Thug’s entire approach to his music has never sounded so polished and potent as it sounds on Barter 6.

His third record perfectly distills Passion Pit’s mission statement to a mixture of musical nostalgia and energy that coalesces quite well with larger messages of accepting the past in order to embrace the future.

Alabama Shakes don’t rock the boat necessarily, but by refining the formula, they’ve proven they can succeed with a model that has become all too easy to fail with in recent years.

The band’s strengths are all the same, but they’ve been developed, and their focus seems to have stabilized and sharpened.

The art-rock band’s third LP Infinite House combines tentative dips into R&B and soul with a firm foundation in jittery, spindly, angular NYC rock, resulting in pop songs with a deliberately nervous, ungainly, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink feel to them.

He’s stripped his simultaneously fascinating and off-putting style down considerably without diluting its effect, jettisoning the loopy abstractions and lurid detail of Doris in favor of a commanding iciness.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ultimately an experience as disorienting as the sensations and emotions that Woodhead describes, strangely beautiful one minute and aggressively ear-splitting the next.

Beat the Champ, while it ain’t Songs in the Key of Life, keeps up the move toward eclectic instrumental color.

The inventive production and songwriting transform result in monolithic, almost sculptural works that rarely make more than half-hearted gestures to anything specific outside themselves.

In the absence of the chill-ed out R&B and funk that defined his early sound, Toro y Moi’s newest album just doesn’t stand out from an increasingly crowded field.

This LP is as sterilized and recycled as the pop gunk that the band profess to loathe.

Discarding the albums actually awesome opener, “No Room in Frame”,--which briefly had me hoping for some tangible musical progress from the band--Kintsugi is more or less 45 minutes of boy-next-door, paint-by-number indie pop

The title may be a little hyperbolic, but what it lacks in realism it makes up for in groovy new-wave guitar licks, other-worldly instrumentation and production par excellence.

By Death Grips’ standards, the first disc is significantly less dynamic than the second.... Jenny Death represents another step forward for Death Grips, a group that seems to have walked over the horizon and out of sight albums ago.

Haunting anecdotes make Carrie & Lowell consistently compelling and elevate the storytelling from murky religious contemplation to relatable human struggle.

All in all, Parton and his collaborators cumulate a muscular and even touching evocation of simply being rattled by the rush--happily.

Dark Sky Paradise lacks cohesion as an album, but on a track-by-track basis, it positions Big Sean as a wonderfully versatile rapper whose personality and style hold together even as he adapts to a range of contexts.

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.

Frustratingly, a few of the songs on Eclipse really do hit that arena-pop bullseye, but stacked alongside so many other songs mining the same territory, they become irritating by association.

This is Diamandis’ break-up album in more ways than the romantic sense. She also severs ties with popular expectation, and the end result is regressive rather than revolutionary.

Sometimes I Sit and Think is in conversation with the likes of Marvin the Album and “Supernova,” Brighten the Corners and “Malibu,” Mellow Gold and “About a Girl.” The dream of the 90s is alive in Courtney Barnett. And with Sometimes I Sit and Think, it’s just been fully realized.

Short Movie is an introspective journey crafted into a communal experience. It’s the product of a genuine artist losing faith in herself, hitting the reset button, and returning with an intensely personal work that manages to say something about us all.

To Pimp A Butterfly is a veritable feast for thought--and there are simply too many loaded couplets and unrelenting sonic fakeouts to be unpacked within the confines of a single review.

Jesso doesn’t have a perfect voice, but his flaws are less derailments and more idiosyncrasies. These pockmarks, along with strong and engaging composition, are what give personality to a record that could been another bland adult contemporary release destined for the sale bin.

Strangers isn’t bottled lightning like The Moon & Antarctica or The Lonesome Crowded West, nor does it contain a magnitude 9 single like Good News or Ship, but its unwieldy stature and combative stance compliments Modest Mouse’s storied discography.

A hodgepodge of bland, rehashed, vanilla indie-rock, scarred by woefully inept lyrics, and completely lacking any of the infectious melodies and choruses that bolstered their debut.

If you never liked APTBS, odds are you’re not about to start here.

It’s an album that gives as much as it gains, both in trap-flow intensity and emotional catharsis.