Deep in the Iris is more concentrated than anything Braids have released to date. If its runtime is more approachable, the songs themselves are also more intense.

Kacey’s dulcet voice and talent for melody are still worthy of great respect--just about every tune connects.

Camera Obscura are old enough to know what they’re are capable of, and they do it passionately and with a practiced hand.

Even if Colour doesn’t drastically alter Blake’s sound, it widens and refines it, keeping what made his first two records so memorable while hinting that there remains ever further room for growth.

Here, the music feels more organic and in line with the songcraft that has formed the band’s backbone to date.

Del Rey has struggled to back up her provocations with substance. Ultraviolence was an exception, a singular breakthrough. Honeymoon is, sadly, a slip and fall after a promising stride forward.

It’s not breaking news that reunion music isn’t a revelation, but this album seems worse than the merely dull crop of new Owen material.

There are over-arching problems here: the lyricism that doesn’t relate to anyone except the singer, which is especially troubling on the mostly lyric-driven “Widow’s Peak”; the lack of color from the lugubrious and minimalistic approach (excepting the vocal shading of “Joe’s Dream” and the Western-tinged “Honeymooning Alone”); the dearth of melodies, make the relatively short album get wearying over time, especially when you add the too-pristine production.

Seeds isn’t TV on the Radio’s strongest album, but it is a radiant reboot, a move forward and a reason to move.

This can’t hold a candle to Late Nights: The Album (was anyone expecting it to?), but it’s one of the better mixtapes released this year.

Tremors manages the feat of being both invigorating and mellow, and no matter how many layers of sound in which the songs find themselves wrapped up, electronic or otherwise, they remain painstakingly personal and human.

Fuck Off Get Free We Pour Light On Everything explores the moral murk of our times with glorious abandon.

Production has never been cleaner. Progressions have never been tighter. The adhesive has never been stronger. And Jim James has never been finer.

Once a few months pass and the buzz has died down, this will no longer be a groundbreaking album about the complexities of modern relationships. It will just be another very good album.

Next Thing truly is beautiful, if a little too slight to be counted among the greats in its genre. It doesn’t seem to strive for that type of greatness, though. It’s content to revel in purely being, basking in its own breathless embodiment of grace and lightness.

Where the first half of the album is strong but routine, the back half finds mixed but more interesting results.

Marshall’s lyrics are desolate and vehement, but McDonald does a solid job of ensuring that the instrumentation acts as a foil to the bleakness when necessary, providing a counter-redeeming edge to the desolation.

Their approach works because the songs are so excellently written than they’d be praiseworthy coming from a less capable, more pedestrian group

Will is a wobbly baby step from a well-honed sound to something greater. There’s not much reason to listen to it over any of her other albums, and it’s less interesting for the music it contains than the music it promises.

Her complete dominance over the sonic space of her debut reinforces Broke With Expensive Taste as a product singularly of her vision.

It’s simultaneously daunting, exhausting, terrifying, all at the same time. It’s all a lot to take in, with not a whole lot of the Gambino we are familiar with to help wash it down.

The main two highlights are the strutting “Mandy Cream” and the bass-heavy closer “The Magazine,” with rapid-fire handclaps coming in during the choruses and a sustained falsetto melody recalling Yes’ “We Have Heaven.”

The supple dynamic shadings of earlier Projectors material is gone; everything’s annoyingly crisp, with lots of things at the front of the mix that shouldn’t be and Longstreth’s pitch-shifted voice running near-constantly throughout.

Like Summer Sun, there’s more ambience, more general keyboard and synth blear, more lounge-pad speckles and dots, but the songwriting is rudimentary even by this band’s standards and the tone color doesn’t vary as much as they maybe thought it did.

Self-aware in all of the right ways and delightfully crass in all of the wrong ones, Mr. Wonderful is ultimately a bit of a lark, but it is also far more enjoyable, far more self-aware, and far wittier than it needed to be.

Volcano Choir’s second album is filled with memorable hooks, hummable melodies and arena-worthy choruses.

Most of the time, Nabuma Rubberband sounds well put-together but empty, all style and no content, the kind of album that won’t offend you while you’re listening to it but which you’d be hard-pressed to remember any of once closer “Let Go” comes to an end.

This is neither a reboot nor an overhaul of their signature sound. If anything, it affirms all the things the duo does best and then shows they can do much more.