At 15 tracks long, it’s a smorgasbord of Lambert specialties: traditionalist country, vivid character sketches, revved-up rock guitars, double-take turns of phrase, pop curiosity, place names and incredible consistency. It may not be her best album, but it is a very worthy entry in what is quickly becoming one of the best recorded catalogs in music. Period.

Where his first record, You’re Useless, I Love You (Reading Group, 2016), was a gorgeous rush of intoxicating pop mutations, Blood Karaoke is a nervous, epic downward spiral of the weird, wonderful and forgotten poetry of social media.

i don’t know who needs to hear this… is grander than anything she’s done before, but rarely does it feel like a departure.

Whether treating the serious not too seriously is the right way to go about it or not, it does bring about 40-some-odd minutes of refreshingly genre-bending music that only rarely drags.

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.

Everything Was Beautiful marks another career-best in Spiritualized’s euphoric discography.

(watch my moves) finds Vile connecting with his friends and idols alike, but more than anything, it finds him staying connected to himself—his identity as an artist.

It would’ve been nice to have more live material. ... We can look at Terror Twilight as the sound of Pavement coming unglued, but we can also hear the music as the sound of a band holding together—just barely well enough—to transcend their limitations and out-do themselves one last time.

It cements Tillman’s place among the best singer/songwriters around. It’s gorgeous. It’s heartbreaking. It’s timeless. It’s the sound of an artist who really went for it and succeeded wholeheartedly.

On their best songs, PUP have always built hooks that can carry entire albums. It’s just unfortunate to see those sing-alongs held back by THE UNRAVELING’s surrounding misfires.

While this old dog isn’t learning any new tricks, the band’s unmistakable chemistry shines, and each note is a glimpse into a youthful energy that hasn’t been seen in quite some time.

Though it has its moments, Fear of the Dawn isn’t quite wild enough.

Barrie is now a glistening, confident synth-pop act with tinges of folk, and the warm yet tentative hue that clouded Happy to Be Here is mostly gone.

Their songwriting is tight, their lyrics are brazen, smart and amusing, and they are at ease shifting through various indie styles. ... The duo often sound on Wet Leg as though their songs are intended primarily to entertain themselves, and each other. The rest of us are lucky to be along for the ride.

On Diaspora Problems, Soul Glo have caused a clearing in the forest with an album so boundless in its creativity that it cannot be ignored. This is the shape of hardcore that we had been promised.

Throughout the LP, Wallows show an ease in incorporating unexpected sonic textures and multi-genre influences while still remaining immediately recognizable, accomplishing what every band must hope to achieve on their sophomore album.

Camp Cope’s third album, Running with the Hurricane, trades that thundering punk for lighter fare. It’s brimming with just as much emotion, but the band this time focus more on personal triumphs and tribulations for inspiration, making their characteristically electrifying songs feel raw in a different way.

Warm Chris thrives in that new flexibility, using Harding’s expanded sound to consider the implications of professional and interpersonal performance in turns across its 10 tracks.

Midlake’s latest LP is a nice addition to their already impressive arsenal, but it would benefit from a more detailed kind of excavation.

Yumi Zouma play with a wider musical palette on these songs, which reach beyond the synth-pop sensibility that often characterized their earlier work. These songs are lusher, but in a low-key way

It’s not her discography’s lowest point, but it is her first misstep. When Charli achieves the perfect confluence of what she loves about pop music, and what we love about her music, it soars, creating some of her finest material to date. But when that balance is not achieved, the songs can feel generic or reductive.

On Broken Equipment, BODEGA don’t sugar-coat the intoxicating feeling New York can create when it gets into your blood. If you can survive the constant rent hikes, shady practices from shifty landlords, collapsing infrastructure, and a cyclical reshuffling of artistic epicenters and neighborhood fixtures, it’s an adrenaline high worth building a life around. This one’s for the ones able to hang on.

By connecting so well with one another, MICHELLE reach listeners in a singular and effortlessly listenable way.

This is probably the best Band of Horses album in 12 or maybe 15 years, after all—but when longtime fans listen to “Lights,” they’ll almost certainly hear echoes of “Weed Party,” a song from the band’s debut album.

Squeeze excels when it provides the perfect soundtrack for punching a hole in the wall, or at least fantasizing about it.

True to its title, Nightroamer is an album for shadow work, one that seems to relish meeting the darker parts of yourself head-on and admitting that you may be powerless to defeat them.

Empath’s mix of melody and noise is so effective, it’s not hard at all to squint a little bit at Visitor and see the potential for some sort of breakthrough success for this band.

Throughout five mesmerizing tracks, Texas Moon invites listeners into that special world. It’s a world where time moves at a delicate pace and where that classic American road trip detours through the scenic route.

What matters are the travails we endure to appreciate goodness. Life on Earth is a journey through the former toward the latter, and a dazzling shift from Hurray for the Riff Raff’s roots to their present.

Longtime Glass fans might observe parallels between PREY//IV’s sound and the music of the band in which she was emotionally abused. In continuing to explore that group’s abrasive, icy sound, she reclaims the power that her abuser attempted to steal from her. And in collaborating with her partner Jupiter io, formerly of noise-pop band HEALTH, she brings her own softer, foggier edge to the blistering rave music with which she’s often associated.

From the majestic opening notes of the title track to the last electronic flourish of closer “Modern Love Stories,” Once Twice Melody is the culmination of everything Beach House do best.

Heterosexuality can be an overwhelming listen, packed with emotion and production choices that leave you gasping for air , but it’s also deeply rewarding.

It’s the sound of a band in peak form who are pushing to get better, go further and resist any temptation to slack off.

This record sounds like four musicians coming together, telepathically attuned to each other’s ideas, reveling in the strange mystery that unfolds when they play together under the same roof—a fragile sanctuary from the collapsing world outside.

On Pompeii, Le Bon is direct and poignant, honing in on a polished sound while using classical, tragic influences to help her make sense of the urgent, unfurling present.

It’s always been about the process of making music for this band, and after a decade of critical busts and two years of a global pandemic, the passion that’s present here begs the belief that they’ve finally regained that unbridled joy, once again finding something really sweet happening amongst themselves.

Ants From Up There feels like the work of a band figuring itself out. ... This is a record that sees Black Country, New Road reestablishing themselves.

When Mitski veers jauntier and more upbeat, the album soars.

After the breakthrough of their incredible 2016 album Cardinal, Hall and Pinegrove faced the tall task of trying to match or surpass it. They haven’t quite done that, but they have built an impressive catalog of albums that spill over with compelling songs and affecting performances. From that perspective, 11:11 fits in perfectly.

Three Dimensions Deep will doubtless make it onto many a Spotify playlist; the record boasts club-ready bops and chill bangers that can please almost any aural palate. When you dig beneath the surface, though, Mark imparts universal wisdom and gives listeners a much-needed moment to appreciate ourselves.

Bazan evokes the tumult of emotion that accompanies the middle school years, sometimes so well that it’s uncomfortable, as he chronicles the year or so he spent in Lake Havasu before his family moved again.

The Alien Coast’s varied array of influences sound wholly unfamiliar coming from St. Paul & The Broken Bones, but they work. Whether they’re welcome is another question. No one wants to think about annihilation when they’re engaging with art to find respite from annihilation, but The Alien Coast’s fluctuations in tone are so rewarding to confront that they make the record’s message that much easier to absorb.

Anaïs Mitchell is a grownup album. It’s the first great folk album of the year, but more crucially, it’s a quiet personal triumph for Mitchell herself. Disclosing one’s own truths rarely sounds this graceful.

A little bit Sleaford Mods, a helping of The Fall and a dash of Pulp, the group craft smart vignettes of modern life with a confident, witty delivery across their debut full-length, The Overload.

W portends a bright future for Boris, even this late into their career. If their new material is any indication, they may never run out of ideas.

Whether all our efforts on this dying world will be for naught is an open question, but Silverbacks bear witness nonetheless on Archive Material, advancing their craft even as the ship sinks beneath their feet.

It is brief, for sure, but it is packed with densely packaged rhymes and rewarding musical numbers that are majestic.

With The Boy Named If, Costello and The Imposters show they are still capable of kicking each other under the table at the restaurant, showing their fangs to the manager when they’ve been told to leave.

The album’s features are among the best in the Weeknd catalogue, highlighting love and loss spanning decades.

Her sound on Sensational is seductive and hushed, and she adopts a poise that can easily draw a cult following. Give into de Casier’s allure, before her enchantment becomes far more than just a whisper.

Every song on the album is warm and beautiful, marked at different points by laidback acoustic guitar, old-timey horn sections, driving percussion, cinematic string arrangements and morose piano.

This long-lost document may be the most important live offering there is of Neil Young and Crazy Horse—or at least the most important Young has shared with us.

She offers a vulnerable meditation to soundtrack the ways in which our hearts reach outwards towards the loved ones we miss and the loved ones we haven’t met. And if the music world gifts us all with more pro-mom records in 2022, may we return to them just as soon.

With Hayter’s intentions fully understood, Sinner Get Ready not only gains more gravity acting on the guillotine blade as it comes down, but the head that it intends to decapitate has a face that we all can now recognize.

The eight tracks here were intended as experiments in sound, and Vega shows almost no interest in conventional song structures or, for that matter, melody. Instead, he focuses on atmospherics, creating moods that are frequently disjointed, sometimes oppressive and often deeply charismatic.

It’s a breathtaking, immersive, often mournful exploration of the fundamentally transformative, ever-changing nature of feeling.

They’ve followed up a cult-fave album (or in this case, two) with an effort that preserves the band’s strengths while also showcasing artistic growth and illuminating a path forward.

It’s an uncanny understanding of not forcing the muse that she maintains on her brand new album, I Thought Of You.

Flying Dream 1 is in no rush to get anywhere. Its lyrics and music are more lovely than ever before, chock-full of gorgeous piano lines to match Garvey’s husky croon.

Despite the songs’ substantial vigor, they don’t build to obvious climaxes, and their intros and outros are often abrupt. The twists and turns that occur within the thick of things are where songs really take off, as elements elegantly alternate between the foreground and background. The album features some of their most endearing and memorable vocal moments yet.

Korkejian has proven her ability to forge closeness and sincerity in past works, but her third album feels like her own secret, not only because the songs haven’t been shared before, but also because her development as an artist and person is now a bit more overt.

Perhaps the most appealing part of the album is that regardless of what sound, style or location these songs came from—British folk, New Orleans soul, Bakersfield country—they sound cohesive and of a piece in the hands of Plant and Krauss. In other words, the singers make these songs sound like their own.

An Evening with Silk Sonic works because these two artists know how to complement each other extraordinarily well. Hopefully, down the line, they will work to reinvent the wheel instead of merely paying homage to it. But in the meantime, the world should just enjoy the pithy musings of this lively pair.

It’s a remarkable, haunted and resonate touchstone for rock and roll, a record unafraid of its own emotions and openness—full of stories worth returning to and untangling a hundred times over.

For a record born of introspection, Things Take Time, Take Time is surprisingly fun.

A carefully constructed and emotionally resonant sophomore effort.

The third disc, annoyingly titled Kid Amnesiae, starts off promisingly enough with a straight piano version of “Like Spinning Plates.” ... Only four of the 12 tracks here stretch past four minutes, with the majority of them clocking in at under two. That would be excusable if these leftovers revealed anything about what it must have been like to be in the room while making a pair of classic albums.

She hacks away at the extra fluff and molds every song to feel as cathartic as an enlightening sob session with your therapist. We’re left with 10 raw, rock-solid tracks that feel just as restorative for us as they clearly do for Jordan. Valentine is proof that a breakup album doesn’t have to be sad—it just has to be powerful.

His latest effort is in many ways subtler and even more subdued than much of his work, but it’s an album that sticks.

The War on Drugs have continuously grown into fuller and more realized versions of themselves. I Don’t Live Here Anymore is fitting for their newest form: revered musicians with over a decade of quality music under their belts who never lost sight of the prize.

While the songs on to hell with it may read heavy in subject matter, rarely does PinkPantheress bask in the dour.

In its own gentle way, Shade nudges the audience to view Harris as an all-around musician, rather than as the consummate mood-setter she’s long been hailed as. It’s as close to an attention-grabbing gesture as we’re probably ever going to get from Liz Harris—but if that’s what this album is, it’s an attention grab that’s well overdue.

With Actually, You Can, these four individuals have created a celebration of human possibilities and one of their best records to date.

There something like It Still Moves or Circuital soars to untouchable heights, the band’s latest falls flat at a noticeable rate in terms of delivery. ... Their new album is representative of their live show in the best way: It can shift from a rootsy rock number to a hyped-up free-for-all at the drop of a hat, sometimes even within the same song.

Sympathy for Life still skyrockets as a natural follow-up to the left turn of its tonally ambitious and technically masterful predecessor—but on this project, the band ramp up their polished sound with an assembly of synth-rock and soft palettes of speculative and, sometimes, refreshingly vulnerable lyricism.

Wilds is all killer and no filler, not taking itself all that seriously—instead, it opens up and gives us honest glimpses into how a relationship came together and failed, without forgetting to showcase the parts where hopeful sparks just never really had it in them to turn aflame in the first place.

Lately is a much more introspective and muted work compared to the countryfied indie rock sensibility of Walking Proof, the style Hiatt is known for. The change of pace is welcome, though, and reveals much about where she’s been as a person and where she’s going as an artist.

It does manage to strike a balance between the stylish sass of post-fame Porches and the elegiac sulking of the act’s early era. It seems like Maine has finally found a sound that will continue to allow him to headline large venues, without coming across as a sellout. All Day Gentle Hold ! confidently lays the groundwork for a sustained Porches return.

West has said she intended the album to resemble a “poem or a puzzle box,” and often, the obfuscation is part of the charm. Occasionally, though, there are too many barriers between West and what she wants to say.

Their collaboration achieves a sharp folk-rock sound that’s drunk on precision and layered minimalism.

Cold War Kids’ multifaceted style keeps things exciting even at the LP’s weaker points, but how does the story change when taken as a whole? Maybe not by much. Taken on its own, though, New Age Norms 3 shows how much Cold War Kids will push to figure themselves out as they grow and the world around them slowly shifts into something unfamiliar.

There are no brakes on Let Me Do One More—rather, it is more like a sprightly rollercoaster, with mellow gaps in between punchy electronic tracks creating arcs bound to give out an exhilarating sort of whiplash.

A bold, career-defining step, Leaving None But Small Birds updates metal’s longstanding obsession with morbidity, even as the musicians look to the past. That they sound so natural exploring these old, dusty sounds together, and that they manage to breathe new life into them, must be recognized as a monumental achievement.

With A Beginner’s Mind, Sufjan Stevens and Angelo De Augustine have stumbled upon a beautiful vocal recipe.

Throughout the press cycle for Lindsey Buckingham, he’s made clear that this record was made in his home studio without anyone else playing on it. At times, this adds to the album’s tightness and limited scale, but it occasionally begs for more inventive playing.

Sleigh Bells’ heady flashbang of an album.

The duo’s recent fascination with 21st-century disconnection continues, but the bombast is louder and the tranquility is quieter, and in focusing on lucid melodies and unobscured fidelity, they’ve created their most visceral work yet.

Musgraves’ storytelling skills and musical instincts are as strong as ever on star-crossed. While it’s not perfect, love rarely is, and breakups never are.

Given all the heavy ideas and emotions on Any Shape You Take, it’s a minor miracle how bright and immediate it all sounds, without a whiff of self-seriousness or schmaltz.

Despite that mid-tracklist lull, How Long Do You Think It’s Gonna Last?’s existence is welcome. ... Artists want to work with them, and it’s apparent on both Big Red Machine albums that those who choose to do so enjoy it, and therefore make music we enjoy, too.

GLOW ON puts TURNSTILE’s sheer amount of ambition on display, and they deliver on that ambition with a record that widens their scope. Throughout its 15 tracks, their newly expanded sound never falters, and it sees them toying with fresh effects and textures while still maintaining their forceful approach.

Long Time Coming feels refreshingly forward. Ferrell doesn’t tie herself in knots worrying about how her music coheres into a whole, and she doesn’t waste effort trying to make either the record’s pieces or her pieces fit together like a puzzle picture. Bluntly, she tells her listeners what she’s all about by embracing her own untidiness.

Distant Populations is actually heavier in spots than its predecessor, with more driving grooves, more riffs, and mushroom-cloud explosions. Still, after being set up by Interiors, it’s hard not to feel like something’s missing—namely, Capone.

It simply does what CHVRCHES have always done, but it falls short of reaching the exciting thrills of their earlier work. Rather than distilling their sound into its most captivating components, Screen Violence retreads already well-trodden territory.

The elegance of Solar Power is in its warmth, how you can put it on and not pay much attention to its details, and still catch yourself hitting replay.

Over the past eight years, they’ve demonstrated their creative ambition, as well as the courage to move away from the sound that made them successful. And on Infinite Granite, they prove they have the chops to follow the path of their choosing, wherever it may lead.

Shannon and The Clams’ latest record is a rip-roaring listen.

On Scout, Samia makes her own promise to stand by her loved ones, without the sentiment becoming sticky-sweet. The songs focus on the act of cherishing, but deserve to be cherished in their own right.