While Girl Band are no longer explicitly talking about psychosis, they’re still experts at sonically communicating how it feels, through screeching sensory assaults that hit like a migraine and relentlessly pulsate like a heart racing out of control.

Here, blocky synth structures feel mismatched to the themes, and heavy-handed arrangements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the lyrics.

Temples are clearly skilled technicians; they probably could’ve produced this record in their sleep. What’s frustrating is that the project begins and ends at talent. These songs are hollow; you could listen to Hot Motion half a dozen times and feel nothing.

The common thread [of the new mix] is that the guitars are cleaner, the vocals are clearer, and previously buried fills come to the surface. ... Two outtakes, both of which landed on the expanded Don’t Tell a Soul, are the best thing about the sessions by far—the countrified “Portland,” which is fantastic, and the jittery rocker “Wake Up.” ... For anyone skeptical of Don’t Tell a Soul, the most convincing argument for their vitality is the live shows from this period. ... The [live] setlist is stunning.

On Memory, there’s a clarity and intensity to Ramone’s songwriting that leaves little room for gimmicks, employing the earnestness that made the Brooklyn DIY scene such a refreshing break from the coy art rock of early 2000s Manhattan.

Nothing on the album sounds exactly like Oasis—it’s all too controlled and studio-sculpted—but not a song here would’ve been imaginable without the Gallaghers’ enthusiastic embrace of classic rock tropes.

ove Lo’s songwriting is unsubtle but not uncomplicated, and while her scenes are well-worn in pop music—bodies tangled in purple lights, morning sun stabbing at hangovers—her best tracks are both blunt and polished enough to sound original. At its worst, the album can slump into fizzy banalities.

Even with its imposing length, Spirit Counsel is arguably the most accessible entry point into Moore’s boundless experimental canon.

Bridges the sepia warmth of the Laurel Canyon sound with the rooted hymns of Appalachian folk.

The band’s fourth album, Of the Sun, doesn’t so much directly address the state of the world as vividly conjure the day-to-day sensation of existing within it, forever teetering on the tightrope walk between luminous ugliness and awful bliss.

Running 78 minutes, The Return is a dynamic suite of a record, touching on multiple genres without losing focus. ... The Return occasionally feels like it’s beating you over the head. But that’s also part of its charm.

With DSVII, the series evolves into a space for tinkering, where Gonzalez can embrace different influences. With neither someone else’s vision nor any cohesive album statement to fulfill, he reverts to maximalism, melding his two musical identities—synth-pop showman, serious composer for other mediums—to become the director of his own electronic daydreams.

With these highly capable ringers driving the arrangements, Howard pushes the boundaries of sound and space in search of fulfillment and decency. In a world that requires so much fixing, the music works effortlessly. Armed with a deeper understanding of self, Jaime becomes her gospel of empathy.

Eastman’s music has steadily accrued new champions over the past decade, and it’s gratifying to see another high-profile inclusion of one of his vital works. But in general, this confusion is endemic to the project, which is full of excellent performances of strong repertoire without a lot of obvious common ground.

On Jimmy Lee, Saadiq shout-sings, whispers, and croons with new abandon. It feels like a refutation of his old reserve, and it also represents a welcome stretch from Saadiq before he takes his sound all the way back to his beginnings.

Ma is a record rich with takeaways, about how to get by and how to be kind in a social order that tempts us to be indolent and indulgent. It is alternately soft and steely, somber and ebullient, confused and confident—as true to life as “The Body Breaks” and “I Feel Just Like a Child.”

The Highwaymen have often been called country’s best supergroup, but the Highwomen are better. They do here what the men never could—stretch the notions of what country can and must become.

In balancing the stridence of his politics with the aesthetic overload of his many influences, All My Heroes reintroduces JPEGMAFIA as an imagineer as well as a provocateur. He remains a hellraiser, but also comes across as bubbly and inventive, technicolor and cyberpunk.

Adult Baby works best with the volume turned up, a soft mattress beneath you, all distractions on hold. And even though the music often resists forming into anything as solid as a hook, Makino’s vaporous melodies have a way of creeping up on you long after the record has stopped spinning; they have a sneaky tenacity, like a dream you can’t shake, even if you can’t quite remember its particulars.

Intentionally making musical wallpaper doesn’t sound like an exciting prospect, but Mount seems invigorated by abandoning the pursuit of the perfectly structured 10-track record.

She’s an outsider claiming a piece of the mainstream for herself without sacrificing what makes her music so special.

It’s weird that “better than nothing” became the bar for what was once one of the most celebrated bands of their era, but if it’s a choice between more records as solid, if unspectacular, as Beneath the Eyrie or nothing, the Pixies might as well keep them coming. It’s been a long time since this band had anything left to lose.

The ideas sprawled across Mirrorland are mostly in service of songcraft, adding color and texture to their vibrant visions of a super-black Emerald City. It’s Atlanta rap fantasia, manifold in form and style, each track a new, distinctive set design in the production.

Lifetime is marked by aesthetic and personal conflict, and while it doesn’t uncover easy resolution, its beauty (and it is a remarkably beautiful record) derives in large part from the acceptance, or even embrace, of those conflicts as what generates a lifetime’s meaning.

As with earlier albums, it’s studded with experiments: “Project 2,” an interlude of fluting vaporwave synths, and “Sugar,” where melodramatic violin and piano are coated in Vocodered gurgles. They’re less interruptions than camouflage.

With Devour, Pharmakon furthers industrial music’s decades-long history of seeking truth about the self in noise and negation, of boring holes in the propaganda that assures us everything about the system is working just fine.

The new songs, meanwhile, feature a return to form for Belle and Sebastian, whose more recent releases have ventured away from their trademark style of “puckishly depressed” and into explorations of the dancy, the jazzy, and, occasionally, the kinda bad.

Much of Lookout Low sounds more fatigued than mature.