Reznor and Ross held something of themselves back on this EP, and while it doesn’t completely upend the great work that’s here, it does open up speculation about how it could have been even better if it had their full attention.

It’s more of the same. It seems to be needing something more. An extra spark of interest.

In a word, Everything Now finds Arcade Fire in a place they’ve never been. It’s unsubstantial.

While her songwriting hasn’t quite made the same leaps that prior records have shown, Out in the Storm offers a unique perspective: that of someone happier and stronger for the pain endured.

Naturally, the beats are excellent across the board, although 21 Savage uses a little more Autotune and makes more of a play for the pop charts with some slinky R&B jams. ... Unfortunately, these reflective moments are outnumbered by repetitive odes to getting high, getting laid, and getting lots of money. What’s worse, some of his lyrics aren’t just bland, but blatantly homophobic.

Soft Sounds… isn’t quite as playfully subversive as Zauner’s big-rig guitar solo on “Everybody Wants to Love You”, but her work as Japanese Breakfast continues to draw its energy from transgressing both the expectations of herself and her audience.

Public Enemy’s message hits hardest when the lyrics remain open for listeners to step inside. A couple presidential putdowns are enough (no need for another “Son of a Bush”), and the small handful of times the album stumbles are when the focus narrows to micro grievances like calling out Kanye and Kim for being “a spectacle instead of spectacular” (“Yesterday Man”) or pointing out the negative effects of social media on millennials (“SOC MED Digital Heroin”).

Sheer Mag is a band that’s unafraid to feel, whether it’s desperation, rage, or overwhelming love. Over the course of an urgent debut, they let their guard down and embrace their emotions, showing the rest of us that we could all afford to as well.

Funk Wav Bounces isn’t the kind of album that’s going to change the conversation in pop music, but it doesn’t want to. All it wants to do is sit by the pool, release, let go, and have a good time.

4:44 is a breathtaking cycle about a man wrestling with his moral failings in real time, not always winning, trying to live his Mondays closer to what he preaches Sunday as he prepares for 50.

As a recorded artifact, the album falls short of providing a greater realization of the band’s honest potential, losing its better threads in a clutter of noise too loosely woven together to enhance the intended tapestry.

Generally, they stick to their formula, sweeping hooks buoyed by gang vocals and commanding horns, making for an album that’s predictable yet reassuring.

Likely as clean as you have ever heard it, Big’s flow is the glue that holds an otherwise disjointed project together with cadences that kick the songs into hyperdrive, cement his versatility, and prove that he and the Organized Noize production team--the guys that built The Dungeon and the bulk of the joints on this album-- might be close to returning to form. Their indecision about the creative direction of the project, however, takes away from the overall quality of the release.

On his new album, Big Fish Theory, Staples continues to perfect his brand of nuanced nihilism while exploring new sounds that should put the music industry on notice that the future is now.

OK Computer never stopped sounding timeless. In its new form as OKNOTOK, unreleased songs feed off beloved B-sides, forming a web that supports the concrete themes of the original album so as to make its points even sharper.

With Ctrl, SZA proves that the cult following that ballooned with the release of her 2014 mixtape, Z, was not some flash in the pan, but a deserved wellspring of attention from an adoring fan base whose faith in what she had yet to produce helped to produce the project that could eventually stand as the best thing she has ever done.

Even without the willful innovation, the record is important evidence to just how strong and poignant his songs are in skeletal form. Wilco is nowhere to be found here, but Together at Last is still a very good Jeff Tweedy record that should hold over fans until his band’s next musical flight of fancy.

Lorde’s overreaches and missteps are just as charming as the incisive parts, so she must be an icon. The board-manning Jack Antonoff’s over-reliance on synths and clicks limits what she can do with this new maximalism, and her insistence on, well, melodrama will occasionally mar her best writing, which remains in the shadows. She’s not a liability. But she can be a forest fire.

There’s no formal breakthroughs on Trouble Maker beyond the astounding economy, unless you think the harmonica on “Buddy” or Clash-goes-“Ring of Fire” chords on “Telegraph Avenue” makes this the band’s folk-punk album.

Free from the weight of living up to the Grammy-winning behemoth’s history, this 40-minute collaboration shimmers and contains the cheeriest laments about unrequited love you’ll ever hear.

When the record does stumble, it’s because he’s trying to juggle too many ideas at one time as opposed to a lack of effort. Mostly, City Music succeeds at displaying Morby’s strength as a rocker, and along with Singing Saw, the two together paint him as an artist truly coming into his own.

For those who already believe, it represents a promising comeback that, while never fully hitting the marks set for it by time or the band’s own peers, points to even more inventive, invigorated music on a horizon that likely isn’t another two decades away.

If Berry leaves the world with any last thoughts on Chuck, it’s that his vitality and relevance will continue to endure.

Every listener will have to individually cherry pick the songs that work best for them, but these are the ones that best deliver on the possibilities of the album’s premise.

Ti Amo isn’t a perfect record; things sag slightly when the tempos drop, and the tracklist doesn’t quite have a year-defining hit in the caliber of “Lisztomania” or “1901”. However, while it may not be an instant classic, it also feels like required listening for a summer that seems destined to be sun-drenched and scary at the same time.

Witness has great singles, forgettable singles, forgettable filler, and songs that go clunk.

Ultimately, she knows the pitfalls of dating more than one gender better than anyone in pop, and those moments of insight are when Hopeless Fountain Kingdom truly stands out from the pack, but it’s also reassuring that Halsey (who tags herself “alternative” rather than “pop”) conceives herself as an album artist first.

Lenker doesn’t always do pretty things--she can most certainly craft a beautiful song, but she’s canny enough to know that the ways in which we subtly alter our lives to be more aesthetically appealing often obscure a far more interesting truth.