While the album is successful at crafting smart and danceable music, it lacks the fervor that defined their 2018 EP. This isn’t to say there aren’t gripping moments of sonic intensity on Gentle Grip that more than satisfy the more frenetic yearnings of Distance Is a Mirror.

Throughout the rest of the project, Parton’s original tracks (including “World on Fire,” a stadium-ready stomp-stomp-clap protest anthem) and faithful renditions of classic rock favorites help her get the band back together for one last encore shine through. At age 77, Dolly Parton sounds fresh, brand new and like she’s having the time of her life.

Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police is an experiment, and maybe as such it’ll be deemed less worthy, less interesting, than Weird. But where Weird is good, Juliana Hatfield Sings The Police is engrossing, an act of pop cultural interrogation for its own sake.

My Best Friend is You is peppered with pettiness, too, but it's a little more grown-up-and way more amped-up.

Her robust voice keeps these tracks on the right side of the cheesy/affecting divide, exemplifying Hold the Girl’s niftiest trick. Often, when Sawayama looks back on her past to inform her present, she leans into her new collaborators’ radio-pop bona fides and sings her way into earnestness.

It’s an album that understands the value of both journey and destination and when the going gets weird, amazingly everything is right where it needs to be.

While the similarities to both his contemporaries and those who came before him are impossible to ignore, there are few musicians who could pull off singing about an aspiring building inspector and make it so equally funny and sweet—but Hutson possesses a rare balance of critical wit and soul.

Eight isn’t a groundbreaking album—and it may lack some of the daring color that defined the band’s early years—but its lyricism is uncomplicated and easy, with thematics that fit well within the group’s regular wheelhouse. It’s sure of itself and proud to be so.

If Phases proves anything, it’s that Olsen’s discards are better than a lot of artists’ best efforts. Like her name suggests, she seems otherworldly, celestial--her impressive consistency and ability to transcend genre and era with seeming ease, nothing short of divine.

It’s the originals that shine the most, a testament to the talent of a songwriter that has written a standard or two of his own.

This Is The Kit have found a way to stay true to their style in a way that doesn’t feel forced or boring.

While kid-friendliness is a great merit of Under the Pepper Tree, its ineffable beauty makes the album a fast favorite for a person of any age to unwind after a long day.

There’s a faint despair in these songs, but he makes up for it with his undying devotion to capture them as vividly as possible--in a way that doesn’t glorify the subjects’ predicament, but highlights their quirks and shines a spotlight on their wisdom. There’s an innate comfort that comes with listening to Gunn’s music and The Unseen in Between is that Sunday afternoon moment of self-care that you need in your life.

The tone is certainly slow dances at twilight, but given a shimmer by the understated elegance of Moore’s voice, something that has always sound fragile but defiant at the same time.

Multi-task hits its high marks when the band is doing as much as it can, or, if you will, multi-tasking.

Yusuf’s vocals are a bit more gruff than in days gone by, but his whimsical tone maintains the fanciful and philosophical lilt once so essential to that early, engaging style.

Despite its metaphysical optimism, Sundowner resonates not because it has the answers, but because it proves willing to hunt for them or, in their apparent absence, to create them.

Not content to settle on one style of pop music, but rather preferring to float effortlessly between many, Hatchie is a credit to what is possible within the pop genre.

Bad Books’ take on it all could technically be considered dad rock, but on III, masculinity is an afterthought. At the record’s forefront is just three friends using their respective talents to create a collection of songs about the messy business of living.

Commissioned by Stevens and featuring the arrangements of six composers, Run Rabbit Run re-imagines the conceptual song cycle as a remarkably pliable and surprisingly tangible avant-garde composition, its crackling glitches and imposing synthesizers translated into gorgeous sweeping trills, scratchy bow scrapes and sweetly sighing refrains.

The charm of the band's guitar work sometimes gets lost in the middle of C.U.B.A.'s added instrumentation.

Wilson and her band thrive on musical democracy, where each instrument--even the most famous--gets an equal say in the song.

Cheap Queen is more melancholy than “1950,” more introspective than her ode to “Talia,” less ebullient than the assured bedroom-romping funk of follow-up single “Pussy Is God,” the latter of which was co-written with Stenberg. Cheap Queen is also more vulnerable.

The Tennessee native shows a dreamier, more daring side of herself on Rosegold, implementing bold new production elements along the way.

It’s sparse and lush all at once, and each listen reveals a different star in the night sky. There’s still room for them to move forward, but it’s a debut which ensures the listener there’s no way that won’t happen.

It’s true that pain has informed some of Moreland’s most wringing tracks, but he shows on LP5 that he’s capable of writing potent songs without the anguish that fueled his earlier work. That’s not to say these new songs are all gumdrops and sunshine, but it’s gratifying to hear an artist growing out of the framework that held up him at the start and drawing inspiration from new and different directions.

The End of That finds them sounding more mature and comfortable than ever before, signaling perhaps not an end at all, but rather a new beginning.

Her wit is as dry as it as subtle on her eighth album, a collection of songs that are also disconsolate and foreboding.