Variables is not only much more ambitious than its predecessor (sorry Bring Backs), but also the most forward-thinking album Alfa Mist has put to wax thus far, and an experience far more suited to ruminative cigarettes by candlelight than vape-assisted marathon study sessions.

While the music doesn’t go above and beyond what we’ve heard from them already, the quality remains steadfast, making To All Trains one of the sharpest entries in their discography.

Post Human: Nex Gen is genuinely impressive. How does one band manage to rip off Deaf Havana, Deftones, Boston Manor, Enter Shikari, Porter Robinsonbithfimtaylorswift, Green Day, Radiohead, MGK, Iggy Pop and DreamWeaver, feature Underoath, Aurora, Lil Uzi Vert, Daryl Palumbo and Glassjaw… and be this goddamn boring?

Tyla's 35-minute runtime does feel a bit like a brief spin on an exercycle that refuses to leave low gear, and net dopamine levels are limited. .... Nevertheless, there is plenty of playlist fodder to be plucked from Tyla's trim confines.

in spite of this record’s formlessness, i keep coming back to choke enough. there’s something intriguing about a pop album committed to never, ever popping, while presenting enough cute little bits that are just memorable enough to be able to describe oklou’s music.

In the end, if The Foel Tower reads as revivalist, it’s at least creative enough to stand apart from the bulk of contemporary acts in the scene, and the results speak loudly, resonating as one hell of a lonesome, dreary mood piece.

Ultimately, Ascension is guaranteed to rub fans the right way, and it’s adventurous enough to open up new avenues for the future, and at the end of the day, what more can you ask for?

Never Enough's tepid reheats demand some form of urgent rethink.

Sinephro builds on the cosmic shrapnel of her debut Space 1.8, reprising that record's chamber jazz arrangements and buzzing analogue synthlines, its New Age mystique (at the time packaged as ECM overtones) and its knack for gorgeous ambient expanse, all while furnishing the continuity that album's episodic tracklist so patently lacked — but Endlessness does not demand that context, or any, to stand as a great record. This album's draw is as simple and effortless as hearing each and every one of your intuitions for the possibilities of its palette spool out in real time.

viagr aboys is a remarkably consistent affair that invites attention and dance-steps, but not by swinging for the fences. Instead, the band commits to a steady churn of tightly written songs, each one grounded in better hooks, tighter grooves, and a more coherent sense of pacing.

The shockingly honest debut is more comparable to the work of Sharon Van Etten than any of Williams' contemporaries in the pop-punk scene; not in the music itself, but the way both women use music as an outlet, in the aftermath of years-long relationships where they were demeaned and made to feel worthless.

There are plenty of loveable moments, sure, but they tend to congeal like sand passing through your fingers.

Seed of a Seed doesn’t quite reach the heights of I Need to Start a Garden (and let’s be honest, that’s a HIGH bar to clear as it is), but it’s still quite an impressive offering. Instead of lazily rehashing what made her debut so special, Heynderickx decided to expand on it and give her songs a more panoramic space to roam in. Most importantly, the core characteristics of her style weren’t lost in the process.

All of the songs here have excellent qualities to them but have their momentum jarred by some by-the-numbers moments. ... These flaws are not new though, and they don’t stop Senjutsu from being another solid album in the new-millennium Iron Maiden catalogue.

Patient, attentive listeners that take the time to find Magus’s secrets will be justly rewarded, as there’s a lot to be dissected here.

It remains to be seen whether Down Below will have significant replay value but everything sounds so meticulously crafted that each listen results in a different highlight. Everything that Tribulation seem to have lost in aggression, they have gained in haunting atmosphere and hooks.

Overall, the journey Everything Was Beautiful creates is definitely more entrancing and vivid than And Nothing Hurt.

Angels and Devils is a triumph of anguish, needles and monsters and evil in aural form. Be warned.

Celebration Rock is near-perfect in what it sets out to do: making people happy, bringing them together.

Overall, Strawberry Hotel manages to create a very dynamic experience, especially by introducing shorter tracks. Only during its latter half it starts meandering, a thing that could have been avoided had a couple of intense numbers been introduced at the right moments. Nevertheless, the album is another successful entry in Underworld’s catalogue, one that seems to be a grower this time around.

If you’ve enjoyed Holter to this point, it is worth investing the necessary time. Aviary touches every corner of her sound, resulting in an enchanting, if slightly dizzying, fifth album.

All in all, TNGHT is a tremendous and kaleidoscopic introduction to a dream production duo that has already turned heads (HudMo has spent the last few months keeping Kanye on point), and it shows that TNGHT has only just begun.

If there’s any grievance worth mentioning, it’s that they’re probably capable of going even deeper with this sound, but for now, they’ve tapped into something special here, revealing themselves as masters of balancing unconventional songwriting with accessibility.

Where Circles succeeds, where it becomes a graceful and elegant piece of art rather than an experimental excursion, is in finding the perfect subject matter for its laidback meanderings. Quite simply, these songs are dispatches from a day in the life of Mac Miller.

Kris Esfandiari and her team have created something truly special with this album, a musical piece where the divine is given voice and flesh to envision what is Kris' most honest and enrapturing work of her prolific career, and be sure it won't be the last one.

Brown still raps like he's from the future, it's just a timeline less removed from ours where Tribe Called Quest nostalgia and retro instrumentation is fully in vogue. Of course, this being Danny Brown we're never getting an easy meal, and some of the best moments see him shaking it up once again.

As it stands, Us lies at a precarious crossroads of self-help preaching and black history compendium, succeeding at neither and exposing a serious disconnect between lyricist and producer.

Hebrews is a wholly new kind of album for the band. Is it cheesy, over the top and a little too saccharine? Yeah, but the first two of those apply in spades to the first couple Say anything records anyways, and honestly I’d rather have someone singing sweet nothings to me when they’re in their 30’s than try and continue spewing venomous bile that they haven't believed in since their early 20's.