Meow the Jewels deliver emotional depth befitting nature’s most psychologically elusive creature.

Most everything on Over is built with measured precision.... Equally striking is the musical depth.

Adele’s fans have been waiting for years for new Adele songs to explain their experiences to them. And they get a worthy batch on 25, an album so full of heavy-duty drama that it makes a more lighthearted peer such as Katy Perry seem like a Pez dispenser.

The release, available on the major streaming services and as a CD package with bonus DVD (featuring a high-resolution surround-sound remix and two other alternate mixes), offers rich perspective on the evolution of Reed's approach, highlighting an artist in transition, looking for a hit or two and adapting to a new decade.

A proudly organic companion to the EDM-inflected "Phase One," Prince's latest album shows that he hasn't lost his interest in (or his knack for) the creeping funk and lush R&B balladry he was making in the early 1990s.

The music carries a convincing bad-guy energy that’s all the more potent for its sweet, often luscious textures. Its recklessness travels in a clear direction.

Like avowed influences Van Morrison and Neil Young, Friedberger on New View travels in fluid, seamless melodies, and uses them in service of lyrics that revel in poeticism.

Taken together, Malibu builds on the skills .Paak introduced on his first album, called "Venice."

Her most adventurous by far.

Barbara, the duo's first album of original material together in five years, often stacks up with their best work and suggests that the ideas they pioneered in the '90s aren't just back en vogue--they've held up amid decades of fast-moving techno.

The album is an artistic statement album with a capital "A," complete with an alter ego and theatrical flourishes that hint toward something of a funk-rock opera about death, spirituality and personal identity.

If these Top 40 fixtures make the album feel in keeping with current radio pop, they don't crowd Stefani with unnecessary bells and whistles. Her singing--and, more important, what her singing is saying--is always front and center, which gives the music an intimate quality even at its most polished.

Sean and Aiko make for a convincing couple. But what makes Twenty88 such a compelling listen is the startling honesty and rawness it captures--even if it's just fantasy.

["Redemption" is] just one of the many deeply beautiful tracks here that further dismantles whatever barrier was left between rap and R&B following Drake’s earlier albums.

Throughout the album, which the singer produced with Kamau Kenyatta, Porter matches these cozy sentiments with modest, small-scale arrangements--mostly keys, bass and drums--that sound shaped more by the gigs he's played over the last three years than by any desire to experiment in the studio. But Porter’s resting state is a compelling one.

An album that reaches for something far more organic and immediate [than 2011's The King Of Limbs].

Given that she started out as an actress, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Grande can work convincingly in more than a single mode. But it’s still impressive how fully she inhabits the emotional environment of each song here, even when one directly contradicts another.

Tyler explores the boundless opportunities within a few great riffs, while drifting from time to time to explore odd structural detours.

[A] lovely but searing new album that weaves 2016 racial, sexual and political tension into an album of immaculate, Prince-inspired funk and R&B.

A curious, engaging work that mixes electronic and acoustic elements to create kaleidoscopic tracks.

Though never flaccid or soft, Into the Light possesses a lightness of touch, a deft empathy, a dreamlike aura.

Throughout the album, the duo is still working with Mike Will Made It and his stable of producers, who provide Rae Sremmurd with infectious beats set at precisely the right shoulder-rocking tempo.

This surprising effort answers breathless hype not with shouts but with one long exhalation.

Spears is back at 34 with an album that carries her one-of-a-kind electricity without depicting her as a victim or an avenging force; here she seems in control, a grown woman having a laugh on her own terms.

Vernon is in no rush to clear up any of this--to harden ideas about himself or his art--on 22, a Million, which represents an even bigger leap than Bon Iver’s previous record.

Yes Lawd! maneuvers through its 18 tracks with a gleeful sense of abandon. Like the work of the late producer J Dilla, Knxwledge’s rhythms take a few measures to lock into place, but when they do, weird patterns emerge.

With Big Baby D.R.A.M. he comes into his own, rapping with verve and sensitivity while fully capturing 2016’s loopy, soulful moment in hip-hop. No wonder he’s smiling.

The self-professed rapper-actor-activist has delivered a modern-day hip-hop answer to Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On,” tackling everything from romance to the wage gap to the lack of diversity in Hollywood with a political bent.

Produced by Frank Liddell, Glenn Worf and Eric Masse, the music deepens that unsettled feeling with arrangements that feel raw--sometimes even incomplete--by current country standards. ... Yet none of this is the product of indifference or fuzzy thinking.

You can sense their attention to detail in “Dear World,” with a machine-tooled drum track that keeps shifting to emphasize unexpected beats, and “She’s Gone Away,” which features Maandig singing in ghostly harmony with Reznor, her voice nearly imperceptible in the mix.

On “xx” and “Coexist,” the xx was using sadness as a kind of shield; its stylish monotony kept you from regarding the players as real people open to real connection. Here, in contrast, the music’s dynamics make you feel closely involved in what they’re singing about--the highs as well as the lows. I See You presents a band willing to be seen.

A ten song rock record that draws on Segall’s strength as a catchy songwriter and riff manipulator.

A vibrant batch of new songs that still rail against conformity with slashing instrumental and lyrical fury, but also find room for the occasional “la-la-la” sing-along pop hook.

Though the songs are new, the album is hardly a departure. Each is immediately recognizable to anyone who knows the Feelies.

The Nashville-based artist loads songs with sometimes five or six guitars, and while she roots all of them in country, there are outreaches to vintage rock ’n’ roll or western soul. The precise genre sometimes remains elusive, but Lane’s boldness never wavers.

Alice is a studio album in the best sense. Erik Jimenez’s drumming jumps around in the stereo spectrum like he’s inside your headphones, and Ubovich’s double-tracked guitars duel for supremacy in the left and right channels. Taken at full volume, Alice rules.

[A] wild new album. ... Complicated time signatures abound, but rather than extended jams, Thundercat keeps his songs short.

What emerges yet again is his deceptively downhome way of dropping pearls of wisdom into seemingly mundane scenarios, with plainspoken humor, with poignancy, with uncommon insight, and sometimes all three at once.

Listen close and you can practically hear the frontman digging in his heels, pushing back on the idea of Spoon as a tidy lifestyle accessory.

Lyrically, Drake embraces some of his pet topics on More Life. ... Yet Drake is also flashing signs of emotional growth--glimmers he might feel more confident displaying on a happily jumbled playlist than working into a cohesive album-length statement with its own internal logic.

Album opener “I H8 Ppl” sets the tone: a misanthropic song about Moore’s distaste for anyone other than himself, it rolls along like an outtake from the Who’s early album “Sell Out.” There’s not a bum note on the gritty 17 songs that follow.

The fifth album by the Swedish avant-pop group since its 2007 debut merges synthetic R&B, modern textures and of-the-moment dance music. The result finds the quartet at its most magnetic and adventurous.

Her new album features 11 songs, and there’s not a dud in the bunch.

An expertly crafted experimental pop album that at various points suggests the work of singer Kate Bush, the effects-drenched work of the Cocteau Twins and British art-rock band Talk Talk--all musicians who mix a certain sonic delicacy with studio heavy production--No Shape exudes confidence and vulnerability in equal measures.

Like her excellent previous album, “Over and Even” (2015), Shelley’s new one is a subtle venture that requires focused listening--put down your phone--to fully appreciate.

As eager as he seems to establish a new context--to lift himself out of the realm of branded lunchboxes and touch down among the real rock artistes--Styles never overplays his hand on this winningly relaxed collection.

West Virginia singer, songwriter and guitarist Brad Paisley has proven himself a wizard at striking a canny balance among earnestness, whimsy, social awareness and party-hearty celebration. With Love and War he’s conjured another 16 tracks that skillfully traverse those lines.

LaFarge backs it up with the joyful noise he and his bandmates bring to all 10 tracks

These are striking, expertly crafted songs containing left-field bridges and curious diversions, and the result is a memorable record from start to finish.

It's intricate and punishing, industrial and artful.

These are grand-scaled electro-rock anthems that recall the fist-pumping likes of Arcade Fire and Bruce Springsteen even as they confess to an introvert’s anxieties.

Clocking in at just under 40 minutes, the album finds a pair of consistently evocative artists in full control of their powers.

The music is equal parts aching, brazen and gorgeously honest.

Melodrama is so much more potent when Lorde is owning her newfound authority, as in the album’s dizzying opening track, “Green Light,” in which she urges a lover to follow her “wherever I go” over a surging house groove that keeps escalating in intensity.

The record makes you believe in the image in the “Want You Back” video of three women sharing a vivid private language. It also makes you believe that rock might have a future (even if it’s only the genre’s past).

“Reflektor” lacked killer tunes to go with its propulsive grooves, whereas this album is filled with them--including two separate tracks that recall Abba.

The five new songs that make up this extended play give it the heft of a full album. Like synth-rock pioneer New Order's early EP, "1981-1982," it contains as many engaging moments as lesser artists' full-lengths.

The 13 tracks further confirm Martin's limitless inspiration.

If [the cover of Dennis Linde’s “Burning Love”] the first reason to check in on this collection, which went largely unnoticed when Warner Bros. released it, the reason to stay with it is the exquisite melancholy the Alabama-reared musician invests in just about everything he sings.

Some songs from Hitchhiker found purchase on Young’s 1979 electric record “Rust Never Sleeps,” but gathered as they were originally intended, Hitchhiker is a profound addition to Young’s canon of campfire classics.

It’s a vivid account of a woman’s unwanted confrontation with a powerful tormentor--“a bogeyman under my bed putting crazy thoughts inside my head,” as she puts it in “Learn to Let Go”--as well as her determination to leave the resulting damage behind.

Even when the subject matter starts out a little more sober, their unflagging wit isn’t far away.

Murphy skillfully layers his sounds for tracks that somehow feel dense and airy at the same time.

Brick Body Kids Still Daydream is Eagle’s seventh solo album, and builds on his hot 2014 work, “Dark Comedy.” The difference? Scope. Like the composer Stew did in his 2006 rock musical “Passing Strange,” Eagle makes grand narrative connections across “Brick Body Kids ...” and does so through his skills as a storyteller and rapper with a sublimely confident flow.

If you’re familiar with Godspeed’s work, this is far from a reinvention, but it’s also not a record of mourning, as much of the collective’s music has been described. Instead, it feels more like a call to action and creation, even if only to assemble an hour or so of music.

Perhacs sings of universal truths and natural wonders, pondering sad winds and spiritual growth through lush, layered vocals and gusts of sound. “Eclipse of All Love” swirls with folk guitar and a sung duet between Perhacs and Sansone. Best are the Holter collaborations.

The songs aren’t hackwork--they’re catchy and funny and sexy and daring.

Yet another compelling collection of expertly and inspiringly crafted songs that remind us just how wondrous pop music can still be.

Like kindred spirit Dawn Richard, Kelela veers from the requirements of mainstream R&B to explore her own course, and the result is a portent on the genre’s future.

Featuring synthy dance beats, electronic flourish and propellant energy, the record sits alongside similarly infectious endeavors from his impressive discography such as “Odelay,” “Midnight Vultures” and “The Information.”

For all its familiar emotion, though, The Thrill of It All demonstrates Smith’s impressive growth as a vocalist and a songwriter. His singing has gotten deeper and richer.

The band’s fifth album both honors the ideals of classic country rock and rages against it with a freewheeling reflex to push at the genre’s edges.

Dylan’s vocal is low in the mix, rendering certain lines difficult to discern, especially to anyone not already intimately familiar with his clever roster of creation stories he cooked up for so many critters. With the distance of nearly four decades, it’s possible now to look back at this period and recognize that yet again, the Bard from Hibbing, Minn., was doing what he’s done so consistently through all phases of his career: challenging orthodoxy.

I’ll venture to call it her most focused, most cohesive album yet.

Soul of a Woman catches Jones at her liveliest and most defiant as she lets her powerful voice loose in catchy, funky songs about overcoming hardships and dealing with fickle lovers.

The result, by definition, breathes, which leads your ear initially to hear Björk’s voice as just another wind instrument; her lyrics don’t jump out the way they did in early stuff like “Hyperballad” or “Possibly Maybe.” But the words on “Utopia,” once they permeate your consciousness, are actually among her most intimate and affecting.

Once a groove machine that favored the warmth of live instruments, N.E.R.D has roughed up its sound to match these themes; No_One Ever Really Dies is full of heaving beats and harsh digital textures that catch the day’s chaotic spirit in the same way that Williams’ and Hugo’s flashy production work as the Neptunes reflected the prosperity of the post-bling era.

The result is a border-blurring convergence, one likely to propel whatever dance floor is lucky enough to receive it.

Songs are built on weird, chiming chords or little fragments of picking and echoes that make her purposefully modest arrangements feel interesting and unique every time.

Who Are You is a relaxing and intricate work. Nine instrumentals that mix electronic and acoustic instruments, the music revels in texture and layers.

If Braxton, 50, collaborates more broadly on Sex & Cigarettes, she's still zeroed in on the rich emotional territory she explored on "Love, Marriage & Divorce."

OG Ron C on Drank zeroes in on specific rhymed couplets and then loops them, and the effect makes the lines hum and resonate. ... Best, those that have wondered how soft rock singers Michael McDonald and Kenny Loggins would sound chopped and screwed now have an answer.

What most demonstrates the Weeknd's growth on My Dear Melancholy, is the precision of his songwriting, even in material that downplays the flair for structure he developed while working with Martin.

It seems ridiculous to describe the new Eels work as "a headphone record," because, in the era of earbuds, most are. Yet here we are, lost in the intricate melodies, arrangements and textures swirling through The Deconstruction.

What's remarkable about the album is how un-smoothed-out Cardi B sounds in this new environment. Though she clearly values the approval of old-fashioned arbiters, she won't dull her rough edges, as many have before her, to get it; the vivid result gives the impression that she's still in communion with her core audience.

A warm and vibrant tribute to the marginalized people, especially women and those with fluid ideas about gender and sexuality, whom Monáe sees as the true embodiment of America's promise.

The result is a confident, and comforting, celebration of American roots music.

She definitely goes further than Aguilera in tracks like “Ponyboy,” with a harsh beat that conjures smashed glass, or “Whole New World/Pretend World,” which stretches past the nine-minute mark. ... Yet the lyrics favor abstract concepts over intimate confessions; Sophie ponders consumerism in “Faceshopping” (“My face is the front of shop / My face is the real shop front”) and the power dynamics of sex in “Ponyboy.” Then there’s “Immaterial,” which feels like the key to apprehending this fascinating album.

On Everything Is Love the two flex their muscles like it’s an Olympic sport. ... The inside references and the happy proximity to current rap also work in service of a larger point, which is thinking about black achievement in the context of a cultural and political system designed to hinder it. ... Mainstream art makes too little room for stories like that, especially when the grown-ups in question are people of color. But the Carters won’t be denied on Everything Is Love. For them, this hard-won encore is also a beginning.

He’s also got a distinctive, no nonsense style: lyrically direct without sacrificing a certain poeticism, willing to look directly at a topic and offer steely-eyed comment.

Yet for all its tiresome megalomania, Scorpion is so beautifully rendered--from vocals to samples to features to beats--that Drake ends up pulling you over to his side, much like Kanye West did on his similarly vexing “Ye.”

[DJ Mustard and YG] still sound great together in cuts like “Too Brazy” and “Slay,” with YG flexing his SoCal drawl over DJ Mustard’s crisp yet bouncy grooves; the music feels urgent but somehow unhurried, as though YG is sure the beat won’t go anywhere without him. The presence of his old friend brings out YG’s sly charm too.

These 14 tracks merge synthetic funk, hip-hop, indie soul and a love of life. Songs including “Weird Part of the Night,” “Freaky Times” and “After the Load is Blown” possess chops and wit.

The songs are shiny and catchy of course. ... Yet there’s an uncommon sense of self-possession to this album--a kind of ecstatic calm--that sets it apart from everything else on Top 40 radio right now.

Hynes’ bold and moving album.

Yet as easy as it should be for anyone to appreciate this thrilling and sincere record--truly, there’s no resisting the title track’s euphoric refrain--what might be most admirable about it is Sivan’s determination to make a particular group feel seen.

A blast to listen to.

Unlike much ambient music, Gave in Rest isn’t made for background listening. In fact, only with volume can you fully appreciate the depth of Davachi’s creation.