Its heavy-handedness drags down otherwise solid material.

It is a graceful but slightly anticlimactic grand finale: a victory lap over well-trodden ground that eagerly commands the spotlight before it goes out for good.

On A Danger to Ourselves she turns the camera on herself and the lens becomes a mirror, revealing an artist even less inhibited than before.

Not every great album hits on the first listen, but Freeman’s second record, Burnover, somehow feels like it’s always existed.

The resulting psych-folk arrangements are wandering and iterative. These songs are less inclined to tell a story from start to finish than transport you into a space of pure feeling.

The band’s tight, canny songwriting is so winsome on most of the album that weaker tracks, or trite phrases like “I’ll always be addicted to your energy” on the otherwise charming “Roundabout,” momentarily break the spell.

Billionaire may showcase the curling intricacy of her voice, but her songwriting seems less invested in striving for a similar complexity.

Its focus on the verities of songcraft suggests an artist confident enough to lean harder into tropes, formulas, and covers (including a spicy take on Waylon Jennings’ “Kissing You Goodbye”). It may feel like fiddling while Rome burns, but artistically it pays off.

Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime.

He hasn’t lost a step: WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE keeps his signature storminess intact while seeking new contours to his breathless style.

There are still some brilliant moments, but safety is hard to fully fall for.

It’s a lonely album with a whopping heart, a hungry siren call for connection.

There’s so much musical and personal inspiration colliding at once, you can feel the passion even when you can’t quite crack it all.

The songs on Who's the Clown fittingly sound like an extension of Abrams’ world: verbose, conversational, unfiltered. .... But the album falters in its second half, where Hobert uses specificity as a crutch, struggling to transcend the biographical details of her own, quite exceptional, life.

Where Erotic Probiotic 2 was hypnagogic in spirit—drawing from ’80s pastiche, sports-television samples, echo-heavy harmonies—this LP foregrounds rawer, more physical elements, without sacrificing Brown’s booming, atmospheric textures.

Unlike many albums to come from its synth-pop cohort, Flux resists being taken apart for playlists. Set almost any similar song against it, and you realize how heady a spell has just been broken.

Staking his place as a fully formed singer, composer, and producer with All Our Knives Are Always Sharp, Njoku unsheathes his blade.

The loose, intuitive instrumental interplay is crucial to the album’s charm. Often, songs feel as if they’re conjured from the air: Lyrics are rudimentary yet keenly felt; melodies drift into view only to evaporate shortly afterward.

If Smith’s earlier albums tended to flush the sound field with twirling synthesized figures like so many kites in the sky, Gush turns up the gravity and clears out more negative space. Each sound bears more weight and locks more readily into prolonged grooves.

A front-row seat for the Amos-Brown mind meld—sprawling, amorphous, hermetic, overwhelming, heartbreaking, funny as hell. It’s a privileged vantage point.

At times, bursts of velocity push the group toward a kind of transcendence, particularly when the spiky “Everybody Dies” is chased by the galvanizing gallop of “Stuck in a Dream.” The moments of speed also lend a sense of urgency to McCaughan’s nagging anxiety, which complements the barbed melodies and gnarled chords; every element suggests that he’s searching for a way outside of his head.

This is DeMarco’s most direct and confident expression ever—OK with being a little sad, happy to have the chance to get over it.

TWIABP are now making the most technically proficient music of their career and admirably facing down some of the world’s most dire issues. But in the pursuit of radical evolution, they’ve forsaken the emotional dynamism that has consistently buoyed their music through their tumultuous history.

Though Duffy’s voice and sensibility guide the record, the fingerprints of their musical community are all over Blue Reminder, including (among others) Uhlmann on guitar, bass, and percussion; Perfume Genius’ Alan Wyffels on piano, Wurlitzer, and flute; producer Blake Mills on organ and guitar. Together, the band shapeshifts across a range of sounds.

Aaron Dessner helps Laufey change wardrobe (on “Castle in Hollywood” and “A Cautionary Tale”) to lean into less mannered storytelling. But formal dress suits her best, at least on this set, which is the fullest expression of the Cinemascope songcraft that’s got her selling out arenas.

private music—like A Moon Shaped Pool and Fossora—is unlikely to draw in unconvinced listeners, but like those records, it shows them fully in control of their instantly recognizable sound, able to effortlessly bend it around whatever structures they put in its place.

Without a razor-sharp point of view, mgk far too often fails to synthesize his very real pain into something truly artful, instead falling back on the crude tools of rote songwriting and borrowed melodies, which he occasionally manages to build out into something arresting thanks to his instinct for what resonates with his audience.

It goes through your system like a juice cleanse—quick and optimized, but ultimately meant for the toilet.