On Delight, Jain grasps for a joy that lies tantalizingly out of reach, bringing melodies informed by Raga Bageshri into dazzling contact with modular synthesis and digital manipulation.

English Teacher can’t leave a song alone: Not a track goes by without a twist or complication, whether a time-signature change, an instrumental flourish, or a sudden wall of sound. .... Most promising, and core to This Could Be Texas, is the band’s interest in melding indie-prog, rock, folk electronica, and post-punk into a new package.

Musically, it feels like the first St. Vincent album since Marry Me presented without a unifying aesthetic: at various points, Clark incorporates Bond theme melodrama, Steely Dan-style prog, bouncy art pop and lechy industrial rock, making for what is arguably her loosest record, an exhale after years of fitting her songs into increasingly tight restraints. It’s a freedom that carries through to the album’s emotional content.

If Nature Morte was a Richter scale-busting apocalypse of a record, A Chaos of Flowers is the ominous aftershock, an extended reverberation that accrues its own awesome, unsettling force.

Channeling avant-garde techniques into melancholic folk-pop produces an album of tremendous psychological and emotional complexity, where the interior world is—even at its most desolate—full of vibrant, complicated life.

The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.

Wiltzie spends a lot of the album’s runtime in his orchestral-drone comfort zone, but whenever the terrain threatens to sound too well trod, he pulls out something like “Dim Hopes,” with its twinkling constellation of vibraphones, or “Stock Horror,” which seems in the process of being ground up and devoured by the earth.

This is a bolder, clearer, preternaturally vivid iteration of their music.

On this one, they fall short of reinvention, which also means they are still—improbably, unmistakably—Pearl Jam.

For all its oblique melodies and wobbly production, Your Day Will Come evokes a strange kind of beauty.

The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology, maximally bloated with 15 (15!) additional songs. Those that stand out mostly do so for the wrong reasons.

Tortured Poets’ extended Anthology edition runs over two hours, and even in the abridged version, its sense of sprawl creeps down to the song level, where Swift’s writing is, at best, playfully unbridled and, at worst, conspicuously wanting for an editor.

Baldi muses, “Can you believe how far I have come?” Anyone who’s been listening since Turning On won’t either. Cloud Nothings have never sounded so committed to going the distance.

Perhaps an entire project of shapeshifting arrangements would be too personal for comfort, a too-clear window into Thornalley’s mind. For now, he seems content to keep us at arm’s length, his exquisite music a shield against the vulnerability of really being seen.

Rose’s voice is as pure and light as ever, but the most inspired part of This Ain’t the Way is how the album repositions that quiet register as silent rage.

Sometimes, the lyrics on One Million Love Songs unhelpfully pull you from your seat just when it’s just starting to get good. .... But the album masters melancholy anyway, using careful guitar and vocal flourishes to make the music’s embryonic self-consciousness feel urgent, like it’s yours.

It settles for being a mildly adventurous AAA rap album made by two friends searching for fun in heartbreak.

Yes, girl in red is capable of another skin-deep album about crushes and self-doubt. But it would be far more interesting to see her attempt sincere emotional depth.

There’s nothing woefully timestuck about these sensitive dance songs, though. They’re made by someone living passionately in the moment and rushing into the future at breakbeat speed.

Cummings linked with Topanga Canyon vintage king and session ace Jonathan Wilson, who freed her to focus on not holding back. That is commendable, but it results in an album that has the dynamic range and limited application of a strong flashlight. You recognize its incredible power, but you’d do best not to stare into the source for very long.

Don’t Forget Me is, in many ways, its inverse: It inhabits parties and frantic nights out, yet the tracks carry the steady, guitar-backed propulsion of a road movie. Rogers, at last, sounds sure of her destination.

The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same.

In A LA SALA, each member of the trio has several opportunities to shine while making each track sound individual, and it all comes together cohesively because Khruangbin know where their strengths lie.

The strongest songs sparkle with a morose charm. On “Dumb Guitar” and “Shipwreck,” Balency-Béarn’s plainspoken singing wafts over murky lounge-pop, giving The Sunset Violent some much-needed friction.

The Libertines may be running low on originality, but they can still produce a strong tune when the muse strikes.

It’s astonishing what he can do with so little. Marci keeps ample daylight between the instruments in his beats, leaving plenty of elbow room for his incredibly dense writing. He’s in top form here, spinning superhuman mafioso tales from impenetrable thickets of rhymes that contract and expand like gasses changing form.

Interplay does just about enough to keep everyone happy: Shoegaze fans get a sonic-cathedral finale, while Ride follow their creative whims. Without many truly great songs, though, Ride might have been wise to play to their strengths, rather than coveting someone else’s.

The Black Keys who, after 23 years together, know themselves well enough to know how to accentuate their strengths by choosing the right musician for the right song, confident that they’ll wind up with a record that sounds unmistakably like themselves.

As the geometric tones of closer “Take Me to Your Leader” blip and fold into themselves, it becomes clear that, short as it is, Exotic Birds of Prey still has the loose and expansive feel of a radio show. There’s no easier way to visit outer space.

It’s fascinating to watch Shakira take big swings and extend her dominance, but there’s a little piece that’s missing: some small token to show what made her such an icon in the first place.

Only God Was Above Us is also the most honest album Vampire Weekend have made, an encapsulation of what the band does best, melodic and abstruse in Koenig’s own masterful way.

Ultimately, the release of The Carnegie Hall Concert feels right on time, providing a welcome jolt of focus to a widespread impression of Alice Coltrane that’s started to seem just a tad vague. .... As this set shows, she always contained multitudes.

If it’s a bid for dance-pop stardom, then the big singles—finely crafted though they are—are too few, too timid. If it’s meant as a deep-house long-player, it’s paddling in the shallow end.

Evolution’s fatal flaw is conflating being ubiquitous and being generic.

Where experimental music often favors gnarly harmonies and knotty melodies, Moran’s approach is more subtle. Moves in the Field shows us that technique doesn’t need to be showy or daring—without sacrificing rigor or heft, it can also be tender.

By using country as a starting point for experimentation and recalling genre-porous artists like Ray Charles, Candi Staton, Charley Pride, and the Pointer Sisters, Cowboy Carter asserts Beyoncé’s place in this long legacy while showcasing the ever-expanding reaches of her vocal prowess. .... Her magnitude tends to cast a shadow over everything before her, no matter the medium. The side effect of this is that some of Cowboy Carter’s songs feel small and ill-suited for Beyoncé’s stature.

Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey.

Bite Down is at its best when Rosali complicates an idea rather than simply circling it.

The terrain is familiar but Tyla is playful within it.

None of it’s bad, sometimes it’s good, but why now? .... They take the easy way out by evoking past memories rather than building new ones. Understandable because remembering the old days is pretty sweet, well, until it hits you that they’re gone.

For Your Consideration thrives on the elasticity of the human voice, while its lyrics turn from underhanded lovers to the flush of new affairs.

Real Power plays like the jovial, carefree sound of friends enjoying each other’s company; they just happen to have instruments in hand.

The music—bubbly, nebulous, free—seems to have a mind of its own.

Ultimately, what’s different about Glasgow Eyes is not the form but the tenor. As they advance into middle age, the tension between the Reid brothers has dissipated, giving Glasgow Eyes an unusually congenial spirit.

Her mind is alive and humming, and her language leaps out at you with its hunger.

The free-flowing and intuitive nature of the sessions is apparent in the recordings, which have the amiable looseness of first takes. You get the sense, sometimes, that they are figuring out a song’s ideal arrangement as they track it.

Everything I Thought It Was brims with a misplaced confidence that can only be described as Timberlakean, laboring for such a long, long runtime under the misapprehension that a risk-averse mop bucket of last decade’s trending sounds is gonna hit through the sheer force of its performer’s waning charisma.

In tone and mood, Three is the opposite of Hebden’s stadium setlists. But within the carefully thought-out parameters of what makes a Four Tet record, he’s finding new, quieter ways to surprise.

This vulnerability World Wide Whack puts on display is truly affecting, but for a convention-busting artist as Whack, her directness feels strikingly ordinary.

Unfathomable sorrow and controlled fury give the album its shape.

Deeper Well is sympathetically fame-agnostic and focused on steadying Musgraves’ axis, but its emollient balms also aren’t particularly satisfying when you know what she’s capable of.

If you love Burial—particularly the maudlin turn of his work over the past decade—you’ll love the outsized pathos of “Boy Sent From Above” and the high drama of “Dreamfear.” If you feel like you’ve heard enough pasted-on vinyl crackle to last a lifetime, or aren’t particularly invested in the hagiography of rave music’s formative years, you probably won’t find anything new here.

Smith may have abandoned his trench-coat persona in favor of a more honest self-portrait, but the line between the authentic self and the larger-than-life character remains provocatively fuzzy.

Like John Coltrane, Freitas has learned how to approach his compositions with the same confident, wildly adventurous spirit he brings to his instrument. In doing so, he’s left behind some of the accessibility of his early records, but in its place, he’s forged something transcendent.

With Flora Ocean Tiger Bloom, Ubovich offers a resounding reaffirmation that psych-rock is forever, even if the escape it provides from our cruel world is ultimately temporary.

Drawing on a sumptuous palette of classic synth pop and leftfield electronic music, Pupul imbues his songs with personality and soul, unearthing complicated truths about his relationship to his heritage while finding welcome release on the dancefloor.

sunshine is a slightly scattered, but emotionally generous collection of music that cycles compassionately through the collapse of one relationship and into the hopeful beginning of another.

On Bleachers—especially on the singles-heavy first half—the band is simply playing for each other, much to the songs’ benefit.

The cacophonous, vexing, endlessly fascinating The Collective represents the experience of logging off and finding that your perception of the real world has been forever altered. Few are better equipped than Gordon—who, at 70, is still cooler, smarter, and more fearless than most—to guide us through.

As usual, the feeling of her vocals is more compelling than its literal meaning. These opening songs are strong enough. .... However, by the time we get to these songs towards the end of the album, the fatigue of listening to familiar riffs and howls starts to set in. Playing Favorites is at its best right in the middle.

Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").

This is a brutally loud album, its low end practically steroidal; downstrokes are accompanied by walloping thwacks, rendering the guitar a percussive instrument as much as a tonal one. Few records—certainly few records that take their cues from the heaviest strains of metal—can boast such a vast dynamic range.

As a listener, you pay attention not just to those steps but to the overtones that fill the air in between. Each chord is a burr of wonderment.

The album is spritely, frequently bright, as intensely melodic as Ex Hex’s triumphant Rips and more playful than a record this heartbroken probably should be.

Few MCs, on his label or elsewhere, are capable of firing in so many different directions and hitting this many targets at once without sounding out of their depth, but Q corrals the ups and downs of his lavish lifestyle into a deliriously entertaining joyride.

If you, like Webster, feel most at home in the warm glow of a band in the pocket of a groove, Underdressed at the Symphony delivers just under 40 minutes of gentle melodies and extended jams, a soft landing pad after the end of a romance.

I Got Heaven moves with an intuitive grace that makes it feel stadium-sized without losing its nuance or its grounding in the scene that birthed it. It’s easy to love, and it knows it.

There’s no disco excursion on Daniel—they already pulled off that trick on 2020’s The Main Thing—but it’s the cleanest and leanest album they’ve ever made.

I’d argue that 4L and Up 2 Më are bolder than anything here: Yeat’s older projects threw you into the deep end of his magma flows and fuzzy world-building and asked that you either get it or don’t. An album this safe and familiar will be great for packing out bigger concert venues but only makes his musical identity more nebulous.

The Past Is Still Alive’s fantastical yet sharply observed writing and revival of a more traditional sound feels like a homecoming.

Where we go from here isn’t just a throwback. It carries the spirit forward, reaffirming that indie rock, as a style and ethos, can still feel like the most exciting thing a young person could be into.

The songwriting is distinguished by its bite and brevity.

For all its finesse, it can obviously never replicate the futurism that defined its biggest inspirations; these classy reproductions only highlight the chasm between us and that halcyon moment.

It’s a fairly conventional set of club bangers done right: This is an alluring, nonchalant flex between albums that’s weird enough to drop in the hyperpop Discord, but satisfying enough to play at your next birthday party.

The album-closing title track, which charts weird new territory not just for MGMT, but in some small sense, for pop itself. .... is, in other words, the perfect thematic conclusion to an imperfect album. And more to the point, it just hits.

As good as it often is, Mowed Sound reinforces what, in retrospect, has been Nance’s conundrum all along: He remains the clerk across the record store counter, gushing about all the things he loves without being able to tell you the one he likes best, the one he would forever commit to calling his own.

On Blu Wav, Grandaddy’s first album in seven years, Lytle leans into bittersweet Americana twang, a natural fit for his fatally flawed, cautiously optimistic cast of characters.

As a synergistic mythmaking effort, the album is certainly doing its job; as music to soundtrack your actual life, well, it’s about time lute pop got its shine.

While a few songs here could be Chromeo canon, Adult Contemporary too often feels like a glossy recreation of their earlier sound that’s missing the idiosyncrasy and baked-in humor.

Nothing in contemporary music sounds quite like it, yet it seems to have always been with us, hovering just outside the realm of possibility.

None of these modes are new—you might hear echoes of the Ramones’ brash vintage punk, PJ Harvey’s spare 4-track demos, or Jeff Rosenstock’s radically optimistic pop-punk—but Grace comfortably inhabits each.

These songs are not as impassioned or ornate as “cherubim” or “four ethers,” but serpentwithfeet hasn’t lost his bite.

He plays with fewer frills than he did on Uneasy—but his fantastic instincts make the consistency of his beats another motor behind the record’s forward locomotion.

Cohen’s songs can sound loose and jammy on a first listen. The delicate strummed figure that kicks off opener “Milk” quickly refracts into pinwheeling dual leads—both played by Cohen, uncannily evoking a live performance—before the band settles into a groove, anchored by Evan Backer’s sensitive bass playing and Daniel Swire’s crisp drums (Evan Burrows plays drums on two other tracks).

On TANGK, Idles smooth their rougher edges as they explore love in all of its facets—it would be their warmest and most melodic record to date, if only Talbot could get out of his own way.

On their second album, Harm’s Way, McGreevy and fellow guitarist Lewis don’t do much to upset their winning formula; they just execute it with more militaristic precision.

There is an uncanny, even hollow air to the album. It can feel a bit like watching a Super Bowl commercial: the budget is all there on the screen, the lighting and set dressing and sound design just so, but you can’t shake the nagging sense that there is no center, just a clot of references without a referent.

For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one.

Coming Home is full of delectable singles that prove Usher is still the king of pop-R&B—he’s simply reminding his fans what he can do, how many ways he can do it, and how nastily, too, if you’ll allow him.

Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off.

Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked.

There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away.

The clarity of her voice is most appropriate for this album, which encourages trusting yourself enough to surrender to uncertainty.

[The “Underdubbed” version is] not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. .... Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.

You crave a little more wreckage in their wake—a more wanton relinquishing of control, perhaps—but their abundant debut more or less lets them have their cake and eat it.

Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind.

An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.

Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.