The songs sound great, but the easy on-stage banter and joyful communion with the audience sounds even better. Shut-ins of the world, unite and take over.

The Edge of Everything is perhaps too esoteric for either camp—a 5D rendering of the genre rather than a simple homage. But in calling back to concept-driven works like Goldie’s divisive Saturnz Return or the Japanese swordsmanship references of Photek’s Ni - Ten - Ichi - Ryu EP, The Edge of Everything proves that drum’n’bass can still wield an awesome experimental power as it enters its fifth decade.

The scale and intensity of Cook’s ambitions are laid bare on this outsized collection, a glimpse at the whirring cogs beneath hyperpop’s pristine casing.

The Fifth Season is imbued with the tension and power of a live instrumental performance, at once intriguing and nerve-wracking. Throughout the album, Lafawndah embodies a purposeful fluidity of genre and role that makes her difficult to pin down.

El Último Tour Del Mundo gets at the core of what makes Bad Bunny so appealing. “Maldita Pobreza” isn’t just a trap-rock fusion experiment, it’s a reminder that Benito is less than half a decade removed from bagging groceries in Arecibo, daydreaming of exotic Italian sports cars. He toes the line between rap braggadocio and vulnerable everyman with relative ease.

“Mr. Solo Dolo III” is only memorable because of its title, which like too much of Man on the Moon III is coasting on a legacy built a lifetime ago.

It’s a tremendous step forward, while still remaining an acquired, uncompromising taste.

While folklore seemed to materialize from nowhere as a complete, cohesive vision, evermore is structurally akin to something like 2012’s Red, where the breadth of her songwriting is as important as the depth.

We Will Always Love You overflows with heart, enough that it buoys even the top-heavy moments, and the bittersweet mix of emotions feels remarkably appropriate for the current moment.

With his careful needlework, Mazurek stitches together an album of big, unanswerable questions and gorgeously orchestrated music, setting aside distinctions between genres, musicians, and points in time and space without losing sight of how each of these components is necessary to the whole. It rises up to gesture toward the cosmos, then returns us to life on Earth, tracing a single great parabolic arc.

Throughout Time Makes Nothing Happen, Gengras toys with the tropes of electronic dance music (repetition, meter, gridded quantization), only to gradually veer off into unkempt wilderness.

Its mellow sway is alluring but it also can drift ever so slightly into the realm of mood music, perhaps an inevitable result for a gently restless musician who seems to favor feel over feeling.

Musical twists and spasms aside, Origin is the most approachable Liturgy album yet.

Shygirl’s voice carries a bit more over the muck; the production is bolder and more focused, like throwing a sharpened knife at a wall rather than a smattering of darts.

There are more than a few moments of brilliance, but as a whole, the album lacks cohesion, feeling less exploratory and unbound than simply unfocused.

Mendes spends nearly every minute bowled over by the power of love. It’s nice to see his cup overflow so bountifully, but the near-constant awe quickly grows tiresome, especially when conveyed through clichés like, “Your body’s like an ocean, I’m devoted to explore you” and, “You’re my sunlight on a rainy day.”

These songs introduce nothing new to T.I.’s story or sound, but they’re exactly what you’d expect to find 13 tracks deep into a curated rap playlist on a streaming service.

Sigur Rós’s music has always felt panoramic, and Odin’s Raven Magic is no different; its sweeping melodies harken back to landmark albums like Ágætis byrjun, but this time, the music foregrounds orchestra and choir. When the sprawling sound becomes overwhelming, it’s the hidden details that prove most tantalizing.

Frustration and grief animate these songs, but it’s their simplicity and specificity that make them compelling.

Simpson can’t quite sustain a double album in this style, and Cuttin’ Grass loses some steam toward the end. However, there are more than enough bracing moments here to make you wonder what Volume 2 will sound like, especially if it’s all those ’80s covers he promised his wife.

It’s exciting seeing how they’ve learned to play off of each other’s energy. It’d be easy for Uzi to coast and phone in verses after the year he’s had so far, but he’s shown no signs of slowing down.

The album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.

The soft edges of Roped In make it both a sublime record in its own right as well as a pleasant, inviting portal into a wider world of simpatico artists. The album feels like the aural equivalent of gazing into a massive and well-appointed aquarium, a vessel for color and movement that quietly soothes as it shuttles along.

The non-R&B covers—the songs that make her and her band push themselves—are more daring and perhaps more satisfying.

Nothing has established their voice by transforming that anxiety into languid, slanted harmonies. The Great Dismal takes stock of their career, finding vaporous beauty in shrugging off their inner demons.

As a sit-down listening experience, the album frequently feels too repetitive to remain consistently engaging. Still, taken as a microdosed jolt of electronic psychedelia, a song or two at a time, Translate has the potential to lift you up, out, and beyond, to a better, stranger place.

Stepping confidently into her “rock era,” Miley offers a genuinely pleasing, though sometimes hamfisted record that staves off the awkwardness and missteps that plagued her previous albums.

The first set boasts slightly better clarity, the second set coming across more muffled. But the wider canvas of these two sets offers him a freedom he didn’t always have on that tour. Rather than frontload the hits, the trio gets to take their time, folding in a dozen new songs that had yet to appear on any album.