This is a staggering return to form for the Glaswegian quartet, the sound of Franz Ferdinand coming home after a four year long absence--with the right thoughts, the right words, and the right album.

Foreverly offers many pleasures but would have been easier to swallow as a 6-song EP.

While 99¢ manages to find its footing at a number of points, it never manages to prop itself up as a whole.

Despite some glaring issues, Sept. 5th manages to stay listenable, and offers occasional glimpses of genuine inspiration.

It’s not her best (nothing is quite like “Get Some”) but it’s a fresh change from an artist who gave us both subtle and surefire signs she might head in this direction.

The nonchalant attitude Wavves approaches music-making with provides a cap to the height it can reach in terms of producing something truly excellent or groundbreaking. However, that’s kind of the whole point.

It’s been well over a decade since Julian Casablancas & Co. have released an album as taut and wasted and sexy as Anthems for Doomed Youth.

Strangers isn’t bottled lightning like The Moon & Antarctica or The Lonesome Crowded West, nor does it contain a magnitude 9 single like Good News or Ship, but its unwieldy stature and combative stance compliments Modest Mouse’s storied discography.

He now realizes he is as much part of the product as the music he makes and seems happy to be taking a backseat to the performers he’s enlisted for his fifth studio album. At no point do Harris’ sandpapery vocals scrape against the beat; this time he lets his beats do the talking.

A perfect pop soundtrack for the summer search for perfect love.

In the end, What a Time reminds us that music is best when it’s enjoyed when in the company of others. It’s a project that demands that the listener live vicariously through it and looks to give hope through music to those willing to listen. Nothing more, nothing less.

It’s light, jangly, and just right for the summer at the end of this wintry tunnel.

If another goal of art could be said to remove humanity, if only for a moment, from the physical world by using the tools of the very same physical world, Interiors has followed all the rules of architecture to make a building that floats.

A widely varied and ultimately satisfying record.

The album is good, which is a component never worth underscoring. But it could be much more than that.

It’s all over the place, but in a good way. After all, when two people come together to create one identity, it makes sense for that identity to be a bit mercurial.

The Air-Conditioned Nightmare is ultimately an experience as disorienting as the sensations and emotions that Woodhead describes, strangely beautiful one minute and aggressively ear-splitting the next.

While there are elements within that suggest a compelling cocktail of high-drama and low self-awareness, Everything You’ve Come to Expect is more dour than it needs to, or should, be.

Where the album certainly succeeds, though, is in its crafting of a colorful, if a tad overlong, mission statement for a producer still only beginning to approach the extent of his potential.

hese Days… isn’t the kind of sharp-to-the-touch effort that one associates with excellent rappers who eschew the mainstream.... It’s the start of a conversation; and one can only hope that he plans on finishing it.

Individual melodies may not stick in your head, but Magnifique, as a complete work, offers a musical experience unavailable beyond Ratatat’s veteran production table.

Semicircle’s many pleasures--of melody, of tone color, of ideals never losing the beat--deserve an essay’s worth of exposition (no, really).

What the band still manages to do so well is use aural snippets from a range of contrasting but conventional sources, weave them together and still sound like no one else out there.

The brew of Anything In Return is strong enough that its overly sugary moments don’t ruin the experience of the album, and it’s certainly strong enough to merit many, many plays.

Rapor is an absorbing and accomplished 80’s sheened synth-pop EP infused with heartache and imagination.

The reality is that Something to Tell You, though strong in its own right, just doesn’t quite live up to the pomp and circumstance established by Days.

Migos have mastered their craft, but they spend too much time delivering what we expect instead of exploring their more interesting caprices.

Little Boots knows how to write a hook.

This Is… Icona Pop is not revolutionary, original, or inventive.... What This Is… Icona Pop, and Icona Pop as an artistic duo, possess that few others can lay claim to, is a firm grasp on the musical zeitgeist.

Flawless transitions are endemic to the record, and necessary in order to cram this many ideas into an attention-deficit 32 minutes.

Ryan Adams unearths new emotional riches, mostly sad ones, from his source material. And his 1989 transcends mere tribute.

Bundick’s inspirations run rampant across the back half of Michael.

It’s an enjoyable and diversionary, if not particularly nutritious, experience.

Offerings of pure pop pleasure are offset with healthy doses of weirdness. It’s a sincere, exciting and excitable album that successfully adds by subtracting.

Though it never quite comes through crystal-clear, the intensity and sincerity of the underlying emotion manages to bleed through a confusing swirl of altered sounds.

Mind Of Mine is a better whole than a collection of songs, and the standouts tend to be the shorter, less unambitious ditties (the theatrical “It’s You”; the gut-punch party jam “She”).

It is intensely personal, tangled in the sentiments that privately plague each of us. Untogether is meant for those cold, murky nights in which we feel completely and utterly alone.

This is the third Pains record in a row that has enough memorable songs to play almost like a career-spanning Best Of collection.

If allowed a spot in your rotation, its placidity could nudge you into taking the scenic routes a little more often. And that alone is worthy of some (appropriately muted) applause.

Beach Fossils have delivered an album of shimmering guitars and an ebulliently bouncy rhythm that is simply a beautiful listen.

Harry Styles is fun listening and will rightly soundtrack many a summer. But after demanding to be treated as a capital-A Artist, Harry Styles finds himself atop a pedestal without anything to say.

In The Wild won’t ruffle feathers, but it’s rarely less than enjoyable.

Everything musical seems startlingly familiar, and not in the paying-homage-to-the-denizens-of-rock-past way the album’s conceit might have you imagine.

Julian has been leading us here since First Impressions of Earth, he has finally made his no-fi, bonkers masterpiece.

The elements are still there, but they aren’t fused in a way consistent with the hopes of those who foresaw The Strokes being the best rock band of our tim

While Time isn’t a massive overhaul, Bear in Heaven tweaked where they needed to, and picked up a pretty neat trick along the way. The more you listen to these songs, the more they linger.

The only issue is that some tracks are slightly overlong, and the trio of short interludes feel unnecessary--threatening to pull you out of the moment and stifle the gradually escalating sense of euphoria. This is a small complaint, however, given the consistently infectious hooks and melodies, and the manner in which it brilliantly and wistfully evokes rose-tinted memories of the lost Golden Age of dance.

As Tesfaye notes on “Reminder”, The Weeknd has inspired a lot of imitators. Instead of moving forward on Starboy, he ends up sounding like one of them.

On his fourth studio album I Decided, he positions himself as hip-hop’s poster-boy for all of these qualities [hard work, sacrifice, persistence, gratitude], but in rapping about such unassailable ideas, he comes away with uninteresting results.

Joanne still represents a striking course correction for Lady Gaga. By abandoning the dance club for the dive bar, she may have tossed aside her status as a pop star once and for all. But Gaga has emerged as something better and truer.

Darlings is very listenable and mostly fun--just don’t overthink it and keep the BSS comparisons to a minimum.

On Dynamics, Frankel and Millhiser made an unnatural-yet-understandable misstep, but on Crime Cutz, they’re hoping to regain their footing and play off their awkward slip by reverting back to what worked for them in the first place. It’s fun hearing it work for them again.

Whether we like her or not, Sia might be authoring the most iconic pop music of our generation. For this reason alone, This is Acting is worth at least one listen.

While the rest of Outside may not deliver in such a manner [as “A Forest at Night”], it still showcases one of North America’s more unique and talented producers on his own terms.

On Green Language, we witness risks. We listen anxiously as Rustie bets a Brinks truck on his emotional wherewithal, and that bet pays out exponentially.

Taiga is better-produced and differently arranged than 2010’s “Poor Animal,” but it’s no more or less “pop.”

But for the most part, Magpie provides us with another bundle of easygoing tunes from a band that seems to have a limitless supply.

The main downfall of Z is a lack of strong lyricism. In the rare moments that the murk clears or the light becomes too bright, what lies behind is less graceful than what it seemed.

They didn’t just retain relevance; they released the best album of their entire career.

Muppets In Space album cover aside, Gonzalez has still left plenty on Junk for his merry usual band of misfits--the lovers, the dreamers, and him.

The songs on Please Be Honest are in keeping with the constant state of evolution and experimentation of most GBV albums. Which is to say, the songs are hit or miss.

It’s all bolder, fuller, and, well, better.

An unexpectedly weird, inventive and invigorating album that sounds absolutely nothing like The Strokes, and for that reason alone you should be really excited, and maybe even a little hopeful, to give this record a spin.

Sophomore album Always Strive and Prosper had ASAP Ferg striving to expand his lyrical and sonic palette and prospering less than half of the time. Still Striving then, perhaps self-consciously titled, course-corrects by dropping pretense and delivering what we came to Ferg for in the first place: banging beats, fire flows. Some of the time, anyway. 11 out of 14 of these tracks have guest features, and a high percentage of them don’t leave much impression.

A game-changer Bigfoot is not, but it’s a very solid debut album full of eight consistently catchy, easygoing tunes ready-made for summer beach trips, pool parties, and barbecues.

Sonically, his oeuvre has bridged the divide between barren and lush. Lyrically, he has perfected the motif of narcotized horror.... This is the real deal.

So, bottom line, you’ve got a few pieces of trash, a couple of sketches whose mileage varies on how well you dig their hooks, and plenty of fantastic stuff that ranks with M.I.A.’s best work, and M.I.A.’s best work is fascinating and damned fun.

This is no disaster, nor is it a masterpiece. Songs of Innocence is a competent U2 album, always a good thing.

Despite its shortcomings, My Everything succeeds in its primary objective. This is a pop record, clear and simple.

Three is perhaps Phantogram’s most incisive record yet, sustaining a very solid and concrete idea of what kind of pop it wants to promote.

Ultimately, since it took them 7 years to follow-up their last album, both of the Let’s Try the After EPs function, at the very least, as a stop-gap until their next one.

All told, Ye is thin gruel when placed next to Kanye’s intellectual transgressions, not to mention an impeccable oeuvre. As an aural experience, it offers a mix of triumph and nostalgia. Results will vary, depending on your willingness to embark on this very short, often thrilling, ride. But for an artist defined by grandiosity, Ye is frustratingly slight.

The moments when his music really comes alive with joy are the best on Teenage Emotions, and they’re often the less rap-oriented moments.

Though at times a little errant and borderline-satirical, A New Testament succeeds because it showcases backward-facing storytelling and incontrovertibly catchy vintage American music.

The freedom of expression and thematic irregularity that we hear while listening to Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is a fabulous release from the traditionally despised contract that constrained Ebert’s first and former band, Ima Robot.

Lady Gaga’s utter lack of self-restraint sets ARTPOP apart from her earlier work (ruminate on that for a moment).

Sure, there may be a shorter classic buried somewhere within the project’s 145+ minutes. Alas, this mythical album merely exists in my mind. 2 of 2, however, comes tantalizingly close to that ideal on its own.

[A] strange, frequently beautiful, and unabashedly indulgent album.

It does not always work, but in short, orchestral bursts, MS MR demonstrate that they can transcend the confines of goth synth-pop, and produce one of the most memorable debuts of the year.

Beyond some excellent beats and a few flashes of lyrical prowess, Magna Carta... Holy Grail doesn’t invite the kind of intrigue that Jay-Z is capable of. He spends the whole album reminding us that he is the center of attention but by about halfway through most people will be doing something else.