A breezy immediacy wafts through “Dance Through It,” in which a woman steps through a minefield of turmoil, care-free as long as the music’s on. But the album’s vibe is best captured by “Under a Smile,” a slow-burn beauty in which a drifter finds solace in a world that seems to be unraveling. The gentle refrain builds, and one voice melts into a choir.

Nashville pros help with the production and songwriting, and they keep this album from becoming quite as radical a statement as it might have been. Tracks such as “Wonder Woman” and “Velvet Elvis” drag “Golden Hour” back toward assembly-line country-pop. The singer is best when she upends convention.

It’s an atmosphere soaked in deceptively mellow and melancholy neo-soul, another take on the worlds created by Sade’s whispered regrets and the Weeknd’s decadent obsessions.

The best of it affirms that Drake is shaping a pop persona with staying power.

Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.

This alien brand of funk is far more open-ended and abstract than the first album, and better for it.

An understandable reverence prevails over most of these primarily straight-forward interpretations, but a handful dig a level deeper.

With three exceptions, the tracks are blissfully free of the overdubs and other studio manipulations that mar many of his posthumous recordings. Instead, we get a you-are-there document of Hendrix in the last volatile days of his great power trio with bassist Noel Redding and drummer Mitch Mitchell, the Experience.

Cool little touches abound, from the chiming percussion that enhances the dusky "Dreaming My Life Away" to the waltz-time vocal coda in "Last Year."

Divine Fits suggests that Daniel, Boeckner and Brown are doing a lot more than just killing time, if not eclipsing their other, better-known bands.

It's full of surface charm, the type of music that is designed to sound big in a club, the soundtrack for a night of excess. But there's very little conventional about these beats and the way Big Boi nimbly spreads his living-large imagery over them.

Though still dense and detailed in a way that lives up to Parker's reputation as an obsessive studio hermit, Currents also feels more spacious and danceable in its finest moments.

The melodies flow in relatively concise arrangements, which makes the album feel less weighty than earlier Decemberists' releases. At a minimum it could stand a little pruning. But several songs show a new, equally engaging side to Meloy's songwriting.

The bulk of the 14-track album is more than just a rehash of past glories. Notably, this latest incarnation of the Obsessed benefits from the cleanest production on just about any Wino-related project.

When the band amps up the tragic guitars and the vocal swoon, Dye it Blonde convincingly creates its own world.

The singer's personality emerges more forcefully on his originals.

This is not Morrissey's finest solo work by a long shot, but as the singer enters his 55th year, its moments of vulnerability feel earned.

Listeners may find themselves toggling between questioning Kelly's sincerity and admiring his facility as a producer and singer.

The vulnerability is one of the album’s most endearing features. It skirts the-great-man-stares-into-the-abyss-of-mortality melodrama that has become a late-career-album cliche for many of McCartney’s peers. Instead it presents a plainspoken realism, an earthiness in keeping with his working-class upbringing.

Hardcore Prince guitar-freaks--those who yearn for an entire album of six-string slash-and-burn in the mold of Jimi Hendrix, Ernie Isley, Eddie Hazel and Prince himself on "Purple Rain" and "I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man"--will find much to love on PlectrumElectrum.... Though the 3rdEyeGirl rhythm section of Donna Grantis, Hannah Ford Welton and Ida Nielsen provides a solid foundation, and shares some lead vocals, the songs feel slight, a touch predictable.

On Stranger to Stranger (Concord), his 13th solo album, he blends the custom-made, fancifully titled cloud-chamber bowls and chromelodeons of maverick composer Harry Partch with an army of globe-spanning musicians into off-kilter pop songs.

But mostly “Soldier of Love” presents Sade as a genre unto herself; after 25 years, she remains alluring and subtly rewarding, while still keeping the listener at a safe distance, as if she had even deeper secrets to guard.

The merger of trap beats, punk defiance and feminist theory may not be destined for the top 10, but boldness like this can’t be measured by chart positions.

The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.

In a sparser framework, the singer and his songs flourish. Eitzel's spite and self-deprecating humor rub shoulders on "The Road" and "In my Role as Professional Singer and Ham."

If not quite as mind-blowing as its best work, The Hunter provides a solid summation of Mastodon's musical range.

Death Cab for Cutie's seventh studio album, Codes and Keys, pulses with the sound of tires on pavement, life blurring past a bus window on the road.

He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.