The eight songs on the new record are all original compositions written and developed over the past six years, yet there’s no mistaking it for anything other than a Cabaret Voltaire album. While not as pulverizing as the group’s early recordings nor as sleek as the techno and house-inspired work found on 1993’s International Language, it blends the various eras of the group into a mostly satisfying whole.

Bridgers’ songs are so devastating because she plays both hero and villain, creating a Möbius strip of virtues (like selflessness) that twist into flaws (like savior complexes). Rarely is there a feeling of catharsis or righteousness, especially on Copycat Killer, where the paralyzing angst and introspection feels so stark. Yet the EP ends on a quietly hopeful note.

Music, Trial & Trauma is several albums at once: drill bangers, party tunes, and a series of reflections on Black tragedy. It doesn’t always cohere, but the effect is still rather startling. Loski illuminates the darkened corners of his mind in order to reveal the society that gives power to the demons inside.

The album projects a firm sense of place, and it’s not just because Charles’ accent is prevalent whether he’s talking, singing, or shouting. This is an English band, with English influences singing about English places—specifically, London.

Fittingly, on Sin Miedo, Uchis dares to trust herself more. She pares down the guest list, opting for feature production by Puerto Rican hitmaker Tainy and a smattering of artists. Her voice, still thick and sultry, looms larger in the mix.

They mostly tuck the dissonance and bedlam beneath the surface of these tunes, like a weapon hidden between hem and skin. That restraint highlights the band’s surprising breadth on their most diverse set of songs yet.

While Coates favors simple, stately toplines, the record’s underbelly suggests fathomless depths; instead of sprawling outward, like Shelley’s on Zenn-La, the songs pirouette before plunging into the abyss. The album’s splicing of beauty and horror invokes the morbid logic of Greek mythology, where stirrings of triumph tend to foreshadow nasty surprises.

This album has the most features of her career and when she gets a rap assist—like on “Movie” with Lil Durk or “Cry Baby” with DaBaby—she does her hardest work, fueled by collaboration (or more likely, competition). In popularity and proficiency, Megan is ahead of her peers across gender.

Granduciel is a much different vocalist in the live setting than he is on record: more punctuated, less delicate, and even a little less melodic. His soloing, meanwhile, consistently sounds more articulated as he rips into these songs on a tailwind of spontaneous inspiration.

BENEE gets better results by dropping the cutesy affectations. When the pace slows down, Hey u x strikes a balance between whimsy and moodiness, particularly on “A Little While” or the Frankie Valli-alluding ballad “All the Time,” a duet with New Zealand newcomer Muroki.

The result is a performance that exists in a strange hinterland, an album that’s unnervingly intimate yet flickers with the strange unreality of a dream. Idiot Prayer is as up-close and personal an encounter with Cave as there’s ever been. But a little mystery remains, always.

Home for Now isn’t necessarily groundbreaking; there are plenty of bands working with similar fusions of indie, pop, and electronic music, but the album shows them clearly moving forward in their abilities and ambitions.

The record is more interesting when the Herculean feats of lyricism take a back seat to introspection.

They still occasionally bury vocals in a haze of effects, but their instrumentals are crushing now by design, their synth lines starker, the distortion more piercing. They’ve always been capable of expressing harsh feelings, but they seem now more able than ever to echo such sentiments in their music. Fires in Heaven is a more alluring invitation than ever to join them down in the depths.

Though they don’t bridge new worlds or sounds here, they confirm the implicit connections between their formative muses, threading the outré time signatures of J Dilla and Madlib, the spiritualism of Dungeon Family, and the flair of Dipset into a cozy tapestry. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is home.

The performances sound more confident, the music less muddy. Singer Egor Shkutko’s grumbly baritone is better controlled, packing the intensity of a Russian Ian Curtis.

This is an extraordinarily assured first offering from a young artist capable of surprising at every turn. The result is not so much a foreboding portrait of a forgotten, boom-and-bust city, but an invitation to a place and people unduly ignored—and an introduction to an artist who won’t be.

As on her debut, Roxanne’s cool, clear soprano provides the centerpiece of most of these songs.

Uncool is not bad, and if anything, DISCO could stand more of it: to evoke actual disco in all its frisson and desperation, rather than the remembered-40-years-later version, full of kitsch and clip-art disco balls. The album, with a couple exceptions, has two modes: overly tasteful cruise-ship programming, and gauche rehashes.

Paradise may forever be lost, but this elegant elegy is worth many returns.

The record is also uncannily timely; you’d be hard-pressed to find an album that more vividly conjures the equally disorienting and liberating effects of putting your life on pause. This is the sound of your brain on lockdown.

Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

On an LP dubbed Razz Tape, this session spills out energy, with complex songs that slam hard and flow with ease.

By capturing the space between the ache of yearning and the warm glow of memory, “Homing” exemplifies Loma’s talent for bottling convoluted feelings. The intangible potency of Don’t Shy Away comes from its latent sense of spirituality.

Amidon reportedly regards his new, self-titled album as the fullest realization of his vision, and indeed, it’s a digestible nine-song omnibus of his modes and moods.

Summerteeth looms ominously in Wilco’s catalog, marking a point where he [Tweedy] knows it all could have gone wrong. He now sounds like a man who understands pop music will save his life. That quality makes the bonus material on this drinking-age-anniversary all the more potent.

However exhilarating its discrete peaks, May Our Chambers Be Full is one of those common collaborations that’s more notable for what it says about those who made it than for the new material itself.

He skillfully synthesizes his influences, hitting sweet spots that feel purely of his own creation.