She has often made intimacy seem transactional. But here, it feels pure.

Blue Hearts gushes more piss and vinegar than Stanley Kubrick could fill a hallway with, but what makes it jaw-dropping is the precision with which Mould has focused his ire on conservatives, evangelicals, homophobes, while leaving room for some self-criticism as well. ... Blue Hearts often feels like a lost Hüsker Dü album with Mould howling invective over his buzzsawing guitar.

Unlike Ray of Light's pristine inner-ear landscapes, Music is dirty, casually urgent, as if Madonna walked into the studio, got on the mike and let the machines bump.

Cyrus excels most when she’s employing her voice to super-sell big ballads, and Endless Summer Vacation is no exception.

Florence and the Machine's second album is as dark, robust and romantic as ever, but a revving 18-wheeler is no longer the apt metaphor for Welch's voice.

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

No matter how good your new favorite band is, the Stratford 4 are better.

On her excellent comeback record, Rainbow, Kesha channels that drama into the best music of her career--finding common ground between the honky-tonks she loves (her mom is Nashville songwriter Pebe Sebert) and the dance clubs she ruled with hits like "Tik Tok" and "Die Young," between glossy beats, epic ballads and grimy guitar riffs. In the process, she also finds her own voice: a freshly empowered, fearlessly feminist Top 40 rebel.

An honest album, full of truths and delivered as only she can.

Nearly 25 years in, his group has made maybe their best record yet--a line that been repeated, accurately enough, with most every record they've made.

If you believe that art and commerce and provocation and fun – and hip- hop and disco and teen pop – can all be one and the same, here's a record for you.

Both old-school and totally original, both literate and full of unpretentious New Yawk sass, both deeply catchy and underground in spirit.

Overall Gumbo is another strong offering from an artist who has mastered his craft, and is just fine sticking with it.

DaBaby’s regular invocation of vehicular speed makes KIRK feel like one continuous, relentless flex.

There are times when God Forgives is as engrossing and surprising as rap can be.

It's political rock that never confuses passionate commitment with smug certainty, asking more questions than it answers on a hero's journey into our darkest national impulses, and maybe in some small way, beyond them.

She remains hard to categorize, refracting country alongside rock, folk, and other elements befitting a longtime resident of New York City’s melting pot. And her most beautiful work can lean into the abstract.

It's yet more adventurous, a prosperous band's challenge to its comfortable cult.

Mostly, Gaga has focused Chromatica’s spectrum on the kind of body-moving music that comes naturally to her. Dance music will always be her salvation, and her pop renaissance couldn’t come at a better time.

What lifts God's Favorite Customer beyond homage is Tillman's slicing, free-associative candor as he examines the cost in sanity and constancy of his craft and touring life.

This solo debut is as commanding: emotional trial ("Woman, When I've Raised Hell") and despair ("Country Dumb") stripped to Pearson's fraught vocals and hypnotic, irregular fingerpicking.

It adds up to an album by turns confounding and enthralling. It's no Detox. It's something realer, and better.

Their penchant for pillaging rock's past has vanished with Coxon, but their melodic faculties remain, and crafty tunes complement the sonic decay.

The sound’s kaleidoscopic.

Familia is as raw as Cabello has ever been. She successfully laces the sounds of her Latina roots into a record that lyrically rips out the pages of her life’s diary — all its heartbreak, drama, and self-doubt — for the entire world to see.

The performances are natural knockouts – cocksure grooves, pithy knife-play guitars and little overdub fuss – worked up, then nailed, some on the first full take, at the band's suburban Los Angeles rehearsal space. Petty can't help stressing the authenticity here.

There is a matured pacing and weight to the music and John's vocal performances that make this record one of his finest in its own right.

The original Déjà vu presented CSNY as a united front even as the group was already fraying. This excavation tells the other part of the story: four men working together and, at the same time, starting to drift into their own separate, occasionally colliding worlds.

On his 2008 debut, Justin Townes Earle, son of rebel troubadour Steve Earle, seemed like he was getting up to speed with classic country and folk forms. But he sounds like a natural–born honky–tonker on his new album.

Living up to the title of the whole series, those concert tapes often sound like bootlegs; here and there, you can hear people in the audience commenting as the songs start up and end.

This box set is the type of treatment usually reserved for Beatles reissues, but because it’s Zappa The Hot Rats Sessions is a more delightfully quirky. It doesn’t contain everything, the way something like the Stooges’ 1999 box set, 1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions, did, but because of the Zappa-esque details, it feels more comprehensive, for better or worse.

[Amok is] the warmest, grooviest album Yorke has ever made--nine songs where next-level laptop science collides with wild, funky improvisation.

Sing the Sorrow is not exactly a concept album, but it does have a singleness of dark purpose that builds in momentum as the disc progresses.

Now comes the sequel, which plays down Guthrie's playful leer in favor of his snarl.

Adam Granduciel achieves full-on sonic rapture with his band's latest LP, an abstract-expressionist mural of synth-pop and heartland rock colored by bruised optimism and some of his most generous, incandescent guitar ever.

Her fantastic new album, Remind Me Tomorrow, ups her ambitions even further, pushing toward a grand, smoldering vision of pop that can bring to mind Lana Del Rey and St. Vincent (producer John Congleton has worked with both), and the New Wave warrior-queen spirit of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O.

The band doesn't fuss with any sort of rootsy purism, which is why it gets away with retro moves that would sound soft from anybody else.

In short, it’s Björk at her absolute Björkiest.

But if Life On Earth still felt intent on defining itself in part by what it was not, The Past is Still Alive achieves something even braver: Segarra has honed their craft into a cohesive, astonishingly realized singer-songwriter record.

It turns out the two pop-science geeks are a perfect match. Danger Mouse pushes Mercer's gorgeous, existential tunecraft outward with Day-Glo dynamics.

Like Stereolab and Beck, Yo La Tengo liberate their listeners by downplaying language and logic in favor of our bodies' hazy dreams.

These Brooklyn dudes go even deeper on Sunbathing Animal.

Far From Over might lack an obvious mainstream hook, but the sturdiness of its design and the passion of its execution make it 2017's jazz album to beat.

Isolation Drills makes the case more persuasively than ever that these indie-pop godfathers should matter to more than just the loyalists.

You also get 132 pages of liner-notes-cum-memoir that can be just as entertaining as the music.

Megan’s own flow is musical enough to offer its own hooks without outside ornamentation. A track like “Body” shows Megan’s pop strengths as she stretches the title into a stream of ody-ody-odys so bouncy you can practically see booties popping to the beat.

Like Vampire Weekend, it's indie rock getting its global groove on.

A tonally and emotionally dynamic set of of originals that touches on compassion, perseverance, and divine intervention. [Jul/Aug 2021, p.137]

With light-touch production by Danger Mouse, this is also the funkiest and sweetest Parquet Courts set yet, trading off some of their trademark guitar fireworks for danceable jams.

There’s a great depth of sound throughout, no doubt thanks to Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich who co-produced and mixed Tangk, and it allows the heavenly moments to feel even bigger.

The new album is their most adventurous and passionate since Disintegration.

This meaty masterpiece is the debut of an 11-piece troupe co-led by guitarist Derek Trucks and his wife, singer-guitarist Susan Tedeschi. Revelator is also a turning point in Trucks' odyssey, since adolescence, toward a deep soul laced with Indo-slide ecstasy.

AM was so heart-wrenchingly excellent that it looms over the Sheffield rockers and their fans, but unlike 2018’s Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino, The Car seems like its true predecessor.

El Último Tour Del Mundo isn’t by any means a repudiation of the genres that have made Bad Bunny a star; if anything, it’s proof of how far they can stretch.

Recorded near Joshua Tree, the LP loses itself in the desert and finds timely survival metaphors everywhere. And it burrows deep into desert mythology without invoking any of the hoary narratives above (they’ve already done a Bono tribute, after all).

This impressive follow-up sounds remarkably similar -- it's just packaged more pretentiously.

James Murphy and his wrecking crew of New York punk-disco marauders don't waste a moment on the superb American Dream--it's a relentless, expansive, maddeningly funny set of songs asking how a lifetime of good intentions and hard work can blow up into such a mess.

Earl’s choose-your-own-adventure raps belie the precision of his lyrics. His dense words-per-second ratio, as well as the fluid, associative logic that guides Feet of Clay, makes each song appear as a bottled capsule of unfiltered stream-of-consciousness that spills out of him like water from an Artesian well.

Subtlety and simplicity also define this set of acoustic songs. But like the verse, the terms understate the power and beauty of the subject at hand.

Its 31-ish minutes are exquisitely wrought, as smoothly mixed as a top-tier set from a DJ with an infinite collection that includes Fifties doo-wop sides and cutting-edge cuts from the African diaspora.

Despite its length and musical theme, Cruel Country doesn’t at first feel like a grand statement, but Tweedy has subtly laid out the ambitious concept of tying his classic American music to the classical theme of American social and political alienation (this, Uncle Tupelo fans, is where the record truly becomes roots music).

On her American debut, this former U.K. record store clerk boasts an all star cast: executive producer John Legend, Will.i.am, Swizz Beatz, Kanye West and Cee—Lo, who duets on the Philly soul "Pretty Please (Love Me)." But those Yanks don't dilute Shine's regional feel--this West London homegirl's perspective is etched in her husky singing, fleet-tongued rapping and wised-up lyrics.

An equally available yet more sophisticated album.

Yours, Dreamily, takes what Auerbach does at his best, in and out of the Keys--confessional, texturally enriched blues propelled with garage-rock force--and adds a riveting jump in eccentricity.

There’s a new richness to Crutchfield’s voice that smooths out the emotional extremities.

It both feels like a continuance of the band’s classic Eighties sound and it’s actually good.

Dear Science is a brilliant balancing act between pop aspiration and music-geek aesthetics.

The W is a sonic gestalt that exists somewhere between the Queensbridge projects and OutKast's Stankonia, down the block from Lee Perry's Black Ark studios, two floors below A Tribe Called Quest's Low End Theory.

The energy never sags and ideas never flag.

Gold lacks the concise ache of Adams' indie solo prize from last year, Heartbreaker, but it is stronger on naked truth.

The songs are spacious with gentle buzzing, humming, and exhaling drones that slowly evolve, complementing often pretty piano music.

It’s a strangely addictive mix, comfort-food nostalgia that telegraphs knowingness without sarcasm, parody or airquotes.

While drummer Liv Bruce wrings shout-along comedy out of modern-dating insecurity on "Answer My Text." The corker is "Big Beautiful Day," an anthem for oppressed queer kids that bursts with rage and empathy.

Her lyrics are often uncomfortably revealing, as she peels apart her feelings about love, sex, sin, femininity, masculinity, Catholic guilt, and violence and how they all define her — often on the same song. She’s a rare artist who thrives on overthinking everything (hey, she is French) and the album’s general grandiosity never feels obnoxious.

The album reunites Grohl with producer Butch Vig, who worked on Nirvana's 1991 monster, Nevermind, and brings the same nuanced approach to weight and release here.

Mama's Gun finds Erykah disrobing emotionally, shedding the self-righteousness and goddess posture that marked Baduizm. The new Erykah isn't teaching, she's dealing with regular-person baggage.

But if you go back to Up after hearing Reveal, you get the idea that this is the album they were trying to make then, and that this time they got all the way there and found a parking spot. The Eno-style keyboard textures have more room to breathe amid the largely acoustic guitars, with the arcane sound effects intricately woven into the songs.

The album is much better than a greatest-hits affair – it's a reason to go on.

The songs are subtler, statelier, with Matt Berninger's baritone exuding lonesome warmth. [31 May 2007, p.93]

[A] quietly provocative and compelling album.

The music turns much darker Ghosts VI, which, by proxy, makes it the more interesting of the two. ... Unlike the first Ghosts collection, these albums feel like distinct artistic statements.

Leaving Eden is a lesson in 21st-century American folk--a tradition that's as miscegenated as ever, and stronger for it.

McCartney has embraced the small-combo spirit that made Run Devil Run, his 1999 album of rock & roll covers, such a triumph.

A high-steppin', side-steppin' life outside you ain't never seen.

A smart, breezy album that deftly fuses his love for old-school blues and R&B with his natural gift for sharp melodies and well-constructed songs. [21 Sep 2006, p.81]

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.

Sailor's Guide is classic album length--nine songs, 39 minutes--and best heard in one sitting; this is Nashville craft less as pop science than as expansive headphone storytelling.

The overwhelming amount of material — 54 unreleased songs total — proves that even at Dylan’s lowest point, he was still capable of writing great music, even if the best songs often didn’t wind up on his albums.

It’s the density of wit, ideas, and verbal invention that makes this one of the year’s defining hip-hop releases, whether Chance is rapping about God’s cell phone battery, racial politics, or merely unleashing thick clusters of rhymes.

Whether you’re looking to fall in love this summer or pine away unrequited, you won't find a better soundtrack than this.

A Light for Attracting Attention contains some of the songwriters’ most easily enjoyable music in years.

Accelerate is the first studio album by that post-Berry stage band, and it is one of the best records R.E.M. have ever made.

As a final statement from one of the most important artists of the last decade, it's not exactly earth-shattering. But this eclectic, personal and heartfelt Scarecrow is still outstanding in its field.

The fourth live album to come out of Leonard Cohen's 2008-2013 world tour is a fascinating glimpse into his creative process.

Dev Hynes' work--populist, experimental, healing, agitating, straightforward, multi-layered--demonstrates this unfailingly. Prince's radical pop spirit lives on in many artists. But none are channeling it more fully, or artfully.

The Eraser is full of moments when you wait for the band to kick in, and it doesn't happen.

The gem here is the new song, “No Bullets Spent,” which is about praying for the end of some existential anguish (“What we need now’s an accident/No one to blame and no bullets spent”). It could be about politics, it could be about a bad day frontman Britt Daniel had waiting for his number to be called at the DMV. Regardless, it’s another catchy, taut, perfectly restrained rocker that belongs in a collection like this.

Their fourth and best album plays up a dark, bracing urgency, especially on the explosive title track.