As ever, the Brooklyn four-piece triumph when they succumb to the dreamier elements of their work, of which Expect the Best carries just enough to sustain the listener across the finish line.

Perhaps these songs take on a more chaotic, messier, and a little dirtier appearance than they might have in another possible incarnation, but they’re still clearly of the same extraction as what came before.

With nary an aural step forward from their hitherto records, Painted Ruins ends much in the same way it begins, not with a bang, but with a drone.

Every member of this band is wholly present and firing on all cylinders here.

While a few songs interject to maintain the rabid pace of earlier releases (“Because You,” “Somos Chulas (No Somos Pendejas),” “Tonta”), most come through with a mid-tempo energy that might fall flat were it not rejuvenated by dense song forms, disjointed and atonal harmony, and Ruiz’s characteristic snarl.

Its best songs are the ones that maintain the spark of originality that has always threaded through LCD Soundsystem’s work,.

Each sound swerves about unpredictably, as free-willed as particles twisting through a vast nothingness, powerful and intricate in their brutal simplicity.

This is the crux of the album’s difficulty: it feels personal and scans as though it should be, but time and time again, it leaves me not quite sure whether I know a single thing about milo, the person.

Both claustrophobic and breathtakingly expansive, The War on Drugs’ latest effort is their best.

For the most part, the pop songs work better than the mid-tempo numbers. They’re more spirited, but less moving. “Praying,” for example, is better as catharsis than as an earworm, but it’s no less powerful for that.

More or less adapting his own approach to sound with the sonic atmosphere and materials provided to him by the filmmakers, he managed to create a work that, guided by their vision, ties a satisfying knot between the two disparate ends of his catalog. Lacking the singularly textual and conceptual punch of his recent work, it’s both a practice in versatility and a sign that there’s still something of an enigma to Oneohtrix Point Never after all these years.

Need to Feel Your Love is musically propulsive and provides evidence to the talk that a guitar band in 2017 can be a source of ingenuity without pulling excessive tricks and mutations upon the craft.

The only thing Arcade Fire’s Everything Now is about is Arcade Fire, which is its most pernicious and pathetic quality. Arcade Fire are no longer Orpheus and Eurydice, lovers doomed to tragedy; now they are Narcissus, the Greek hunter who lost the will to live after staring at his own reflection in a pond for too long. They ask their listeners to participate in this cynicism as they grasp so falsely at explanations for why “we” are like this.

There is something shimmering, cold, and tender in these songs. There are also moments of rock vigor that are the flip side to folk’s gentleness (never gentility).

Less of an experiment in product-curation, Quazarz scans more as an effort in process-orientation, one that, whether consciously or not, divulges some of Shabazz Palaces’s obscure mysteries.

Rafts may seem conceptually like a retrospective or statement of purpose, and it holds up nicely as a portrait, but it should also be considered a refinement, wading further away from readymade images of the tropics and into the depth of the traveler’s imagination.

With two exceptions (Desiigner and, uh, Damon Albarn), the [guest artists] completely fail to elevate the tracks in any way, an unfortunate consequence of needing to feature Charli XCX on your album because she’s good and popular as hell rather than because you and Charli XCX have made any particularly interesting music together.

As usual, it’s best listened to when you’re in your feelings, and since good news is in short supply, that might be often enough for her gauzy vision of love to feel like a balm, the more wide-eyed the songs the better.

The music enables Vega’s voice as his best accompanists have: providing the expository setting and minimalistic bedding necessary for Vega to project his scene upon and float above. His delivery will sound strange to those unfamiliar, but it will be oddly cozy to those who have known it all along.

Despite expectations, it’s an utter joy to listen to--a simple display of what 21 Savage sounds like when he’s having fun rapping.

Mellow Waves might be a strange bedfellow for the seminal albums of the year so far, but it’s a nonetheless unassumingly essential artifact.

Avey Tare’s stream of vanishing sounds, creaking floorboards, and silently intonated lullabies is romantic in its faded resemblance to our radiant, ever-growing environment; but as with Portner’s newly adopted city of Los Angeles, the supposed nature exists purely as an extension of the human desire to create and actualize what we see in our minds.

Ultimately, Soft Sounds is an uneven experience, stylistically and in terms of (this listener’s) engagement. But still, in the shimmering hooky synthpop of “Machinist,” the Morrissey-esque lilt of “Boyish,” there are bright stars hanging in the firmament.

The release’s awkward format and patronizing presentation are among the least of its poor qualities: Even for the heads, Kaleidoscope offers very little not already heard elsewhere. ... In addition to the previously mentioned Chainsmokers pair-up, there is the very ungainly Big Sean feature “Miracles (Something Special),” which, wearing more than a few embarrassing, auto-generated reverential name-drops.

Out in the Storm hones that truth; it wonders about it. “You ring me up/ I tell the truth,” goes “Fade,” and “You’ll have your truth/ I’ll have mine,” goes “Hear You.” Ten songs divulge it, which don’t have sections so much as well-portioned energies.

Bill Orcutt is a mid-career eponymous release. This is a familiar signifier of artistic reinvention.

On The Echoing Green, Cantu-Ledesma has brought a newfound clarity to his work, carving distinct shapes of mellifluous guitar lines to impose against his towering sonic architecture.

Beautiful Thugger Girls is remarkable because of its Thugger-ness--it’s a clear step forward at the very moment that Thug-derivation is a particularly viable come-up.

Melodrama overwhelms me. It reaches me at that weird and fragile center.

Are Euphoria dreams dreams that weld themselves to clusters of thought-clouds. A kind of hieroglyphic retracing, keen in this summer air, surfaces, lulled in by the world.

Dust is then a remarkable accumulation of disruptions and attachments, gaseous parts and shifting centres. Coherent in their incoherence, playful in their experimentalism, its tracks unfold smoothly, their trunks buzzing with magnetism, attracting the attention of pealing bells, skronking sax, and dub-techno beats.

There’s an attempt here to go back to the relative atmosphere of at least Going Blank Again, but the resulting music ends up sounding like the more reverb-heavy, turn-of-the-millennium British art-rock bands.

Peasant pulls every strand of Dawson’s work together to create something that might actually resemble accessible songwriting were it not so contorted by its own filthy humanity. It is utterly unique music, reminiscent perhaps of the complex, gnarled story-songs purveyed by Mayo Thompson and Joanna Newsom, but taken to much darker, more physical extremes.

With the bag secured, Gucci has nearly limitless options to proceed, but he’s done little to show that he’s interested in them. Droptopwop is a return to form insofar as it is the high point of his post-jail music, but a plateau is a plateau nonetheless.

What emerges is a baroque topography of movement and energy, culled from the explosion of an ultra-specific cultural context outwards, and then back into the dusk.

As is, Teenage Emotions reads more like that freshman-year college paper you really wish you’d just deleted off your hard drive.

For CFCF and Jean-Michel Blais, it’s essentially a self-improvement exercise, one with every reason to exist but no particular cause for release. For the listener, it’s something too rare these days: an exceedingly pleasant listen, unburdened by the weight of being anything more.

Despite having moments that tip it toward being his most “challenging” album lyrically (if being challenging has anything to do with being serious), This Old Dog might be his least interesting instrumentally and musically.

The fact that Best Troubador manages to outright milk unqualified whimsy from the life and music of one of country’s most rugged, ambivalent heroes--well, it’s really something.

These pop-forward moments are frontloaded on No Shape, extravagant and baroque. The soaring production value is not accompanied by conceptual upending or reinvention, but rather extends into a grand sort of sequel vision of Perfume Genius.

There is something martial, something insistent, to Compassion. True to his aims, Barnes has created something that denies passivity.

Heavy and heartbreaking, teeming with a warm, analog energy, Snow looks backward at each defining element that made the band so memorable to begin with. But like many of the best moments, maybe you just had to be there.

Contact is aggregated purge and celebration past the self, flesh seared back and stomp soldered to somnambulism.

The Thin Black Duke is a concentrated work of beauty and malevolence that will go toe-to-toe with any other rock record released this year, and likely beyond. Oxbow can take twice as many years to make their next record, as long as it results in something this magnificent.

All the tracks here (note that it would be crude to say they were indistinguishable from one another, but keeping your eyes on the tracklisting might be a good idea) sound like they could have been made with an arsenal of sequencers and rippling arpeggiators, but it’s all the sound of one man surfing the crests of a series of pulses.

This is an album of breath and sigh, baby’s gibberish and parent’s confession. It’s also a complex and layered meditation on fatherhood and family, rich in emotion, textured and capacious; it’s a long exhale--stately, calm, joyful.

m b v is good, Slowdive is great.

The M.O. is so resolute, the beat so constant, that even after 17 years it is unimaginable to think that a new GAS album would sound like anything but this. As with the forests of Voigt’s childhood, it’s a comfort and a moment of disquiet to confront something so perpetually, hauntingly still.

The pleasures that Pleasure describes are mundane to the point of tedium, trite beyond cliché. And the music itself is, despite the strength of Feist’s voice, mostly intolerable.

The diversity of the material provides Galás with an opportunity to showcase the full range of her vocal talents.

The more populist material that makes up All the Way is stripped of any comfort such familiarity may provide by Galás’s jarring reinventions.

Climate Change is an album about nothing. It hears nothing, speaks nothing, and sees nothing. It could be about partying, but even that subject is given such perfunctory treatment that what’s left hardly rewards participation.

The songs seemed to absorb the vista, their embers sustained underneath the settling dusk.

Three months in, DAMN. feels like our first Trump-era classic. It’s as bold and as hard and as hopeful as it is bursting with vitriol. It’s as distracting as it is inciting. It’s as cohesive as it is dense.

The result is a mix that is less concept-driven and less unified under a singular identity than previous releases.

Arca suggests a sort of shift that is so well-defined, confident, significant, and grounded in the artist’s own past aesthetics that it capably reconstitutes its onlookers’ iconic definition of the artist.

As a follow-up to the massive, hypnotizing Overseas, Sorcerer is a concise distillation of Tonstartssbandht’s refreshing vision, a crystal ball portraying their intimate friendship, their cosmic noodling echoing deep into the nethersphere.

The Far Field is carried by light catharsis, diffused and mild-tempered fun, virtuosic vocal delivery, and steel-clean production.

The bad news is that Tears isn’t as gripping as Kingdom’s earlier work (notably 2013’s Vertical XL). Tears sacrifices the ping-pong polyrhythmic beats that made his earlier material so compelling and replaces it with something simpler.

While Toxic City Music hints at alienation, it never succumbs to it.

It’s not every day (or month or year) that an album like Rosebudd’s Revenge comes along, one that packs a novel’s worth of imagery, mood, characterization, conflict and theme into practically every line; one that presents scenes so meticulously crafted they inspire us to pick up the narrative threads ourselves, to explore where they came from and try to figure out where they lead, which is always farther than the story tells.

Number 1 Angel is a maybe mixtape, sorta free, but released by a voice that’s constantly solving life’s real problems with the imagined solutions of pop music.

Pile are at their strongest when involved in slippages, designed moments of elasticity and indecision, effects incidental.

Thankfully, More Life is Drizzy’s homecoming, a vocalization of the heart in his heartless world, and a veritable return to form for it. Welcome back to the Firm.

Taken as a whole, World Eater makes a strange kind of jumbled thematic sense.

Phil presents his thoughts here with stunning candor, using just a laptop and a microphone to capture his characteristically amorphous guitar lines and thin yet comforting balm of a voice.

Kozelek spends a lot of time on Common as Light giving us his broadly “common sense” liberal pluralist live-and-let-live shtick, punctuated by grumpy bashings of “hipster” culture and its parades of regenerated tenement buildings and juice bars, music journalists, and Father John Misty, but it’s only on 10-minute opener and standout track “God Bless Ohio” that he really bares his soul.

At its best center, Infinite Worlds gives the song back to the person.

The record’s second half is sedate by comparison, skewing away from the drone element and more toward conventional pastoral film score calling to mind Terrence Malick.

Reassemblage already feels peculiarly familiar, but the residue it leaves behind is oddly intangible.

As ever with free-improv records, the level of control is remarkable.

Drunk’s a chill listen, but it’s also a restless one.

This disconnect between Dirty Projectors’s pop tendencies with its “art” signaling is what ultimately stains the album with such a deep sense of confusion, making it difficult to parse who exactly this music is written for, if not people who are already fans of Dirty Projectors.

Without an adequate treatment or storyboard, [I Decided] feels listless and wanting immediate predicate. It lacks a ready place on the shelf.

The energy imparted simply can’t overcome a drowning of influences, or rather, the kinetic is overcome by the potential.

Eno’s continuation of his flag-bearing series is about as ignorable as it has always been with waning levels on the side of interest.

Ultimately, though, it becomes hard to identify individual tracks without keeping a close eye on the tracklisting as you go.

It’s as wicked as Twins at a fraction of the cost, as weird as Melted but twice as pretty, oozing acerbic coffee, acid mud, and gasoline.

In some ways, it is as an exercise in stripping away everything that makes The Flaming Lips such a truly special group, leaving only that which serves as decorative tinsel to their music, hanging limp and lifelessly in the air.

On A Shadow In Time, Basinski tries not merely to locate Bowie’s ghost in the machine, but to find its cross-dressing, orange-haired, anisocoric-eyed soul locked somewhere inside the hard electronic casing of the world.

The LP straps us into its cramped, jilted rhythms and harsh materiality, keeping us in its grips. And it’s successful in keeping us there precisely because we enjoy its confinement, we enjoy its power over us, and we enjoy the illusion that we aren’t confined and powerless. That’s ultimately what makes it a wonderland.

There is a creeping charm to tracks that seem initially off.

Nine Suns, One Morning is unpredictable without being arbitrary.

Despite its sub-30 minute run-time, Remain Calm packs a punch.

It’s a diverse group and they’re doing some excellent work. Really great stuff.

Many of these songs begin promisingly before losing momentum and settling into turgid grooves. Rather than serving as a platform for D∆WN and Machinedrum to hybridize and expand the pop form, Redemption offers ornate, glittering garments, which constrict as they envelop.

For all of its harshness and grit, Daniel Bachman is an elegant, personal work, a letter written cozily from the hearth of modern country music, its ink smudges and scrawl an affectionate indicator of the hands that wrought them.

Jessica Rabbit does not feel challenging, nor does it feel inviting. The adolescent only hopes to participate.

Lambchop’s albums often come off as minor masterpieces--not quietly stunning but aesthetically proclamatory, carrying material enough for a listener to stay with and dwell on. FLOTUS is no exception.

American Band won’t transform our American landscape; good country music can’t heal a national soul. But an art of humanity and a faith in being better to each other can help redefine America.

Beyond the Fleeting Gales is a genuine and unpretentious promise from Crying that they are here, and so are we, and together we can save the world, even if it’s just for a moment.

Exercising a more polished sound than heard on their debut Intro Bonito, which felt somewhat dinky by design--it was often centered around decisively hollow chiptune-inspired arrangements--Bonito Generation is its own self-reflective hit parade carrying with it five pre-album singles and the potential for at least a few more.

Ultimately, 13 is a lens buffer for viewing Supersilent’s previous interrogations of how conditioned humans process sound and space, yet it needn’t in itself be a normative work.

Musically, there are too many things going on and too few things going on. Every track sounds more or less the same, and every track sounds like a poor heyday tribute.

Building a Beginning takes to heart every criticism of his 2013 release, inverting it into something that, though restrained and even surprisingly heartfelt at times, does very little to save itself from being forgotten.

The borrowing of in-house trap elements is neither crass nor exploitative: it is rather a seeming extension of the communicative nature of patten’s project.

Color is, first, a thing of intrigue and frenzy, as deserving of your undivided attention as it is confounding mixed with almost any other sense perception; second, it’s an exercise with a few robust rewards.

COW makes no claims to reinvent the wheel. Yet its heightened attention to detail marks a new focus for the duo, who, with less tools than ever before, manage to find a sound that’s wistful, wide-eyed, and surprisingly full of sounds new to the act, if still par for the course within the wider realm of contemporary composition.