It is not overkill. It is the necessary account of a brilliant, wayward pop life still best known for tawdry and misleading reasons.

The enhanced instrumentation and dreamy songwriting make this the singer’s strongest album yet.

You Won’t Get What You Want is a slow build rather than a shrieking onslaught, but it still has an inherent sense of danger.

Feel Flows lets everyone else hear what their fellow musicians have known for decades: When nobody was looking, the Beach Boys made extraordinary music, complex sounds all their own that made for California albums up there with Love’s Forever Changes, the Doors’ L.A. Woman and X’s Los Angeles. This stuff was made for these times, whatever those times might be.

Hop Along know how to make these tiny moments feel huge.

This 25th-anniversary reissue features an accelerated and raging '89 live rendering of the album that adds a few Hüsker classics--acoustic and disarmingly tender.

His ambitions are even greater on his third album, which demands attention in a way his quietly heartbreaking music hasn't in the past.

Los Lobos' best album since 1996's Colossal Head.

The way the screams and music dance across these 17 songs--recorded during three nights in 1964 and 1965 and spliced into a seamless rush of manic love--is what makes Live at the Hollywood Bowl such a thrill.

A beautifully wrought pop record that grapples with the disquiet hanging over the globe.

Born in the New York post-punk squalor that mothered pals Sonic Youth, Swans make their grandest statement yet for their 30th birthday.

On No Thank You, the follow-up to her excellent 2021 breakthrough Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Simz gives us 10 choice cuts (showcasing her brilliance and breadth) that convey the whole emoji board of riveting emotions.

Purple Mountains is the sound of that guy starting to come to terms with his reality, and maybe building a new emotional architecture in the wreckage. In any case, keep ’em coming. The journey is worth it.

As bawdy and unpredictable as anyone is in their first puberty, Puberty 2 shows Miyawaki indulging her whims with a devil-may-care attitude--the result is an incendiary self-portrait.

Although gems are scattered throughout The Early Years, its last two discs — a homemade demo followed by two 1967 sets at the Ann Arbor club the Canterbury House–are the keepers.

It adds up to a hard-hitting 20-track portrait of life and love in a mad city.

Let's Stay Friends is the first album of new songs in six years from indie-rock madcaps Les Savy Fav, yet it sounds like a band that's just hitting a peak.

Whatever informed it, this may be the most heart-rending music she's ever made.

For once, the inevitable U.K.-press hype is justified: Franz Ferdinand's debut draws from beloved Brit pop and post-punk bands without the usual plagiarism.

CSNY 1974 may be the closest we'll come to hearing a mid-Seventies reunion album from this band.

God Level is a record so massive that it should be impenetrable, a tome. Instead it’s a nearly definitive statement from a gifted writer and one of his era’s most interesting synthesists.

Africa Speaks is not the sort of record to listen to on headphones; you have to hear the way it springs forth from speakers, like a live performance, to fully appreciate it. There aren’t any Billboard-targeting hits here — there’s no “Smooth” or even an “Oye Como Va,” though “Breaking Down the Door” comes close — and that’s part of the appeal. Woodstock was 50 years ago; this is Santana now. The spirit is the same, yet somehow it’s even freer.

Jack in the Box is brief — its 10 tracks clock in at around 22 minutes — but potent, with J-Hope’s musical curiosity and dexterity on the mic helping create an immersive world that showcases the inner life of someone who’s in a lot of photographs, but who may not always feel fully seen.

Noname isn’t ambivalent at all here—she goes full blast. Sundial is the sound of an artist who hasn’t lost any of her passion for making music—or making trouble.

Upping the spectacle from Fun Fear his 2012 debut, I Love You, Honeybear is an autobiographical set about love, marriage and derangement that's both ironic and empathic.

There may be nothing explicitly political in the songs on Be the Cowboy. But there’s plenty implicit, from the DIY American mythology of the title, to the way the songs validate voices that are shaky, hurting, irrational, and damaged, while also being smart, wry, powerful, and deserving of love.

They evoke folks as diverse as Led Zeppelin and My Bloody Valentine, but the gently woozy Sigur Ros don't sound like anything or anyone else so much as a classic-rock band bewitched by white magic.

Jaguar II is a shining demonstration of the aptitude that made Monét a sought after collaborator, but here, in the album’s comfy old-school soul and sharp modern edge, she preserves something fresh and unique for herself.