Personal-feeling moments are the album’s strongest, and Superstar could use more of them. By clinging to the never-ending blank page of the bit, Rose winds up in shallower waters.

Heavy Light thrives in this sort of dissociative blaze where gender politics, grief, and deeply fucked-up pop hooks slam into one another. So much of Heavy Light exists in this emotional space that feels like an exquisite freefall.

From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss.

It’s a break-up album, less focused on wordplay and punchlines than universal truths. And while her songwriting continues to avoid the obvious path, her arrangements decidedly do not. ... The best moments are when Clark fights through the heartbreak to find her own footing again.

While Traditional Techniques easily succeeds as a curiosity, its songs continue to delight after the novelty wears off. The most surprising thing about the album isn’t how far Malkmus has strayed from his comfort zone. It’s how at home he sounds there.

If self*care showed someone in youthful fluctuation, searching for his identity, Salvador is a self-portrait of an artist in turmoil. What makes the record click is that it feels relatable, yet entirely on Sega Bodega’s terms: ambitious, lonely, and aching for intimacy.

He’s trying to tell a story here, but he’s just not much of a storyteller—his bars keep the narrative going, but he doesn’t offer enough arresting imagery to make his scenes come to life.

Real Estate doesn’t upend their own foundation; they instead find beauty in filling in its empty spaces.

Hope and intimacy can be relayed through lo-fi production that flirts with the grittiness of field recordings. Though in rare moments on Nevaeh, that style approaches detachment rather than transportation, as on the meandering, minimalist ballad “bbygurl.”

The Storm Sessions’ improvisation has the spirit of adventure, but the album winds up feeling stuck at home.

Every track is given space to unfold, building into a record that feels deeply thoughtful and unified, in step with her contemporaries yet detached from any particular scene.

Her imagistic writing remains spare as ever, making a game of revealing concealed emotion by rendering it in multiple languages.

These 11 songs feel like a loose mixtape, flitting among a half-dozen moods and motifs in what feels like a methodical quest for streaming placement.

Watching and listening as Masters has spun off in as many different directions as he has only makes this album feel even more special; a brilliant, vivid snapshot of an artist and a band at the very beginning of a fascinating and unpredictable journey.

It’s easy to miss Krauter’s compelling and complicated arrangements; the record is subdued almost to a fault. You have to put in work to feel drawn into Krauter’s world.

Represents two artists pulling each other closer to dangerous, interesting edges. Their brand of amelodic pandemonium has the same risky yet satisfying quality of watching acid burn through steel.

Steiner fills Printer’s Devil with half-remembered snapshots of adolescence—sprints down hills in the summertime, a ride on an airplane simulator at the mall—juxtaposed with images of overgrown grass, vacated lots and other innocuous signifiers of the passage of time that carry weight only in the rare moments we pause to consider them. The effect is comforting and sobering all at once.

The album is full of nebulous renderings like this, where we’re left to interpret Dare’s personal mythology. It makes Milkteeth feel suspended in time, more dream than recollection.

Snaith’s principal strength remains his skill as a musician and producer. He’s got hooks for days, and you could heat a single-family home by the warmth of his chord progressions. Virtually every song has some little detail that makes you lean in closer.

The writing on Companion Rises is still thematically obscure. But, at least temporarily, Chasny has resurfaced in search of a more immediate connection, letting heavy notions push his songs upward rather than drag them apart.

Because the album’s scale and ambitions are modest, some of its songs blend together. ... Still, the individual songs are strong enough that obsessing over their similarity feels like nitpicking.

If there is anything missing from color theory, it’s a sense of intensity and surprise. Many of the songs chug along around the same midtempo, with a similar first-drum-lesson beat. Her choices are intentional.

When Hughes tries out more rote pop songs, Cape God can get a little dry. ... Still, the sad world of Cape God is an alluring one, and Hughes’ vocal range is its unequivocal linchpin.

His beats are generally chunky sample flips and simple loops, but he also has an ear for a good sound. But if you’re listening to a Royce album it’s because you want to hear the guy rap. To his credit, Royce has the rare effect of a rapper’s extreme technical ability making him seem limber instead of rigid.

On the closing title track, she attempts to wind her own emotional experiences together with her father’s. ... it introduces the album’s most interesting material right at the end. If she had threaded it more steadily throughout, the album would have been a more keen statement than the respectable pop offering that it is.

These songs are obscured like frosted glass, as meticulously pretty and faintly unnerving as a porcelain doll. Though the album ends almost as quietly as it began, Obel’s whispery ambient fog lingers far longer.

The most sincere moments on Wild Wild East are the ones least weighed down with meaning.

Persona lacked the natural fluidity and chicness of their best music. Those problems aren’t exactly mitigated here, since most of those songs appear on this album too, but within this new context, they feel like a flashback before the saga continues. Many of the new songs are better about balancing Easter eggs for day-ones with new entry points for more casual listeners.