The songs sound as fresh as morning air through open kitchen windows.

While it showcases the breadth and the peaks of her capabilities, My 21st Century Blues lacks a clear thematic throughline.

Rush!, their first album recorded mainly in English, is absolutely terrible at every conceivable level: vocally grating, lyrically unimaginative, and musically one-dimensional. It is a rock album that sounds worse the louder you play it.

Gaze into Smalltown Stardust’s airy arrangements and you might see a reverse image of previous King Tuff records. That was music made for the cold dark of night, or at least a dimly curtained bedroom; this is music made to be heard in the reassuring glow of sunshine.

Heavy Heavy sweeps its listener along, churchlike, and conveys the feeling that resisting the urge will always feel worse than rising up and pushing the air from your lungs. And then, after a brief 10 tracks, it’s all over—as if the procession has marched on, out of earshot. But the invite is still there extended: It’s up to you whether to accept it or not.

New York City is less a reflection of the sanitized, hyper-gentrified New York of today than a reaction against it—sneering from the paint-peeling dive bars, flipping off the real-estate vultures, and summoning the snottiest ghosts of the city’s punk past.

Dancehall is a singles-driven genre, but Popcaan often shines in the album format, so it’s regrettable that many of these 17 songs feel so lackluster. For a genre rooted in joy and conviviality, the letdown is hard to ignore.

Those looking for Graham from Blur will find it in his laconic vocal turns and occasional guitar explosions, while Dougall’s dreamily dejected melodies will resonate with fans of her solo work. But The WAEVE has its own chemistry, an alchemic mixture of psych, punk, folk, tenderness, and dread, laced with dextrous saxophone tones and a few come-hither drops of terror.

Refining the sprawling sound of Souvenir, Portrait of a Dog is produced entirely by the Toronto group BADBADNOTGOOD, encasing Yano’s melancholy lyrics and tranquil guitar playing in a more casual environment and giving the album a meditative, inviting tone.

Twain’s team of co-writers and producers have past credits with Halsey, Justin Bieber, Pitbull, Fred again.., and Iggy Azalea, and too often the material they’ve assembled for Twain feels like third-tier scraps intended for other clients. Queen of Me’s bland and plasticine arrangements are a far cry from the energy and sizzle of hits like “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman.”

Dead Meat’s sound may be a throwback, but it’s so tunefully crafted that it charms the way it did the first time around.

It speaks to Baird’s ever-expanding ethos that, after 20 years of eager, in-depth collaboration, she’s managed to sound more like herself than ever.

It’s all so easy to digest, so pitch-perfect, so safe. Let’s Start Here. clearly and badly wants to be hanging up on those dorm room walls with Currents and Blonde and IGOR.

Cyclamen’s ruminative moments work in tandem with its daydreamy instrumentation, a balancing act Graham extends to the album’s most transcendent songs.

On We Cater to Cowards, Oozing Wound have downsized to a smaller ride, but they’ve filled the tank with rocket fuel, and they’ve never sounded more comfortable behind the wheel.

On Every Acre, McEntire’s patient observations of the land provide her with a new footing: one full of possibility and promise. It’s in the commitment to stasis that McEntire finds the fortitude to begin anew.

Lewis’ singing is one of the few novelties on AudioLust & HigherLove. The rest is all breezy grooves and cabana jams, frictionless and blemish-free.

Disc One gives us the final studio album, remixed and scrubbed fresh so we can avail ourselves once more of its glorious shadows and submerge ourselves in its delicious mood. The remaining four discs—two of unreleased outtakes, one previously available, and a live set—repositions Time Out of Mind as a rebirth rather than a farewell.

On One Day, Fucked Up sound freer and more purely happy to be making music together than they have in years.

The album’s more pleasing songs, like “Charm You” and “Honey,” are campfire ditties with rich, inviting harmonies. These brief moments of levity suggest that, in the face of existential dread, maybe it is more rewarding to sing with the people you love than about them.

Pastiche is the entire point of Lobes. Maybe its period recreations provide some surface pleasures, but it’s not enough to erase the suspicion that We Are Scientists have turned into indie-rock journeymen, content to dabble in sounds and styles that have just fallen out of fashion.

Recent hit single aside, Smith has somehow never felt further from pop’s molten core. It’s still a pleasure to watch a singer who once consigned themselves to lovesick, gender-neutral ballads spread their wings.

Rejecting escapism and celebrating invention, Does Spring Hide Its Joy is equally compelling and uncompromising. The music and the feeling of being absorbed in it is its own reward.

There’s an album’s worth of tracks here that put Clavish head and shoulders above his peers, which only makes the other album’s worth of misfires more disappointing for their inclusion.

One of the most radical departures in Segall’s catalog and a significant breakthrough for the band, exposing and refining the complex mechanisms behind their murky sound.

His voice remains unmistakable, a walnut burl with cracks in the grain. The stentorian register that Cale used to wield with authority is absent. ... Cale’s here, once again and for now, still not making things easy on anyone.

RiotUSA, who’s produced most of Spice’s music since her 2021 debut, saves the lethargic midpoints with skittering tracks that sound like true collaborations as opposed to premade beats. In just six songs, the duo experiments with the past, present, and future of drill.

Evocative images recur throughout Time’s Arrow, which is full of flashing lights, water, and dreams that offer mesmerizing spaces for getting lost. ... Time’s Arrow’s consistency also works against it. The record’s more placid songs bleed together.

From the self-deprecating shrug of a title to its brief run time, the aesthetic details of Anyhow suggest a musical trifle. But the reality is a work of profound detail, fascinating musical textures, melodic twists, and stylistic ambiguity that is more diamond dust than pocket lint.

At 35 minutes, it’s more a sampler than a full set—essentially a bonus feature for one of the year’s finest rock albums. You already know that these three musicians have forged a thrilling chemistry amidst the chaos of the pandemic. That this live album exists indicates that they know it, too.

Though each track is named for where it was recorded, there’s not much to distinguish one stop from another, and though you could connect the locations into a journey, these tracks don’t form an arc but play as if stacked atop one another.

Plain’s solo music has always rooted itself in a sense of calm, but with Prize, she also offers up the understated beauty of observation.

Rarely does an album this understated say so much.

While she’s writing less about the details of her own experience, her music still speaks to life’s murky specifics.

Belle and Sebastian have always been focused on connection, and on Late Developers, they’re unpretentious about sharing that bond and generous in reinforcing it.

There are moments when Every Loser’s carefree bravado degenerates into puerile silliness (amid the Stonesy trash of “All the Way Down,” you’ll find nuggets like “I’m gonna blow up a turd!”), but such outbursts are balanced by more nuanced, emotionally resonant performances.

SNOOP CUBE 40 $HORT is merely a good album on its own merits, which is not shocking at all to anyone who’s followed these rappers in their resting-on-laurels decades.

I find myself wishing Dicker had allowed himself to get just a little weirder in these more muted, more indistinguishable tracks. Nevertheless, The Work holds together elegantly, moving from pick-me-up to gentle comedown, and at its peak affording a keen-eyed glimpse of a better self, a brighter world.

Landwerk No. 3 never quite transcends the image of a man playing along to his records. The best experimental turntablism can make the listener feel as if a ghost has entered the room. Listening to Landwerk is like eavesdropping on somebody else’s séance, but luckily, these spirits have a lot to tell us.

Harvey has never settled. She has never released a staid or unsurprising album in her life. She has always favored uncompromising gestures. ... And here, scattered across these six LPs, is a surplus of proof.

Each of the Whisky shows is dotted with extended between-song pauses that are long enough to necessitate their own track designations. But these sorts of gaffes are small prices to pay for the illicit thrill of hearing the Trick in their primordial prime, rampaging through the darkest and most deranged songs in their repertoire.

The result is one of the most structured, deliberate releases of Frisell’s career, a diaristic set that no one will ever mistake for a genre study.

Dal Forno is a perfectionist, but instead of letting that tendency crowd her music, she stakes out a few places in her compositions to plant each refined detail. Many of the songs are grounded by a sturdy, repetitive bassline.

The record is self-assured and polyvalent, a current of shifting emotional states that MIKE’s exquisite word and production choices shape into rich affirmations.

Changes is the most subdued and modest record of the Gizzard’s October harvest.

Laminated Denim gives us two linear, conventionally structured, vocal-driven songs that carve out their own lane in the Gizzard discography, somewhere between the ceaseless propulsion of their signature strobe-lit rock-outs and the blissful melodicism that defines their occasional forays into pastoral whimsy. ... The two pieces on Laminated Denim stay true to their original mission: They each make 15 minutes go by in a breeze.

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava stakes its claim as the band’s most agitated yet fiercely funky record.

On his latest album, Almanac Behind, nature takes center stage, sometimes overwhelming the music completely.

Deep Fantasy captured the ferocity of an absurdly tight band playing together in a room, thrashing against the walls and playing off each other’s anger. That ferocity has faded. By contrast, Premonition sounds like talented professionals working remotely.

There’s a lightness to Simz’ tender explorations of Black fatherhood, the failure of her community to help those struggling with mental crises, and the slippery loss of solidarity across economic divides on “Broken.” Sometimes the production’s soft edges can belie the bite of the words, but overall it’s a pairing that brims with possibility.

Without a lyric sheet on hand, you can still enjoy the pure animality of Mahony’s voice. You’ll only catch an actual word here and there, but her psychodramatic tantrums—imagine Miss Piggy going apeshit on Maury—are a delight in and of themselves.

For a box set focused on a single album, it doesn’t feel as self-indulgent as it might have; the multiple versions of songs are perhaps excessive for a passive listen, but the collection represents an invaluable document of his artistic growth.

SOS is a clear document of how extensively SZA has sharpened her songwriting since the exquisite CTRL, how she’s become an even more exacting lyricist and imaginative musician. While placing herself firmly in the tradition of R&B, she’s forcefully blasé about genre tropes.

Metro is great when he makes Metro-type beats, shaky when he ventures outside of his comfort zone. On Heroes & Villains, he surpasses his standard quota of bangers while also taking a few fun risks.

Live at the Fillmore sounds and feels vibrant and inviting, and it is curated with obvious attention and care.

Still impossible to pigeonhole, his hybrid of classical, chamber pop, baroque, and jazz is as thrilling as ever, while the newly stripped-back arrangements heighten the intimacy of a songwriter seeing himself clearly.

Often, the band feels like they’re deliberately avoiding their old tricks, finding new ways to arrive at the same destination. Generally, the proceedings have a light touch, a gentleness that is readily apparent on the opening shuffle “Love Earth” but also on the thicker rock’n’roll of “The World (Is in Trouble Now).”

If Stormzy’s last album, and the pressure to speak for a generation, weighed heavily, then This Is What I Mean feels lighter, freer.

Inspired by a dream and grounded in no concrete narrative, the magic is in the satiny vocals and paisley compositions, a world unto itself.

Wrangling together dozens of technical ideas and arranging them with idiosyncratic flair, NNAMDÏ enters this challenging middle zone without compromising his priorities. It’s what makes Please Have a Seat the best he’s ever sounded.

A frustrating listen from a brilliantly talented artist. For all of its angels and prophecies and mid-century decadence, what we are left with is a very quiet collection of songs with all the weight of ephemera.

Dijon is in her element here, eager to expand house music’s limits. For every pulse-racing dance breakdown, there’s a surprise.

With Both, it was exciting to see an underground lifer finally getting his due; Through a Room confirms Nace’s inquisitive spirit and formidable skills.

The record has a calculated fishbowl quality, chronicling the group’s rise and accelerated decline through the lens of a mercurial Svengali. It’s a victory lap with a slightly bitter aftertaste, like champagne left uncorked in a trashed hotel suite.

Her pursuits on softCORE prove that it’s possible for pop-punk and R&B to exist in the same space, which adds a fresh take on the nostalgia train steering the former’s resurgence. While the endeavor is admirable and audacious, its execution isn’t as seamless as the fluidity of Fousheé’s own voice.

Until now, Okay Kaya records have often felt like a compelling viewpoint in search of a sound, but on SAP, Wilkins’ arrangements have finally caught up to her free-roaming mind.

KD3’s most effective songs are the ones pulled toward opposite poles:.

It’s the sound of an artist drawing from his repertoire while demonstrating that he is still looking to the future.

Its demanding hour-and-a-half runtime never pushes Dawson’s music to places it hasn’t gone before, even if it’s all executed with his typically handwoven sense of craft. The insights feel slightly stunted, as Dawson trades out the pained, everyday compassion that he’s conveyed so deeply in his more earthbound music for dystopian scenarios that can’t quite settle on a clear premise.

CAZIMI, Rose’s long-delayed third record, makes a complete song cycle out of those entanglements, with each cut reflecting the proper amount of neon.

The rhythms are stately and unsyncopated. The arrangements are lushly orchestral. The songs are mostly around six minutes long, proceeding at the unhurried pace of guided meditations. And, perhaps owing to the sense of communion-via-solitude espoused in the first track, the lyrics are concerned with “we” nearly as often as they are with “I”.

My Heart was Shoman’s breakout moment as a songwriter, and A Swollen River is foremost a triumph for Tenci, the band.

Parker’s latest may be his first live album, but it’s also the product of a mad scientist, cackling over a mixing board. Time is dilated, curated, edited, and intercut, and the very live-ness of a concert recording turns fascinatingly, fruitfully convoluted—even when the artists responsible are four players participating in the age-old custom of jamming together in a room.

Love’s rapture is on full display on the lyrics sheet, but throughout Myself in the Way, the chemistry feels lab-sterilized.

Die Cut / City Planning feels like a record without a center of gravity, no matter how enjoyable the drifting may be.

Listeners who have struggled to appreciate previous releases will hear more of the same in Comradely Objects. Those who are attuned, who find that the band’s smallest pivots can induce a feeling approaching euphoria, will encounter the album as a carnival of delights.

It’s got character, and more than that, it’s got energy: Springsteen has never sounded quite so lighthearted, so unburdened, on record.

Written and recorded during an extended stay on Ireland’s windswept west coast, the follow-up to Land of No Junction reaps lucidity from family bonding and fleeing the city in search of peace. With it, Frances’ psych-folk soliloquies arrive like postcards from a friend who’s just beginning to open up.

After a while, the songs on Alpha Zulu begin to mimic the experience of observing objects in a museum—you can admire all you want, but please don’t touch.

They each bring out some of each other’s best work. ... The tracks where Richard takes a back seat spotlight Zahn’s remarkable maturation as a composer; overcoming the slightly somnolent pleasantness of his previous work, he creates rich, mesmerizing arrangements that subtly shift the mood from piece to piece.

There are moments of considered writing and bursts of Drake at or near his mischievous best, but in its middle, the record becomes inert, making the bits of self-conscious misanthropy scan as strained rather than gleeful, as if the id could be focus-grouped.

Back Home provides heart-rending moments alongside its punk grit, expanding on Big Joanie’s sound without loosening their bite.

He’s got undeniable talent, refined taste, and a studio of cool friends. Yet, despite it all, Cometa fails to leave a lasting impression, convey a guiding sensibility, or, worse, clarify anything remotely idiosyncratic about Nick Hakim.

The band’s daring pays off when vocalist Julian Cashwan Pratt breaks his voice wide open on tracks that dig into sounds that are firsts for the band, and consummate what were previously flirtations with dance music.

More than a side project or a solo moniker now, Is It Going to Get Any Deeper Than This? joyfully cements the Soft Pink Truth’s era as a band—and one that throws a hell of a party.

Crybaby displays neither the maturity of a band in a retrospective era, nor the sense of fun of a band trying not to grow up; instead, there’s something loose-ended about it—like it’s a companion piece to all the mythmaking and nostalgizing, rather than the other way around.

Across Endure, Special Interest embellish the cornerstones they established on 2018’s Spiralling and 2020’s The Passion Of with gestures that wouldn’t sound out of place on ’90s radio.

There are shards of intriguing ideas buried in the album’s plodding acoustics and garish rock-pop confections, but Fletcher fails to excavate them.

Svengali feels like a milestone he’s been working toward for years—a smooth balance of anxiety and aggression, love and lust, confidence and vulnerability. Whether he’s pleading for love or manipulating it in the shadows, Cakes’s decisive presence ties it all together.

ILYSM isn’t a brilliant album, but it shines bright and it soothes an aching soul. In this case, that’s more than enough.

It’s unfortunate that she appears to have doubled down on this habit on her debut album. Often, songs sound more like tributes to her influences than reinventions.

Entergalactic is an unusual addition to Cudi’s discography, a small statement from a rapper who prides himself on big, aimless ones. It doesn’t wallow. It doesn’t rage. It just sort of lingers pleasantly. It’s the easy hang that Cudi usually works so hard to deny himself.

Reason in Decline doesn’t pose. Instead, these 10 tightly coiled songs rightfully treat those former concerns—bitter character studies of lovers and townies, jilted analyses of the overcrowded underground—like Clinton-era trifles, conflicts of no consequence in a time of autocrats and prospective apocalypse.

These songs bend and stretch like they’re toying with psych pop, even though the music is still delivered through Frankie Cosmos’ now-trademark minimalism.

Tove Lo herself often sounds lethargic while singing these songs. She is contending with far more serious subject matter here than on, say, Sunshine Kitty; she is not enjoying herself. She is less daring, less awake, less alive to the pleasures of sex and love than she ever has been.

Actual Life 3 has moments of brilliance and will certainly connect with big festival crowds. ... But music that focuses on reality tends to work best when it is doggedly cinematic or highly relatable; Actual Life 3 is neither, instead frequently slipping into mundanity.

There’s still plenty of pop culture shoutouts and nods to modern mundanity delivered in a deadpan voice, but at their best they feel less like provocations and more like world-building details—observations of a messy world contextualized with messy anxieties about growing up.

The result is an album defined largely by what it lacks compared to the band’s past work: a reduction rather than an expansion. Waiting Game proves the duo can conjure their trademark atmosphere without many of their usual tools, but it’s harder to identify what their music gains from losing them.