Even at its darkest, though, softscars is a blast, its turbo-charged riffs and sticky melodies all but begging you to crank the volume up to levels that will require future ENT visits. And there are plenty of purely fun moments here too.

It is the most relaxed of her recent LPs and by far the best, a return to form that privileges the emotional immediacy and kinetic sensation that’s defined the best of her music for years.

So much of Stone feels like stitched-together composites of what has worked well in the past. Momentum is often squandered, and the electrifying bits rarely rise into something more.

For the most part, Protect Your Light takes a more patient and self-reflective approach, vibrating on a different frequency. It’s the act of refilling one’s vessel in song form.

The King offers no light at the end of the tunnel, no promises of inevitable redemption. Grief and anger only give way to more grief and anger. What it does offer though, is an invitation to feel deeply,

May disappoint fans hoping that the muted reception to Frankenstein might inspire the band to shake things up, but Laugh Track does fine-tune its predecessor’s approach, albeit subtly.

The softer turns on Black Rainbows feel nearest to Rae’s earlier material, but those, too, subvert expectations.

These are among some of the most surreal, existential, and fascinating songs of Mitski’s career, zooming out from the exigencies of her vocation to probe the essence of the human condition and our place in the cosmos.

A constant through Linkous’ catalog was the pairing of his most optimistic lyrics with his saddest melodies, giving the sense of a constant battle to transcend the darkness. There’s a similar quality at play in these songs, where the heaviest, thrashiest performances are also the most beautiful.

It’s all so simplified, not only selling short teeangers’ ability to handle more complex emotions (hello, Olivia Rodrigo) but making Teezo look like a generic corporate vessel, genre-hopping to distract from the hollowness.

Hit Parade is the kind of highly original pop assemblage that the Irish singer has seemingly always wanted to make, a record of peerless highs whose best and worst quality is how alienating it just so happens to be.

Jam curation is an underappreciated art (Teo Macero, Carlos Niño, and Mark Hollis are among its greatest practitioners), and DePlume shows a knack for it here.

The result is a meticulously crafted homage to the strobe-lit, chart-topping dance music of the 1990s and 2000s—though, at times, it misses some of the tension that made Romy’s songwriting with the xx so vital.

As he expands his sound beyond genre confines, he can sell a multi-part epic like “Jake’s Piano - Long Island” and a complexly orchestrated slow-burner like “Ticking.” But he doesn’t yet have the same range in his writing, lyrically or melodically.

It’s bolder and more intentional than her 2022 debut, Everything I Know About Love, which felt like a sketchbook compiling the artist’s assumptions and hesitations on the topic. Here, Laufey doesn’t simply let jazz inform the work; she uses it as a vehicle to enact fantasies and ambitions, lending her contemporary musings a misty, out-of-time quality.

A collection of bratty rocker-chick anthems and soul-searching ballads that could slot into the soundtrack of any classic high school flick, from 10 Things I Hate About You to this year’s ludicrous queer sex comedy Bottoms.

The results make for an inspired evolution of his sound, with Blake occasionally glancing in the rearview mirror as he moves in a new direction.

Even the love songs feel lonelier, the landscape more unforgiving. A good Slowdive song has always felt like two lovers huddling together for warmth. But on everything is alive, the forces conspiring against the star-crossed lovers feel more menacing and specific.

trip9love…??? is tender as a bruise, the kind of bruise you press down on now and again, just to confirm that it still hurts—and to take secret pleasure in the ache.

Journey is a carefully curated sampling of Garson’s talents as a composer, arranger, synthesist, and sound designer. It adds to his mystique as a channeler of otherworldly frequencies, a grinning virtuoso tapping into the beyond one patch cable at a time.

He went big on HELLMODE by going smaller. It’s the prettiest album he’s ever made, but it still gets you riled up. That level-up is most audible in HELLMODE’s punk-rock tracks, which offer a dialed-in but not dialed-back tone.

The smarts and spritz of Dupuis’ writing, and the way her mates fuss up the arrangements, make Rabbit Rabbit one of those albums whose complications provide as much pleasure as hooks-hooks-hooks.

The Window’s great gambit is to lean into them anyway, and it pays off spectacularly, heightening the thrills without sacrificing the amiability. What a pleasure it is hearing this charming little band show off.

The chemistry between Earl and Alchemist comes from how naturally their styles blend together, as if VOIR DIRE is some kind of prophecy being fulfilled by the universe. It’s a record that was meant to be: simple, elegant, and always true.

Burna Boy has more than established himself; I Told Them is an adventurous promise that he won’t become complacent.

It is a joy to hear, and a reminder that the struggle for a better world is a beautiful and worthwhile endeavor, despite the many powerful voices that work daily to convince us otherwise. branch fought the good fight until the very end.

The best songs will be welcome additions to their live repertoire; it’s already riveting to watch them play these songs at full dual drummer power. But the threads that bind these songs are loose and inconsistent.

Even if you get the sense her best work still lies ahead, it’s refreshing to see an emerging star earn their concept album.