The Neon nestles the duo back into their musical comfort zone when they’re exceedingly capable of more.

The original songs on Peck’s latest Show Pony EP are more vague [than Pony}.

Imploding the Mirage has more bangers than a Killers album should 16 years after their debut and without copping to “maturity.” This band remains as absurd—marvelously so—as ever.

If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill.

More often than not, listening to Songs for the General Public feels like watching the D’Addario brothers throw old ’45s at a brick wall to see what sticks, snickering all the while. They want you to have a good time, and they sound tighter than ever; they just need to figure out how to control the Frankenstein that they’ve made.

Almost every song here shoves interpersonal woes against societal angst in a fundamentally Bright Eyes way.

The production has become knottier and more entangled, layering staccato notes with glimpses of field recordings, flourishes of breakbeats, and sweeping effects. At times, Articulation’s grandiose ideas are deflated by an overwrought execution. ... The magnetism of Rival Consoles lies in the chaotic warmth created through an intrepid play on rising and falling, conjuring a sense of turmoil that seems to become louder and more definite with each release.

The album doesn’t have enough blemishes, stumbles, or flourishes like this to give it extra excitement and curiosity. The risk level stays relatively comfortable; the payoff never really shoots up.

Twice as Tall advances Burna’s political vision, and is frankly less fun than the two recent projects that catapulted him to superstardom. But the world is less fun than it was a year ago, too. Society could use a hero, a godsend. Pairing rhythms that possess the hips with encouraging calls for Black unity and an infectious sense of self-reliance, Twice as Tall is Herculean.

Each song on Welcome to Conceptual Beach has an accessible core to which it can return, allowing Young Jesus to scrutinize their exploratory impulses without lapsing into fussiness or formlessness.

For the most part, these covers are faithful, fine-tuned, and sound great. No track on Candid warps its original in a particularly wild or ambitious way; Whitney are more concerned with nailing these takes respectfully than fundamentally reimagining them.

It is not the singularly engrossing experience that Die a Legend is, but it argues for him as an adaptable and unmissable talent, an unlikely star in a new major-label system.

He’s just the latest shrugging embodiment of streaming trends.

Shutting Down Here never sacrifices the knotty complications that make his work far weightier than a mere genre study. This is a personal record, after all, and knotty might just be a big, welcome part of who Jim O’Rourke is.

These are unsparing accounts of tough subjects, but Edwards navigates each song with tenderness and humor, allowing her to tear apart old idioms (“Love is blind/Whoever bought that line must be a real sucker”) or invent new ones (“Love is simple math/I can be a total pain in the ass”).

As ever, Hornsby’s wistful, elegant melodies are the main attraction.

The maudlin “Love Never Dies,” the album’s lone ballad, dials things down too far, channeling musical theater over a lilting piano melody and funereal drums. It feels like a strange outlier, especially in comparison with her more evocative, emotionally spare one-off ballad “Sweet Love” from last summer. Still, Kiesza’s gut-punch delivery and melodies buoy Crave into a brief, bright pleasure.

Regardless of his or his label’s intentions, it’s possible to hear Eight Gates as a fitting tribute. In its blank spaces, it reflects the spectral quality of his greatest music, albeit sometimes for different reasons.

The impressionistic and imperfect sound quality of Goose Lake ultimately feels fitting for a record that captures some of the band’s less performative and more human moments.

These songs aren’t just high-spirited, slightly goofy, and unassumingly clever; they have a lightness that is invigorating. They feel like proof that the fun-loving kid who went viral in 2016 hasn’t yet been entirely overwhelmed by the burdens of reputation.

Dreamland falls prey to the unfortunate mode of modern branding that conflates personal nostalgia with making a point. Glass Animals want to talk about The Way We Live, when it’s really just Let’s Remember Some Stuff.

Over a decade into his career, Greene is more than capable of producing technically interesting music that comes across as deceptively simple. Unfortunately, Purple Noon falters and feels too safe and lacking in substance.

He channels the wonder of his youth as if no time has passed, exalting the sublimity of waterfalls, rainstorms, and crashing waves. ... Elverum imbues these memories of constant experimentation with undeniable romance.

The relaxed warmth carried over from Lodestar to Heart’s Ease affirms that she’s glad to be here.

Jaguar is a sleek cocoon of funk-tinged R&B that excavates what it means to be in control.

Seeing Through Sound (Pentimento Volume Two) is the far warmer of the two works, despite titles that allude to Iceland and Saturn’s frozen moons. In its most mesmerizing moments, Hassell slips into memoirist mode, allowing old tropes from his past to flicker back to life.

By Morissette’s standards, Pretty Forks is a vulnerable, sedate, ballad-heavy album. Most of those ballads are unobtrusive, with songwriting-template piano and strings plush and regular as amphitheater seats.

His score is only one small part of the movie’s audio track, a subtle human presence within Reichardt’s typically rich palette of natural sounds.