AIN’T NO DAMN WAY! is consummately smooth, but it rewards close reading and detective work. Brilliant things are happening underneath the gleaming surface.

While not as pristine as the self-titled, their debut record for Epitaph is much denser, often overwhelming.

Though the album can be quite funny, it delivers the goods with no funny business—16 songs and not a throwaway among them, each an example of what works, rather than an experiment in what might.

This is bold, irreverent, exploratory music.

On ABOMINATION REVEALED AT LAST, Osees begin their return flight to the garage-rock headbanging of their mid-2010s material. There’s too much synth and wooden drumming to sound like a full throwback to their Thee Oh Sees days, but you wouldn’t be misguided if you said the album’s title and art mirror Mutilator Defeated at Last from a decade ago.

Taking in Bugland’s spree of bright colors and surprise twists can feel like breaking a piñata onto the crazy-pattern carpet in the laser-tag arena: There is so much happening, and nearly all of it commands your attention.

At its best, Pressing Onward amplifies that magic with powerful choral harmonies, carving out new space in contemporary gospel and shaping it in her own image.

It sheds the excesses of Five Leaves Left and finds the gift buried beneath the brush: a singer, forever short on time, always at his best when taking the most direct route to a beautiful bedrock of very hard truth.

The result is a dance record that wears its political themes like a Halloween costume—great for cheap, campy thrills but falling short of striking any deeper, never mind radical, notes of terror.

When backed by such light-touch production, these mantras can feel like a first draft whose final hues haven’t been colored in. At its best, though, this unforced approach manifests in Levy’s gift for stream-of-consciousness narratives that spin out as if propelled by their own internal velocity.

Next to Fountain Baby’s splashy bombast, Amaarae’s embrace of tension and restraint is both audacious and inspired.

Younger’s familiarity with her harp opens up many avenues, but Gadabout Season settles for following what’s by now a familiar path: that of the skillful and charming contemporary spiritual jazz record content to linger in the background.

It’s all exceedingly pleasant, which is a bit of a curse. They’re songs with ingratiating hooks—tracks that would benefit from the ambient exposure of a grocery store or a doctor’s office, where they’d worm their way into the subconscious leaving no trace of entry. It’s so comfortable, in fact, that it hardly feels creative.

Sprawling as it is, the project, so far, coheres around its defining theme of fragility—of life, of love, and of the American dream. You’d be forgiven for not getting all of that just from listening. While loaded with backstory, these records subsist more on ambiance than on plot.

THE FUTURE IS HERE AND EVERYTHING NEEDS TO BE DESTROYED is billed as a spasmodic response to dehumanization and disaster. And when it sticks to that first-thought philosophy, it’s a thrilling success. .... The trouble with state-of-the-union albums is that they often come off as didactic, and the Armed do clip the edges of that minefield occasionally.

Part stage-managed pop crossover and part pretty-good gay Sheryl Crow record, BITE ME never quite convinces you that it’s got something new to share.

Lu’s vocal delivery hovers between a coo and a stage whisper, though it rarely delivers the sort of blissful incoherence that shoegaze and dream pop are known for. The softness makes sense on a raw acoustic ballad like “All i need,” but it feels more like rote theatrics on “Black swan,” where the raging noise practically begs her to snap out of her feathery stupor.

“Gold Feet” feels as if it could have been pulled off a hard drive that had been neglected since 2018, all the way down to its JID feature. But more often, the album pushes through that illusory ease to deliver heavier tracks and a more animated Gibbs than we’ve seen for some time.

Though there are pockets of brightness, the melancholy of Kenny Segal’s “contraband” and Child Actor’s “phone screen” are Neighborhood Gods’ prevailing mood. .... On this album’s paralyzing second half, he slips in and out of sometimes wildly disparate vocal modes to communicate that flickering dread. When he recounts a dream about a seemingly omniscient baby, he does so in a regimented syllable pattern that feels, uncannily, like a downward spiral.

Rather than excavating weird, uncommercial offcuts from the Ray of Light sessions, this is a slight release that collects seven remixes, most widely available, as well as one demo left off the 1998 album.

Irony and easy melody spur I Love People’s best songs beyond tribute or satire towards a lived-in equilibrium.

Precipice is not without excellent hooks, and the ones on “Crying Over Nothing,” “Not Afraid,” and “Heartthrob” let De Souza’s star power shine through. But when a record’s great moments are just that—moments—waiting on them is tedious.

He’s still what everyone says he is: an Appalachian man with a penchant for storytelling. Snipe Hunter is his first record to capture and celebrate the depth behind that.

Arriving at a particularly abundant time for lyric-driven indie rock drawing on folk and country, New Threats From the Soul stands proudly on its own.

The songs are defined less by sounds or ideas than by their sanded-down edges: plodding beats from Nottz and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League, histrionic Marsha Ambrosius hooks, putative passings of the torch.

Despite its big tent and low stakes, DON’T TAP THE GLASS is a record only Tyler could make: retro but not nostalgic; tender but steely; jangly yet slick.

It’s austere, formidable music, but by fitting within a tight 40-minute package, it endears itself to listeners who might not know much about drone music.

What The First Family does do well is situate the listener in a time and place that seems galaxies away from the one the Beatles would birth two months later when they put out Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.