Under the Sun is eight tracks and 40 minutes long, but every move Maya Shenfeld makes across it seems to happen on a galactic scale. It’s hardly in slow motion, but it requires us to suspend our understanding of time and speed and space and understand something much bigger.

Grounding these cosmic musings is the music itself. There is an effortless quality to Rooting for Love, with Sadier needing little more than her voice and a simple guitar riff to sketch a compelling pop hook.

Instead of breaking new ground or forging a new aspect of her persona, This Is Me…Now, through its title, capitalizes on what already exists.

The players’ energy and Lund’s vocals drive the songs forward. There’s a liveliness throughout the record that never goes away. The album may be dedicated to an “old man”, but the music has plenty of get-up-and-go.

The music is deceptively complex in its simplicity. The individual tracks always carry us to places we didn’t know we were heading.

Though Loss of Life is more reserved, on the whole, the conspicuously backloaded record culminates with a run of songs about sleep, love, and death so deeply felt that it doesn’t matter if MGMT are still joking on some level.

On their third album, Musow Dance, the lineup shifts again, and the energy is as vital as ever as the group continues to celebrate womanhood over some of their most engaging beats to date.

They managed to mask their eclectic influences and occasionally clichéd ideas behind a loud, bold, excessive sound, spectacular visuals, and provocative lyrics about “candle wax melting in my veins”.

Her lyrics are sharp and direct, and the band is there to match her, providing tension and release across all 11 songs. While far from poppy, the songs have a hooky rawness that is addictive.

With the subdued evolution on their new record and a treasured female feature, Omni continue to carve out a distinct identity (with an exacto knife) and shine among the glut of post-punk revivalist bands. That’s a Souvenir worth savoring, for sure.

While TANGK is a mostly successful effort that showcases continued musical growth, it’s hard not to miss the bite that once came with the bark.

Walls Have Ears is certainly less valedictory than Live in Brooklyn 2011. Yet, by virtue of this, it gives a stronger sense of how Sonic Youth earned their unimpeachable credentials through a long-standing ethos of contravention that unsettled musical and artistic complacencies of the time.

On Phasor, we are still orbiting and navigating Lange’s particular dreamy sound space with the familiar debris, but this time, there is a stronger emphasis on the power of relational love.

One of this year’s most striking releases so far. Add in a killer style, playful energy, impeccable production, incredible performances, and some very important representation, and you’ve got one of the most striking pop records of the last few years.

There is nothing weighty going on in the lyrics. Think of Spiel as an instructional audio asking one to listen, turn one’s head, and hear the music again.

It’s unlikely this will be a breakthrough to a larger audience, but to the faithful, this is the latest chapter in one of the most consistently rewarding careers in hip-hop.

The nine tracks are relatively brisk and generally run about three minutes long. The short(ish) time spans fit the urgency expressed.

Saviors probably won’t bring in a lot of new fans, but it will attract lapsed devotees from the past 30 years to check out the band again. These songs will also fit snugly at these upcoming marathon concerts, fitting in snugly between the full album performances of Dookie and American Idiot without sending thousands of people scurrying to the beer lines en masse.

Despite its reserved, dry, soft, and tranquil harmonies, What an Enormous Room sounds even more poppy and self-confident than its predecessors, with its multilayered, luscious-yet-intimate arrangements and a lot of ringing void.

“The Bell” and “Void” take Ty Segall’s listener on an extensive and restless ride in just the first 12 minutes of this 65-minute whopper. The album smooths out a little after that, settling in for 13 more tracks that don’t stray far from what Segall knows and does best.

Carlisle croons in a clear voice layered with dust. He clearly articulates the words and emphasizes the important ones. The details matter. He also lets the syllables slide into each other to express emotions.

Wall of Eyes comes across as a more cohesive project than its older, wilder sibling. Its pace is unhurried, and its songs favor compositional restraint over sheer energy.

People Who Aren’t There Anymore is that rare album where you might find yourself with the unusual but life-affirming compulsion to dance and quietly sob at the same time.

Even with its taut construction, Pick-Up Full of Pink Carnations sags just a bit in the middle. The downside of the renewed focus is that some of the songs sound similar and struggle to assert themselves. .... All of this aside, it is good to hear the Vaccines being a guitar band again—and an excellent one, at that.

Cloudward is a shimmering, deeply satisfying example of a jazz sextet firing on all cylinders. Prepare to be astonished.

It’s good that she kept picking away at that block of ice, as it resulted in what might be her finest album to date.

Black Dog is the sum of these past strange adventures. The mysterious vibes of The Entiry City, the cold, brutal post-industrial of Unflesh, and the avant-pop musings of Pastoral. It is a work reminiscent of Gazelle Twin but also forges a new path. One that is able not only to merge these disparate aspects but also to surpass them.

Inside the beautiful hot pink mess lies Nicki’s most disciplined and adventurous work to date, one that’s sure to cement her position in a constantly expanding field of female rappers.