The success here of being an album worth mention is derived from its encompassment of the past and present Marshall Mathers.

Good Nature recaptures the brightness and pop sheen, sure, but it's a trip back to a treasured childhood location only to find that the palace in your mind was always just a fallen tree, and the river your dreams used to float along forever is just a kinda gross, muddy little stream.

Sadly, the relative adventurousness of Girl of My Dreams has been traded in for trite stadium-pop fodder that doesn’t play into Fletcher’s core strengths as an artist.

While much of the record’s content could be charitably filed under inoffensively middle-of-the-road, ‘Outsider’, ‘Addicted To Pain’ and ‘Shards’ are some of the feeblest compositions the band has ever released.

It just lacks in a hallmark of all prior Ducktails releases: imagination.

Among the Leaves is notable for the bitterness and resignation of Kozelek's lyrics; for the first time, Kozelek's erratic and standoffish personality onstage shines through on record.

In the grand scheme of things, I’m taken aback on how Thursday can still manage to spark my interest with each new album. Just when Thursday seems to stir in unfamiliar, unwanted territory, they manage to find a way to make it happen.

As a comeback album following one of the decade's most memorable flameouts, it reaches all expectations adequately. But considering the late musician you're obviously modeled after (and more disappointingly, the Hella-inspired track to which this album seems to forget ever existed), King of the Beach feels more like an expertly timed marketing ploy.

Both for Dulli as an artist, and me as a fan, the borders may be wider but the thrill remains the same - this is dark, cynical, sexy, and genuinely moving with it, and that's a combination potent enough to make this an outside bet for rock album of the year.

Grande is far too talented to be crafting forgettable pop albums, so here’s to hoping that she regains her footing soon.

Once The Black And White Album settles in, and you've figured out which songs to skip, it's as enjoyable as any of their previous albums.

Lyrically, too, the album excels.

Hedvig Mollestad Trio have stepped up their game in every aspect, coming out with an instrumental album that's dexterously performed, often inventive and always compelling.

It’s beyond obvious that Duff wanted to showcase her emotional relatability and depth, but the album ultimately collapses under shallow lyricism and stylistic imitation.

Though there are several issues that inevitably drag it down, this is a good record that finally proves the band is willing to move upward.

For all the criticisms Nelson may endure for not branching out or over relying on minimalism, White Bird Release does provide a certain thrill.

Port of Morrow seems much more a step sideways than forward for Mercer, not so much a dramatic comeback but more a compilation of greatest hits masquerading as new songs.

Czarface Meets Ghostface won't shake up any lives, and if we're being perfectly honest not too many of us will be spinning it when the year is out. That's alright, though--it's not designed as some timeless classic statement. Sounding free from the burden of expectation from their storied careers, for the first time in a long time, this is the sound of legends cutting loose a little bit.

13 is primarily a journey into familiar territory, one that yet again focuses on Black Sabbath's acumen for vintage heavy metal.

It doesn't quite spike with the sharp edges of old, but the passion is in a more intelligent place, and it's a place worth returning to with at least the same frequency as those hospital walls.

Hill's End is an album of good songs with good hooks; who could ask for anymore?

Bleeding Through's self-titled album is yet another Bleeding Through release that tries to skirt by on the bare minimum. For every good idea presented, there are three more trite and tired ideas weighted to it, dragging it down into the abyss.

Lyrical content aside, Thirteen sees Megadeth do very little wrong.

Something Beautiful is an absolute triumph that casts aside any qualifiers to make a strong bid for the best major pop album of 2025 so far.

Happiness Is is warming shot of feel good guitar pop and bright choruses that is easily on par with the best of the latter half of Taking Back Sunday's career.

After The Disco displays a sense of focus that feels like the two musicians finally coming together as a band--although, unfortunately, the album is not quite as sonically diverse as one might hope.

The White Album manages to deliver on the promise showed by The Blue Album and Pinkerton without spending the entire time treading on familiar ground. Glowing with shades of the band’s past while differentiating its approach, The White Album sounds like a Weezer revitalized, reloaded, and ready to rock out like it’s ’94.

While Half Of Where You Live is structured remarkably well, its definitive moments lack that particular magnetism that’s always been at the heart of Gold Panda’s music.

Untitled is far from terrible, but it's still a deflating, disappointing, infuriating listen.

We have Gone Now, which alternates in black-and-white fashion between intriguing and utterly flavorless.

Given Jónsi’s past solo releases and Sigur Rós’s discography, Shiver should have been much better than it turned out. While not a complete trainwreck, it disappointingly features a minimum of the signature greatness listeners have come to expect.

They are heavier, and denser, and overwhelmingly less instant than their predecessors, as cloaked and finely adorned in all manner of bright, shiny synths as they are, at times almost crushed under the weight of an ambitiously flamboyant band. But these are still Phoenix songs, and by the end of a dozen listens they are as urgent as ever.

On a very basic level Pre-Human Ideas may appear to be the work of an artist diving headfirst into insanity. But at its core the album is one of the most personal and engaging releases of Mount Eerie’s career.

While it sounds as though the band are still working on perfecting their recent power/thrash/prog formula that started being established with The Power Within, everything's beginning to be pieced together quite nicely.

With Shake, Shook, Shaken, we get an album that has never sounded truer to The Dø’s strengths as a band.

Skeletal Lamping lacks a satisfactory, uh, idea. None are progressed, thoroughly provoked, just simply thrown out the speakers in hopes that we are transfixed by its oh-so literal translation of Barnes’ Georgie Fruit act.

The group have harked back to the more memorable songs in their canon, but this can be interpreted as largely derivative in some quarters.

Broken Bells is the crown jewel of each musician's discography and is a necessity for fans of either one.

While it's hardly a pop renaissance, It's Not Me, It's You is an appropriate follow-up to a debut that peaked not only because of its musical merits but also because of it's cultural catalysts.

It’s hard not to enjoy it. With Muse, they have [un]intentionally touched on this form of art. For (mostly) all the wrong reasons, Will of the People is the best, most engaging record to come from the band in sixteen years, and it’s quite possibly the most fun I’ll have with an album all year as well.

Hobo Rocket is definitely an overall fan-pleaser, and one that compensates for Beard, Wives, Denim by mutating its 'flower power' whimsy into an erratic display of mood swings and horror-show theatrics.

ATGCLVLSSCAP will be different for everyone. But undeniably, it's an entrancing piece of music, collecting every bit of Ulver's legacy and throwing it to the wayside, making room for something transcending the band's 30 year existence.

Until Gibbard can harness this newfound happiness with the kind of lyrical flair his fans are used to, Death Cab remain in danger of being, well, just another indie band.

Far from a unified artistic statement, Other Truths refuses to pin itself down, and marks itself simply and modestly as a showcase of some of the best talent in genre. A minor miracle, if you will.

It's hard to find any real faults with Eisley's latest album, The Valley.

Is 4 Lovers isn’t a bad album, it just lacks that much-needed energy and purpose. A lot of the songs here feel like they’re going through the motions.

While Dark Is the Way, Light Is a Place isn't the album that will make long time fans of Anberlin still holding out for some sort of magnum opus from the band weak in the knees, it is the third straight near perfect album released by them.

Solid and relatively consistent, Hope is better than a "finding their feet" experiment, yet that is ultimately what it is.

Only in spurts does it ascend to the heights of the band's opening three acts, but it does manage to triumphantly assert itself as a leaps and bounds improvement over Coheed's most recent material.

This is a great album, perfect for a retro rave and I am happy to see the band reactivated. Hopefully, it won't take them another 7 years to release the next LP.

These aren't ferocious songs and they aren't always playing with everything on the forefront, and it's compelling to see that; the band has rounded up the edges of their songs and put them into the ground.

Past Lives isn't exactly full of surprises, but it doesn't need to be to succeed as a mission statement for a new band who seem to be around to stay, if rumours of new material brewing are any indication. Every member of L.S. Dunes is in their element even after respective years of being legends in the genre.

While it's sort of a fresh take on their musical canon, it could afford with more new songwriting techniques and maybe less vocal effects. Still, Year of the Black Rainbow is a consistently great album that may have required just a bit more panache, and certainly lives up to its predecessors.

Rooms Filled With Light is more than an interesting transitional release, it is a bold and moderately successful grower which will reward the patient.

Bouzilich however, does have some good ideas and there are some very good moments to be found on Hello, Voyager, it's just the convoluted mess of ideas that is the rest of the album overwhelms its strongest points.

There's a sense of detachment when I listen to this record that's weirdly hard to explain, and it's certainly hard to shake. As it is, anyways, Port Entropy's still vastly enjoyable on a surface-level; this certainly counts for something.

There is roughly an EP worth of songs here that bring something remotely interesting to the table, rather than simply rehashing past ideas and reproducing beats you’ve heard in 100 other tracks before.

Wrong Creatures is an often somber listen, better done at night. It isn’t Black Rebel Motorcycle Club at their peak, although it shows the three seasoned musicians doing a good job in their own field.

This is a fun, sometimes moving project, extremely consistent and concise by the standards we apply to Kid Cudi since around 2013.

The Golden Medallion will “click” better for those that can find bits of themselves between the lines, but Fight Like Apes have crafted a fine pop album in their own right.

Not unlike The Heroin Diaries, their latest effort suffers at times from inconsistency and filler, but at its very best, it’s a collection of highly engaging anthems that accomplish exactly what they set out to do.

The Other One takes its metal/pop influences and fuses them into a seamless sound that trades Kawaii for seriousness and atmosphere. While it might be initially disappointing to lose a decade of Babymetal influences, it was probably time and the more mature and serious Babymetal sound is still as captivating as always.

Period is an album of lukewarm nostalgic bops, where the few moments of truly interesting artistry are left to languish alone in their respective corners. It’s by no means a poor record if you’re just in it for some lighthearted background party jams.

Even though it might not rank as essential Brian Jonestown Massacre, Revelation is a lovely experience.

It's a dark, gorgeous, twisted, spine-tingling experience that is able to pull off such a decelerated pace because it owns that pace entirely, injecting it with haunting rhythms and naturalistic beauty.

While Angles lacks a definite image, it is the band's best purely musical statement, and as the band members explore their 30s, perhaps it is time for them to retire their young, aggressive punk image and become successes in the first sense of the word -- strictly musical.

Despite being a solid, sometimes gorgeous album of songs from a very well-matched collaboration of artists, Unmap’s ultimate effect will be whetting appetites everywhere for the next Bon Iver record.

The band is out of gas and has been for a while now. Wonderful Wonderful fills the same role as Battle Born, taking mid-tempo pop-rock with aimless verses and marrying them to one stab-at-the-radio chorus after another.

Home is a sometimes captivating, occasionally flawed, but always intriguing release.

The discarded Carrie & Lowell tracks will not disappoint any fans who revere that album and should thus be acquired--independent from the whole album--if need be. As the remixes stand, they’re fairly inoffensive on their own, but will likely not sit well with those who have developed a personal connection to the original cuts.

A rousing vessel in which Wolf has finally had the chance to channel his newfound zany confidence into his most extravagant and captivating record yet.

Yes, viewed on its own merits, Born This Way is a slightly above-average, if patronizing pop album that knows its own strengths and plays to them.

It’s an album surprisingly even in its delivery, if a little underwhelming in content, somewhat reserved and unquestionably safe.

The Fame isn’t a defining moment in pop culture, but it is a promising sign for Lady GaGa, with plenty to dance to.

The Final Frontier is the kind of record that takes several listens to truly appreciate, but it's definitely worth it.

The album is just standard rock/alternative affair.

Duffy is a major talent, and Rockferry is little short of outstanding.

The record's ADD can be felt with every unbridged leap between ideas to its shocking lack of transitions, and the whole time there is this pervading sense that Heritage doesn't really have anything to say at all.

There isn’t as much outright variety as there was on Impossible Past, but there are subtle refinements that make Rented World perhaps the most musically solid album the band has released.

Dr. Dog stands on the shoulders of the band’s other modern efforts. If it’s quality indie-rock you’re seeking, then this is an album that you simply shouldn’t overlook. Dr. Dog is back.

A cohesive and complete album in the world of Southern rap.

While this record's predecessor was the definition of a mixed bag, Take the Sadness Out of Saturday Night is markedly reliable - a product that you're likely to either take or leave in its entirety.

Myths of the Near Future is no classic- the highs don’t come fast enough to warrant that- but it’s a solid debut release from one of the least pretentious bands around.

Impeccably produced, Conditions is a legitimate contender for debut album of 2009.

Sennett's overwhelming perfectionism, his pursuit for the ideal pop song, is just as likely to submerge him in soft rock cliches and painfully obtuse lyricism as it is likely to lead him to an aces country-rock tune that sounds like the best song Fleetwood Mac never made.

Essentially, Still Night, Still Life is a fun, carefree listen and doesn't pretend to be anything more. As an added bonus, it's also a clear improvement over the band's past works as well.

Eight albums into their career, Jimmy Eat World still know how to generate and craft some brilliant songs, but most importantly, they continue to demonstrate a keen sense for how to connect with any audience.

This could well have been a much better album than it is. Still, there's enough here to indicate that Nash's obvious natural flair for songwriting will blossom, and that her fearless voice will only get better with experience.

Hyperdrama will ultimately please fans who enjoyed their last two albums, but for anyone else hoping for a more adventurous LP that captures the succinct, edgy and grimy attitude of Cross, you’re going to be left disappointed. Justice’s fourth album caters to the radio-friendly masses, and frankly, they do a good job of it.

On their third outings most bands attempt to step up their game in terms of consistent songwriting. Instead, there's as many skippable tracks on this record as those worth revisiting. Mere competency is not sufficient to turn heads, especially in the year that abounds in high-quality stoner rock releases.

A lot of the gratification of this record is in the production, which takes the age-old hip-hop trick of taking a fractional melodic idea, barely a song by itself, and spinning out of it a thick sonic weave.

Definitely a leap into the right direction, the album is the product of a clear mindset and less ego tripping.

No one is ever going to mistake Genexus for anything other than a Fear Factory release, but the band’s slight alterations have produced a change in sound that is minor in execution, yet significant in scope.

There hasn't been a better blueprint for the New Pornographers' sound and mission, and, if all else fails, Together will certainly make you smile.

Ultimately, jj has the concept and the intrigue down; if only they could get their music to match.

A masterful little work of sonic soundscapes, dark edges, muted colors, and low, simmering sexuality.

Reputation is a hodgepodge of styles that have been percolating around the mainstream for years, repackaged into a shiny, expensive-sounding vehicle for Swift’s lyrics and sizable cult of personality.

Islands produced an adventurous and daring record with Arm's Way, an adventure many bands are afraid to attempt.