Love Goes, Smith’s third album, unfortunately fails to deliver on the promise of “How Do You Sleep?” The album is clumsily split in two, with no regard to sequencing; it begins with a collection of bubbling, at times electric songs spanning melodic funk, pulsing deep-house, and mid-tempo pop, before abruptly veering to five messy ballads that would be better delivered via Hallmark card.

The oddest development of Angelheaded Hipster is that most of the 20-plus participants opt to inject angst and torpor into Bolan rather than revel in his pomp and frivolity. ... Sadly, Willner’s last great tribute album tells us little about its subject.

The selections are eclectic, the tone is subdued, and there’s not a squalling whammy bar in sight. Only the obligatory new original—a fuzzy and indistinct mood piece called “Bleeding”—feels a bit slight. As for the rest of this 19-minute release, there’s nothing here that particularly surprises or reveals a new side of Yo La Tengo, but there’s nothing that could conceivably disappoint a fan of the group’s jukebox side, either.

The dueling approaches of the two recording sessions enrich each other, providing Hey Clockface with its yin and yang. Alone, either style might have seemed like predictable genre play for Costello at this stage in its career, but together, they make for an album that’s energetic and consistently surprising.

Brief and assured at 10 tracks, E3 AF is the first time since 2007’s Maths + English that Dizzee has managed to tread the extremes of both his underground and mainstream iterations convincingly on a single album.

The album has all the hallmarks of the era that Frusciante apes, but offers thoughtful, intriguing embellishments at every turn.

Positions doesn’t broaden Grande’s sound the way her past few albums have, and it isn’t buoyed by a heroic anthem, like “no tears left to cry,” or guided by a specific mission, like how “thank u, next” honored her relationship history. The record resonates partly because it doesn’t weld grand statements out of living with trauma; it narrows in on the wobbly path of pleading with yourself, the begging and bargaining of healing.

The album is filled with nearly indistinguishable third-hand indie-pop songs.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.

These eight songs grapple candidly with [family loss], but, like the music itself, the words don’t wallow. Instead, Pallbearer use these tragedies to revel in being alive, or to answer the “gnawing doubts that I ever learned to live.”

Albini’s live-off-the-floor, overdub-resistant recordings really bring a visceral punch to III’s jammier passages, ensuring that the moments where Moothart peels off for a solo are just as much a showcase for the rhythm section rumbling underneath.

It’s dance music interested in the loneliness of late-night partying, and Minus tends to the subject with a subtle hand.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.

While the closer may not immediately resonate with a listener coming down from 25 minutes of introspection, it succeeds in ejecting you from the album, almost as if Slow Pulp is rolling the credits and yelling, “show’s over, folks.” It puts the preceding melancholia into perspective, no longer dire.

Even as it revels in new-age proselytizing, Under the Spell of Joy never treats inner peace as a given—it’s something achieved by going on the offensive, by engaging in continual struggle.

All of this is a continuation of the familiar PUP ethos: standing up and screaming about what ails thee is vastly preferable to standing still and shutting up about it.

The reason the record provides some measure of consolation is due to its modesty. Rather than a concept album about quarantine, it’s a snapshot of a moment in time, one that captures the confusion, longing, and loneliness of a world set back on its heels.

clipping. never present themselves as resurrectors of horrorcore, and Visions’ songs are livelier than those on TEEATB, but the way the group embraces the style feels archaeological.

He made an album as bleak—and funny—as anything he’s ever done, digging deep into his sense of self with the same sardonic wit that made his breakout LP Dark Comedy so impressive. It helps that he’s not entirely alone.

Some of these songs are as lovely as any Lenker has ever written: lush and verdant, chords fanning out like ferns, their major-key tonalities at odds with the heartbreak at the album’s core.. ... A collage of these recordings comprises instrumentals’ two songs, “music for indigo” and “mostly chimes,” which together run more than 37 minutes. They are not showy pieces, but the depth of her relationship with her instrument is clear.

He has every right to experiment and try on sounds as he sees fit. Hit-Boy attempts to balance this out by heading in the opposite direction so fully that it occasionally overwhelms Benny’s personality. ... Burden of Proof is undoubtedly the next step in Benny’s evolution, even if the music doesn’t always match the vision.

The songs are occasionally great—“Ghosts” and “Burnin’ Train,” in particular—and sometimes they feel remarkable just due to their old-school presentation.

The result is a kind of precise imprecision, as if the band had captured the abandon of their early recordings and then pored over the detail with manic industriousness—tweaking rather than polishing, the better to accentuate the unevenness. Shades is lightning captured in a meticulously painted bottle, and a hell of a good time, to boot.

Her songs are like islands: self-contained, gorgeous little worlds where nothing is obvious—especially the genesis of love and its unsteady first steps.

The parts of Shiver that strain to be fun and fresh can’t seem to break orbit from the grandiose mass of Sigur Rós, and the album leaves a sense of oppressive profundity in its bulky wake.

Only For Dolphins may not be vintage Bronsolino, but it’s still a display of why so many entities outside of music want a piece of him.

Once the allure of hearing Grace so stripped down wears off, the record begins to sound like what it is: glorified demos for an Against Me! album we'll never get to hear. Even at its most vital, Stay Alive never escapes the sense that the pandemic has one again cheated us out of something better.