When I Get Home, on the one hand, is a portrait of Solange, following the success of A Seat at the Table, leaning to the point of falling into all the most pretentious aspects of that record. On the other, When I Get Home is a complex and fascinating exercise in reconfiguring a whole history of black music for the post-modern age. ... Yes, When I Get Home is overbearing in the way it wants to announce itself as art, but the album also makes that easy to forgive.

The music is stately and nocturnal guitar pop, arranged precisely and played with quiet conviction, as sure of its purpose as the song’s narrator seems unsure of theirs.

None of the songs on the Black Album are as garish, horrifying, or catchy as “Beverly Hills,” nor as totally committed to a one-dimensional concept as those of the White Album. By contrast, the Black Album sounds scattered, as if the comedy is beginning to lose definition.

On every track, the mad-libs are paired with stylistically diverse arrangements--and invariably plodding tempos. The album’s lone sugar spike is “Dumb Blonde,” a rehashed “Girlfriend” that features a phoned-in Nicki Minaj guest verse midway through and, for some reason, a pre-chorus melody yanked from Lipps, Inc.’s “Funky Town.” In spite of everything, Head Above Water offers one brief moment where Lavigne’s emotional alchemy assumes a bolder musical form that’s properly befitting of her powerhouse vocals and enduring authenticity: the opening stunner of a title track.

At times the writing struggles to keep pace: The concepts behind songs like “needy” and “fake smile” are as relatable as they are predictable, and begin to stretch thin after a couple of minutes. Still, there is an awful lot to like.

The relatively trim Buoys winds up feeling as minor as 2018’s A Day With the Homies EP, despite being twice as long and bearing far higher expectations.

This is a record that sounds like it could be performed in living rooms, in department store foyers, on mall stages, at any moment, anywhere. The songwriting stands strong enough that the context of the music matters less and less, and the instrumentation becomes secondary to the tonal and lyrical moves--chamber music for the microdosing set.

Remind Me Tomorrow turns on thoughts of growing older and reflecting on the past, resulting in some of Van Etten’s most mature lyrics to date. Most bittersweet is “Seventeen,” which applies radiant clarity to the hazy, faded production aesthetic of a band like the War on Drugs. Even when swamped in overproduction, Van Etten’s performances are uniformly the best of her career, and Congleton for once gives her the perfect amount of space.

For such crackling peaks, there are also times where it seems Blake has found himself at the forefront of a heady new genre, trap-schmaltz. ... Despite those shortcomings, Assume Form stands as Blake’s most coherent statement to date. The Spartan singer-songwriter tropes of his debut, the half-baked collabs of Overgrown, and the overlong The Colour in Anything fall away to reveal a more dynamic Blake.

Though A Brief Inquiry is just as dizzying and disorienting as 2016’s heroically omnivorous i love it when you sleep, for you are so beautiful yet so unaware of it, the 1975 take themselves a little more seriously now.

The album reasserts his status as a uniquely fascinating rapper. On Some Rap Songs, he’s making the most adventurous and exciting music of his career so far.

If you come to this collection strictly as a fan of one particular period, you may have to work to appreciate the others. An Artist’s Legacy is certainly comprehensive, but it fails to highlight any common threads that might help us navigate Cornell’s long and varied career.

On Caution, she is still doing it better than most of her students, and sounds more comfortable than she has in quite a while.

All signs pointed to Shiny and Oh So Bright (full title: Shiny and Oh So Bright, Vol. 1 / LP: No Past. No Future. No Sun.) as an authoritative step back on track.

On Delta, the scope of Mumford & Sons’ ambition is far wider than their abilities as songwriters. The result is an hour-long slog with only a few brief realizations of their old potential before the next crescendo hits.

That it reads like it came from NAO’s diary points to her greatest achievement on Saturn: every song can shine as a standalone track, but they sound even better together.

Honey, sparkling yet subtly realized and constantly in motion, follows Robyn from the precipice of heartbreak into the club and onto the beach, and eventually toward something resembling redemption.

By setting its course in the equal and opposite direction of Life Without Sound, it becomes its evil twin, a still-incomplete picture of Cloud Nothings. ... Yet Last Building Burning feels like a triumphant return because there isn’t as much pressure on it to do or say anything beyond its purely utilitarian aims. It slaps, shreds, and whips ass in whatever way you see fit.

Dose attempts to go everywhere and do everything. Opener “None of Your Business Man” is classic Abraham ascendancy (and the perfect anthem to quit your job to). “Torch to Light” introduces the double LP’s first moment of psychedelia, a new-ish venture for the band that’s sprinkled throughout. Mascis’s contribution on “Came Down Wrong” is, unsurprisingly, fuzzy, lackadaisical indie rock. “Dose Your Dreams” is disco. “Two I’s Closed” is a Beatles ballad. “The One I Want Will Come for Me” recalls shoegaze-y Cure.

The problem bedeviling the first new Chic album since 1992’s Chic-ism is one of definition: What does Chic mean in 2018? To Rodgers and his collaborators, it means a Daft Punk album whose processed vocals and acoustic elements collide to abrasive effect; it means a tighter Maroon 5 album. Yet Adam & the Levines are nowhere in sight, nor indeed any major star with the exception of Craig David, Elton John, and Lady Gaga, the latter intoning the lyrics of an unwise remake of 1979’s “I Want Your Love” as if she were Minnie Mouse imitating Grace Jones.

If the lyrics are getting all the attention on Digital Garbage, it’s only because the music is exactly what you’d expect. Mudhoney’s sound hasn’t changed much since the early ‘90s. ... Mudhoney are comfortable with themselves to a fault.

What we have is an album that’s mostly pretty good. It’s certainly an improvement over Tha Carter IV--likely his least memorable album ever--but it’s also not a record that is going to reignite a second peak from Wayne, if that was the hope.

A lot of Chris--and a lot of the coverage around it, to be fair--can seem reductive on first glance. But Letissier is one of the most nuanced songwriters working, and an inventive arranger.

Noname leaves little to no room for filler on Room 25, conveying a wide breadth of compelling ideas within 35 minutes. ... Though it can require attention to detail for her words to sink in, she gives off a feeling of effortless and whimsical grace as she speaks from a place of stark honesty over live instrumentation. A complete one-of-one act who continues to grow in real time outside of the limelight, Noname makes a subtle yet strong statement for women providing alternatives to one-dimensional rap archetypes.

>>> succeeds about half the time, but too often the band sounds conflicted between marching forward as the old Beak> and committing to a new direction.

Apart from its near-voyeuristic intimacy, Piano & A Microphone is most interesting when one imagines what this session meant to Prince at the time.

None of Collapse’s derailments are permanent, and this one only lasts a few seconds before the music puts itself back on track. If the EP leaves you wanting anything, it’s more malfunction, more frenzy, more extended deviations from the Aphex Twin playbook.

His skill is still intact, but his music lacks its former inspiration, and he only digs a deeper hole for himself by taking aim at the youth.

Hynes impeccably orchestrates his jazzy art-funk, resulting in the best sounding music of his solo career.

Be the Cowboy largely dispenses with the distortion of Mitski’s guitar-oriented recent work, getting all the fuzz out with intro track “Geyser.” What’s left are short and thwarted pop songs. (Only two are longer than three minutes.)

It is the best distillation yet of his tortured hustler mystique.

Except for standouts “Barbie Dreams,” “Good Form,” and “Chun-Li,” Queen is full of songs that Nicki has more or less done previously and in better ways. It’s not that Nicki has become a worse rapper (“Lara been Croft” jokes aside) or that the production is bad, it’s that everything here is only adequate--nothing pops, no chances are taken, and there isn’t any notable magic in these records.

It is his most fully realized album, but also the one that most strikingly situates Scott as secondary to his collaborators. ... For all the interesting things that can be found on Astroworld, it is still way too long and can sound so uniform that it loses your attention.

The tropes in YG’s songs are West Coast traditional (women, realness, threats, repeat) but there’s a combination of veteran savvy and lane mastering that refreshes the more expected moments.

Hive Mind remains as soulful as ever, weaving disparate sounds and textures without feeling erratic; it’s moving even at its most minimal.

With its intermittent clean vocals, abundant alt-rock solos, and near-constant warmth, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love qualifies as Deafheaven’s most accessible effort thus far, not to mention one of 2018’s most universally-palatable collections of heavy music.

If Dirty Projectors are no longer indie A-listers with the expectation of having each album provide shapeshifting genius, the upside is Lamp Lit Prose sounds like something Longstreth wanted to make rather than had to.

Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.

Since the release of Fractured Orgasm, this duo’s 2011 cassette debut, they’ve proven themselves adept at subtly but profoundly shifting the mood of whatever studios or venues they happen to be exorcising. What The Switch demonstrates is that Gordon and Nace have gotten better at being overt.

If it’s not Giant Steps, the album that type of casual Coltrane fan knows is A Love Supreme. Both Directions at Once isn’t definitely isn’t Supreme, but it enhances our understanding of how that group of musicians came to make it.

Scorpion is stronger when Drake stops narrating the circumstances of his own life and simply writes more of the breezy, cocksure songs that seem to come so effortlessly to him.

A record that’s more reflective and human than you’d ever expect from a band of literal cartoons.

The most rewarding Florence and the Machine full-length yet.

Blawan never forgets that in addition to turning our rushing heads and moving bodies inward, which Wet Will Always Dry most assuredly does, this sort of music can and should also, you know, entertain.

A blatant 180 degree shift from the confines of his wretched comfort zone, Redemption is full of creative risks that pay off in spades.

Aguilera lets her talent fly as high as her freak flag, solving pop’s current obsession with box-ticking by nudging their lines into shapes more her liking.

Bad Witch, like its two predecessors, contains glints of exploration tempered by maturity and consistency. ... It’s a strangely tentative gesture from an artist who made his name as a longform auteur.

It all rings hollow due to how thinly sketched out the writing and production is. Much of it is awkward, directionless, and, at times, just confusing--showing an artist grasping at a million ideas and hoping to grab one, with none of it being done in any interesting or shrewd way.

The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.

Even at their most fervent, the characters of Hope Downs remain soaked in sun, able to convince themselves that one great night could be enough to set them straight again. At about 35 minutes, Hope Downs is a brief vacation, and so are many of its songs.

An odd gem in a catalog full of them, 1984 is a rewarding left turn from a band who’ve remained interesting for so long because they’re less likely to fall off than wander.

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

After last year’s uninhabited Kurt Vile collaboration, she has a second album called Tell Me How You Really Feel that restores confidence in her tunes and the way her guitar lines snake through them. ... Settle into Tell Me’s crinkled smarts and Barnett remains as observant as Sometimes demonstrated.

A collaboration that alternates from alienation and sadness to melodic tenderness, punkish rap bravado, and triumph in 23 minutes. It’s both embarrassing and gripping: never boring and often euphoric. ... It makes for a perfect version of a Kid Cudi album, with Cudi taking center stage under the guiding hand of Kanye’s stellar production.

Many of the tunes emerged after the duo’s chance meeting in Todos Santos, the Mexican town Buck calls his second home. This sense of discovery shines through the record’s layers of polish. Its immediacy makes Arthur Buck a rarity in 2018: a record that wears its messy heart, as pleased with its flaws as it is with its power.

Lykke Li’s songwriting is strong here, but the excess of electronic manipulation sometimes resembles a bedroom experiment.

The record’s brutal frankness belies its lyrical depth–small touches, like the reprisal of the intro track “Anytime” as the album’s closer, leave the listener with a sense of a hopeful, if ambivalent, closure.

The feeling is more of what comes when the drugs wear off: there’s a hint of euphoria, but moreover, it’s a sparse and sometimes desperate reflection on working through anxiety, somewhere between the realms of T-Pain and Tame Impala. As a result, this might be the best BMSR record yet.

There is nothing new to be learned from this album burdened by crudely formed raps about his already exhaustively covered life and deeply muddled politics. ... Still, the music at times almost makes it worth it.

“Late to the Flight” is also indicative of Marling’s range on this album: She hits contralto notes on “Shake Your Shelter” and enters soprano territory for multi-tracked harmonies on “Hand Hold Hero.” The instrumentation, almost entirely performed by Mike Lindsay, is more varied than any Marling record to date.

It’s as good a model of modern folk music as has come along in some time.

For now, we’re stuck with a record that’s both intentionally and unintentionally frustrating: A record about self-loathing where the actual remorse is absent, where its creator would insist that’s the point.

The strangest and most ambitious album yet by the electronic composer and producer born Daniel Lopatin. For all its references to the past, Age Of is a distinctly 21st-century collage. ... When the Baroque arpeggios that close “The Station” enter a lockstep reminiscent of his synth-drone score for the 2017 thriller Good Time, for instance--it’s a musical thrill that renders questions about historical fidelity irrelevant.

From murky ambience to noise, free jazz, and beyond, Hval deploys sounds with a careful attention to feeling, building lush collages with a strategic intent further amplified in the lyrics. While ultimately smaller and less ambitious than her previous full-lengths, The Long Sleep grasps at ideas about presence, affect, and influence, recognizing the important potential of networks of all types in the lives of all who listen.

The album is claustrophobic and unrelenting, but also intensely exhilarating in its brevity.

That’s the beauty of Universalists: there’s no use trying to pin it down. What’s more, doing so discredits its core thesis: music is music, plain and simple. Gat manages to capture the ecstasy of his live performance, while expanding his production and experimental practice to a global, and—dare I say—universal palette.

In 2018, as it becomes more pressing than ever for artists to use their platforms to speak out, Love Is Dead pursues clarity, both in production and politics, with mixed results.

Their most relaxed to date. ... Whereas the first installment of the series seemed uneasy and disjointed in its span of styles, Love Yourself: Tear’s genre-hopping sounds like the group is simply having a good time.

Instead of sounding like a half-baked aberration or a tedious, overlong experiment, Die Lit broadcasts a refreshing and well-developed aesthetic--one that feels like Carti’s specific achievement. Its appeal feels distinctly corporeal, like it’s inducing some swag-rap equivalent of ASMR through exploring a limited and tightly EQd collection of sounds.

Sparkle Hard is the kind of quirky and realized record made by an artist with nothing to prove.

Parquet Courts’ ridiculously good new album Wide Awake!, is a delirious ode to the power of collectivity thinly masquerading as a gameday anthem.

Rausch’s ambitious structure is an incomplete but laudable step forward. If Narkopop was a belated capstone on the first era of Gas, Rausch might be the first real statement of a coming second phase. And its status as second-tier Voigt doesn’t necessarily portend dire things to come.

Across the album’s 13 exceedingly catchy yet contradictory tracks, Puth laments his success and desirability while boasting about both. ... Voicenotes feels like a step, at the very least, in the right direction.

A short, precise album which is equal parts inventive and masterful.

The result is an eclectic mix of tempos and moods that maintain Kozalla’s sense of whimsy without sacrificing earnestness.

By nature the album highlights their aesthetic differences, but at no point makes a strong argument for their separation. Still, it’s a bit of an awkward listen, with each of the three discs displaying obvious charms but none following through on its promise completely.

There’s little to be found here with the immediacy of yore, but this ends up working in the album’s favor: the more you give in to these vibes, the more the vibes give back. That goes double for Turner’s lyrics, which are playfully quotable in a manner that recalls the opaque asides of Destroyer’s Dan Bejar.

While writing some of the most accessible music of her career, she makes fun of the assignment a bit while completing it. The maturity of her songwriting voice on Rebound is staggering, and makes her enterprise feel like an emotionally embodied exercise as well as a technical, aesthetic one.

Beyondless is a far cry from the New Brigade immediacy that attracted fans, but it offers something perhaps much more valuable: longevity, if you’re on their side.

The hopelessness that loomed over his prior work gives way to a sort of circumspect hope on The Horizon Just Laughed, a new sense of things working out or having the chance to, and that’s victory enough.

Her ability to transcend her influences has always been song-to-song, and that’s true here, too. But it also feels like she is inching closer to a breakthrough: an album that fully lives up to her reputation and ambition.

By no stretch of the imagination is Beerbongs & Bentleys a good album, but it’s admirable in its commitment to its strangely singular dirtbag vision of L.A. luxury. It isn’t consistent enough to mold Post Malone fully into the Soundcloud rap version of Ed Sheeran, but it will certainly allow him to stick around for at least a few more years.

Grid of Points is as untidy as 2005’s Way Their Crept or 2008’s Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill. What’s different--and what’s key--is that in her ongoing embrace of the piano, Harris has made room in her artistry for a new sensation: the unmistakable glow of comfort.

Even when the concept stumbles, parts of Vide Noir are pretty enjoyable listening anyway, like the flecks of psychedelic guitar across the title track and the filigree detail and sensual current of “Moonbeam.”

Its smug, unexplored sense of intellectual superiority is pretty much all it has to offer. Musically, it’s an hourlong misallocation of the considerable resources that made a nu-metal minor classic out of 2000’s Mer de Noms.

For the most part, they don’t disappoint.

Sparrow transcends its own tastefulness, and odds are excellent you’ll find it gorgeous.

It’s a commendable effort, with Cole putting himself in a creative territory to respond to critics, peers and progeny. His messages are timely despite the fact that they continue, rather than conclude, a larger conversation.

Despite its tortuous path to existence, Joyride is a strong, cohesive project.

Invasion of Privacy is a cohesive piece of work that demands to be heard in full, from front to back, side to side, on the pole and on the stove.

“Outer Acid” remains uncanny in its mix of blissful keys and menacing acid squiggles and “Spy” diffuses some dubby harmonica into Heard’s atmospheres. “Inner Acid” returns to the squelchy acid house Heard made back in the ‘80s and the knocking beat and bells of “Nodyahed” suggest that he can still make a dancefloor quake.

America presents the most contemporary, Top 40-friendly version of Thirty Seconds to Mars to date. Bombastic drums and guitars have largely been replaced with fairly tame looped and programmed beats and ominous synths, basically reimagining Thirty Seconds to Mars as the glossy grungetronica of Imagine Dragons. Leto still screams like a banshee, but for once the sounds backing him don’t match his fury.

Expectations is an insistent but uneven album that points toward greater musical ambitions than it achieves. The sound is pleasantly aquatic and soft-edged but fussy and overwrought, as though its architects were worried that too much downtime might spur listeners to click away.

By balancing on the tightrope between meme and icon, between relatable and aspirational, Ephorize emerges sounding remarkably human.

The richness of the music occasions her best vocal performances to date. The arrangements are airy with distance and light, but their architecture is boldly drawn: the basslines thick and taut, the arpeggios whirring and spangled, the guitars unfurling in a glossy neon cursive.

The best you could say for Lil Xan is that he can be serviceable: “Saved by the Bell” and “Shine Hard” are catchy enough, and at least fully-formed ideas. The album may be bad but it is not especially so. It’s paint by numbers and as such blends in with everything else. You might hear it at an Urban Outfitters and confuse it for three other recent rap albums you’ve heard.

Freer of their influences, Hop Along have produced a stunning batch of songs--each of them like a small world of its own, continuously unfolding.

Here’s hoping The Tree Of Forgiveness is not either an incidental or deliberate farewell. If it must be, at least it’s both a suitably goofy celebration of his career and a dignified capstone.