Their sound may be familiar by now, and their days as the poster children of L.A. DIY are more than a decade in the rearview. But at their most fearless, No Age can still make discord feel sound utopian.

These 10 tracks refine RBCF’s formidable strafing abilities. They roll. They’re feverish. They also coast. ... RBCF get in trouble, however, when they want us to pay attention to words and such. This is more of a problem on the material sung by White, responsible for the this-is-pop moments that require a slight deceleration.

Hit to Hit’s final quarter, which the band recorded as an ensemble, takes a more grounded approach. But after a record of instant gratification, these gentler tracks have a tendency to melt together.

RTJ4 centers protest music less explicitly than RTJ3 did, but the moments when the album is most pronouncedly in active revolt are still when it feels most essential.

Full of slippage and lacunae, whipping itself from moment to moment and then fading, ORCORARA 2010 is so absorbing as to make the world outside it seem bizarre, and in this it has political power.

There are some obvious flaws. The uniformity of mood, melody, and texture means the album can drag, and while the spontaneity of the recordings is largely vindicated by the results, it also leaves some loose threads dangling. ... At her best, however, Power lives up to her name.

Whether Muzz wind up being a lasting band or a one-off diversion, this is a promising debut from three old friends who have an instinctive grasp of each other’s talents.

Hutson’s musical style finds a perfect complement in Bridgers’ subtle production.

Gibbs skates over these beats, effortlessly gliding in and out of the pocket. Even the moments of stark contrast feel natural.

Small, fastidious details add up to a tapestry that feels deeply lived-in, even if Island often lists toward the subdued or dreary.

In Future Teenage Cave Artists’ hectic, crammed-to-the-brim structure, Johann Sebastian gives Deerhoof listeners something they have been methodically denied: space to process the music.

While Neon Cross highlights the versatility of Wyatt’s gorgeous, commanding voice, she finds her comfort zone in singalong anthems like “Goodbye Queen.”

You don’t listen to a Diplo album for the songwriting, and Snake Oil suffocates in treacly kitsch.

This is house music at its most shiny and immaculate, a genre made from ache and escapism, high strings and numbing throbs. But Gaga’s lyrics are plainspoken, mostly free of religious metaphors and pretense. ... For all Gaga’s emphasis on Chromatica being an album meant to be heard start-to-finish with no skips, the sequencing is a bit off.

WUNNA is more than an endless barrage of boasts about his designer clothes and foreign whips; the flows are crisper, his puns are more colorful, and the beats are pristine.

Domesticated is a concept album whose concept falls flat; a shot at the future that’s too in debt to the past; a brilliant idea consumed by inertia—less back-breaking deep clean than half-hearted tidy.

While Jepsen makes B-sides markedly better than other artists’ A-sides, she can still falter; some points feel like kissing a crush for the first time and missing the spark.

There are hints of this fledgling growth throughout Good Intentions. ... The most fun moments on the album are the ones where Nav gets out of the way.

Beyond Bulletproof is the closest Mozzy has come to making his songs accessible.

It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.

Introduction, Presence doesn’t offer any great reinventions. ... But their understanding of the genre they’re working in—its workings, tropes, and trappings—is so refined that they are able to boil it down to its barest essence, saving catharsis for just the right moment.

The record represents a roaring comeback for the band at a moment to which their sound is particularly well-suited.

Except for the previously released singles that pad the end of the record in keeping with industry norms, High Off Life is better-paced and sequenced than most of Future’s recent releases—the whole thing seems to glide by frictionlessly.

Von Schleicher doesn’t necessarily need to be transparent; more often than not, teasing out the hidden messages that lie beneath her impressionistic songwriting is genuinely enjoyable. Calling one’s pain by name can be terrifying, and she has a great talent for subtlety. Still, Consummation is at its most transfixing when it is at its most legible.

It can feel indulgent. Yes, they have expressed some of these thoughts more succinctly in the past; and yes, the tracklist could be condensed so that you don’t have to clear your schedule to get through it. But when everything clicks, their work has never sounded so patient, so personal.

While his singing is strained and incompetent, at least he’s going for it. Too much of the album seems satisfied with the small space Lean was able to carve out for himself.

These songs tend towards fuzzy sentiments—the words “love,” “life,” “light,” and “feel” are staples. Many of the musical ideas—tinkling pianos, plasticky strings and emotion-squeezing chord progression—have been part of Moby’s toolkit since the word “Go.”

Flowing between formal tonality and structural dissolution, Lee reconciles her traditional musical upbringing with her subsequent expansion into free improvisation and avant-garde composition, and she finds an unusual beauty in juxtaposing the familiar character of popular and traditional music with experimental sound-making’s leap into the cosmic unknown.