Despite its sprawling architecture, the album is one of the band’s most consistent, unified works.

At a time when so many of Celeste’s peers are delving into dark, distorted sounds, she’s chosen to walk a lighter path. It’s not easy to sound this carefree, yet it appears to come naturally to her.

It is the work of a kid still determining his creative identity, and the best part of EVERYBODY’S EVERYTHING is how it shows him figuring himself out through his work with others.

Some of James’ solo songs struggle to emerge from under the shadow of their former selves. ... The merging of Abrams’ and James’ worlds owes more to geography than to atmosphere. That makes The Order of Nature something of an inherent gamble. The two composers end up breaking even.

The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.

It’s hard to say whether 2042 would be a more compelling record with more appropriate sequencing, or if this sprawling sixteen-track album would have made, perhaps, for a better set of separate EPs. What’s all too clear, unfortunately, is that 2042 stumbles precisely where Okereke has proven himself so capable of soaring.

The reverence is understandable, but you’re left wondering if it stymied bolder invention.

Konradsen’s approach skips the groundwork to go for experimentation. It’s folk music untethered from tradition, prioritizing well-crafted production over well-crafted songwriting.

Molina's songwriting here is much stronger than on last year's Axxess and Ace, but he's abandoned some of the guests who helped make the album so affecting when he opted to record in Scotland, rather than the U.S. ... making The Lioness a decidedly more resigned and less passionate affair.

Though there are moments where a new tone or inflection runs the risk that Doja might be mistaken for someone else, the album’s anchor in her R&B and soul background creates a tender space for her to stack and reveal her layers. Hot Pink doesn’t demand that Doja figure out the totality of her sound right now.

One of Oldham’s most complicated albums. ... If you’re left confused or disoriented, that’s exactly Oldham’s point. Welcome, he seems to say, we’ve been waiting for you.

A large, baroque gesture toward the act of what it means to purposefully lose oneself.

Dacus intended 2019 EP as something of a diversion from her usual work, a series of stand-alones intended to flex new musical muscles. Perfect as these songs are for our moment, there’s an unmistakable staying power to them, too.

Tragically ignored during its time, the album takes its rightful place it alongside Love’s Forever Changes, Judee Sill’s Heart Food, or Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, bringing together the conflicted, clashing aspects of Gene Clark’s art into a cohesive whole.

Sonically, the album backs away from the dirge-rock rave-ups that defined the group’s last four albums. That’s a welcome development.

However exquisitely rendered they may be, and however strange their circumstances may seem, these are breakup songs. ... Doiron’s presence, though, is a welcome balm, warming these cold realizations and offering Elverum a steadying hand for some of the most difficult moments.

In comparison to 2016’s Fetish Bones, Analog Fluids of Sonic Black Holes, is a refinement. ... Her lyrics seethe with revelatory clarity.

Through all of this chaotic history, DJ Premier is trying to patch together an album that will pass the smell-test, and he does a decent job. Anyone who held out this long for a Gang Starr album will likely be pleased with the results.

Comparing the Scruggs cuts and the funky, swampy Cash covers with the austere John Wesley Harding outtakes that begin Travelin’ Thru is illuminating.

MAGDALENE is visceral and direct, but despite featuring a trunk-thumping Future collaboration (“holy terrain”), this is not a play to make pop music in the charts-humping sense. It’s a document of twigs’ marked achievements in songwriting and musicality as she elucidates her melodies without sacrificing her viewpoint.

Having developed a sound so distinctly her own, Parks has liberated herself from any preset expectations of genre or style.

Myths 004 has a woolier charm [than Deerhunter's Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared?], running on antic, inventive rhythms that suggest a Rube Goldberg device.

Chaotic uncertainty is the reality Meredith repeatedly presents on FIBS, both emotionally and through musical structure. It is the work’s deeper raison d’être, even when the individual pieces seem digestible, pretty, or even safe.

This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing. ... They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins.

Even when Turnover try spicing things up with congas, a violin, and a couple of ill-fitting saxophone features, Altogether tastes incredibly vanilla, like a playlist of department store slow jams.

It’s hard to determine how Monster got this way and the demos included with this reissue aren’t edifying. The band declined to throw in any embryonic versions of songs that actually appear on the record. ... But the 1994 Monster as-released tends to outright reject R.E.M.’s past.

Opener “Lily” falls into this liminal ground, as does “Blue Spring,” and while these tracks don’t seem pointed towards anything particularly urgent, their instrumentation (like the rest of Spring) remains rich and resonant, each component part augmenting the others.

Offering no blandishments, no expressions of we’ll-get-through-this, Kiwanuka is a nerve-wracked, sustained act of whistling in the dark. Absent, though, is any hint of reveling: a tendency that often leads to soul rot.