glowing in the Dark homes in on the group’s most memorable set of songs to date—and it sounds like a little extra time curating has helped them loosen up and have fun, too.

This is joyful music with a spirit of self-preservation at its core.

The lyrics of Lines Redacted may be forever tied to our present moment, but the album is simultaneously a tribute to the kind of youthful friendships that are difficult to savor before they’re gone.

There are no obvious singles or earworms, but more so than Petals for Armor, FLOWERS for VASES takes a step closer to healing.

There are other records like this one, but they’re few and far between.

As welcome as it is to hear Hekt reflect on her burgeoning identity, the most commanding songs on Going to Hell explore personal feelings in service to a community.

Their portentous crescendos and surges of Jewish klezmer music set the pace, making post-rock sound improbably carnivalesque. That none of their experiments feel gimmicky speaks to a diverse and inquisitive musicianship.

These 23 tracks cover a lot of ground musically and critically, tracing her massive hits in the mid 1960s and following her as she weathers professional upheavals and changing pop trends. Start Walkin’ does not, however, include Sinatra’s very first singles, when she was a teenager trying to find her voice.

The Staves manage to overcome Congleton's production and mixing tics because their voices can cut through anything. ... It’s heartening to hear them turn their attention inward; maybe next time, they’ll trust that sound to do its work without the input—or intrusions—from a collaborator.

Their 10th album, Medicine at Midnight, adds very little to their extensive catalog of interchangeable power pop and hard-rock sing-alongs. But you can’t hang them on their own music, because Foo Fighters would never dare to give you enough rope to do it.

Sun June are interested in daydreams as both playground and prison, and about observing what happens when you collide with the borders of your own interiority. But even in this cloudy, circumscribed world of echoing instruments, where faking and fiction are not only indulged, but necessary, Sun June’s sincerity shines through.

Throughout Yellow River Blue, you can clearly hear Yu Su joining together different parts of her life, and that fusion of disparate styles is part of what makes Yellow River Blue so inviting. Created with an exacting sense of compositional precision, it nevertheless wanders like a slow-moving river, offering a new discovery around every bend.

Every moment feels lush and welcoming, designed to reach as many people as possible.

In almost sequential fashion, the 12 tracks here capture a band trying to wiggle out of an aesthetic straitjacket one buckle at a time, evolving from a band you think you’ve heard a million times before into one you feel like you’re just getting to know.

This music is so bluntly fatalistic—in idea and execution—that it feels life-affirming to experience, as cleansing as scalding water. The Body have embraced that sensation since finding it on their 2010 breakthrough, All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood. On I’ve Seen All I Need to See, it is mercilessly distilled and efficient, reminding us there’s no time to waste.

On We Are Always Alone, Portrayal of Guilt find a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. After all, what you consider to be “mood music” depends on whether you’re seeking counterprogramming or a chance to lean into the negative energy outside.

Hebden’s arrangement of Sound Ancestors shows deep and intuitive engagement with Jackson’s weed-scented sensibility, which has no use for presumptive distinctions between the beautiful and the funky, the silly and the profound.

What Chimpanzee could use is simply more music. The EP works well as a compact statement, and even in its short form it’s more fulfilling and inspired than any of the last half-dozen lengthy Depeche Mode albums. But it feels incomplete.

The common threads celebrities try to establish with civilians have proven to be pretty flimsy throughout the past year, but they’re enough to give OK Human an emotional binding missing from nearly every album they’ve made in the past 20 years.