If Birthmarks is Woods’ restless attempt at self-birth, her true emergence feels yet to come.

It’s a leisurely paced album with a lot of repetition. Each piece is full of slowly sighing synth passages and languorous piano melodies that mimic the strange way time dilates when you remove yourself from the rhythms of the city, the way an afternoon alone at the beach can feel like a beautiful eternity.

The album is too inoffensive to leave much lasting impression. Over 18 songs, its initially appealing tastefulness becomes cloying and monotonous. Instead of the dynamism of mixing colors, the album mostly yields just a uniform pastel wash.

After all the sentimental rigamarole, it’s tough to come away from Heartbreak Weather feeling any closer to Horan. He spends too much of the record bouncing between sounds and songwriting concepts to feel distinct.

Sixteen Oceans is 16 tracks long, yet five of them are basically interludes—minute-or-two-long sketches made of watery synth pads, tape hiss, or rudimentary beats. Strangely, most of them fall toward the end of the album. ... The view’s lovely, but for the moment, it feels like Hebden is sailing in circles.

It’s too bad the rest of the record can’t match its ["Madonna"] energy. Still, even as a series of sketches and fragments, Ricky Music captures the essence of a breakup album.

On Put the Shine On, when they rap lines about familial abandonment in an aloof, sing-songy chirp, the effect of both their words and the way they choose to deliver them gets muddied. The pain behind the words is real, but its rendering starts to feel like a bit.

Oh Wonder’s musical project works when the simplicity of the writing matches the simplicity of the sound. When the former element tilts out of sync—gaudy, cliché lyrics about holding cards to chests and feeling “blindsided by love”—the record caves in on itself.

Even when an experiment comes up short, mistakes and failed attempts allow us to see others as the messy, raw, difficult humans we know ourselves to be. Truth or Consequences is more like a Valentine’s Day card—pleasantly sentimental, at times gratifying, and all too easy to forget.

Throughout, Satin Doll warps these standards delectably, leaving you pleasantly dizzy.

His new album Sorry You Couldn’t Make It restores him to a more even keel, examining grief from greater distance while savoring life’s little sweetnesses. Billed as Williams’ country album, Sorry You Couldn’t Make It hits its thematic marks within funkified arrangements.

Code Orange’s second album for Roadrunner, the exhausting and uneven Underneath, lands like a glib attempt to do just that while forsaking the idiosyncrasies that made them interesting.

It is a mystical, distinctive work that nearly lives up to all the lore surrounding the rapper.

The Garden sound best at their most upbeat. ... At times, the album can feel erratic. ... However uneven, Kiss My Super Bowl Ring is proudly defiant.

The Common Task doesn’t scan as a political message. But even apart from its real-world context, the album succeeds as an abstraction. Given even a little bit of time, space, and intention, these compositions are an uncommonly rewarding experience.

Her lyrics as well as her performance may strike some listeners as overly literary, but there is method in these mannerisms. That unwieldiness becomes one of the album’s most appealing traits.

Using words and noise to create mantras and blow them up, Every Bad is the inspired result of a rock band finding itself in 2020, inhabiting many ways of being.

Lil Uzi Vert made an event album, where the main attraction is flex raps and production that builds on its roots. Not even two years (an eternity in rap) was able to hold back Eternal Atake, an album that will be chased for years to come.

This is heavy stuff, but Ahmed’s wry wit and laser-focused delivery ensures that it doesn’t feel overwrought.

The whole album kind of sounds like Fleetwood Mac, or at least descended from the same 1970s Los Angeles studios that incubated similarly crisp records by Jackson Browne and The Eagles, glassy marbles of sound with storm clouds of color swirling inside.

Unhinged as it is, it’s a cathartic expression of the way the world is: messy, ugly, and real.

Smith’s work here is more lucid than anything he did on the last few Fall albums or his guest appearance on Gorillaz’ Plastic Beach.

The band sound thoroughly comfortable. ... It's a shame, then, that on their own album, Phantogram foreground their most conventional, clipped pop selves, when their quietest moments are often the loudest of all.

There may be six different versions of Lauv pulling the strings, but in the end, they all sound alike.

Suga may not be remembered as a keystone in Megan Thee Stallion’s catalog, but it’s a fine portrait of an artist embracing her full self as her world changes drastically.

When Weber’s composition is led by a sense of density—multiple musical voices all intertwining to create a sense of vibrant dialogue—it is at its most engrossing. ... Where Conference of Trees falls down is when its electronic elements talk over its organic ones.

Just as Tejada’s meticulous productions are a boon to Watts’ voice, the comedian-singer’s unique character and energy give Don’t Let Get You Down an ebullience. They might not be innovating the form, but their shared creative spirit has its own irresistible charm.

Non-offensive, near-benign, and as if custom-built for the provocations of doing something else, Simulcast, like many Tycho works, is a reliably egoless experience, an art that approaches productivity-enhancing apparatus.