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

For as sparse as it sounds, there’s great depth to Carnage.

As a pop song production display, it's a tour de force. Lorde's writing and fantastically intimate vocals, ranging from her witchy, unprocessed low-register warbles to all sorts of digitized masks, make it matter.

Some of Beyoncé’s best vocal work on record, produced flawlessly and at the forefront of each track. Her voice as an instrument is wielded superbly across the entire album but most strikingly at the top of it, as she glides across country and R&B inflections effortlessly.

His most ambitious music yet on his fifth LP. ... These are age-old ideas, but they don’t feel that way when he’s singing them. It’s par for the course for an artist who specializes in embodying pop archetypes, and making them new again.

Their half-formed debut EP is redeemed by a previously unreleased follow-up session. The LPs Ben Hur and Umber still stun.

The new Red is even bigger, glossier, deeper, casually crueler. It’s the ultimate version of her most gloriously ambitious mega-pop manifesto.

The richest overview yet of maybe the most visionary funk operation in pop history.

The plush production of tracks like the Neptunes-produced centerpiece "good kid" hearkens back to Seventies blaxploitation soundtracks and Nineties gangsta-rap blaxploitation revivals, and good kid warrants a place in that storied lineage.

Is both simpler--in sound and scope--than Pirate and much more ambitious. [27 May 2004, p.80]

Funeral for Justice is the band’s most forceful album yet, tailor-made to melt minds at massive festivals.

As a whole, 77–81 presents Gang of Four’s brilliance while putting it on context.

Is this an evolution from Lemonade? Not quite. But with Renaissance, Beyoncé is more relatable than ever, giving listeners all the anthems and sultry slow burners we love and have come to expect from her, proving that inclusivity is the new black.

The result is a raw quality with a sound akin to Bob Dylan and the Band’s Basement Tapes — an album that undoubtedly influenced these sessions (George Harrison, having recently hung out with the Band in Woodstock, describes his early take of “All Things Must Pass” as ‘Band-y’.) The mix also includes “Don’t Let Me Down,” tragically left off the original album but now in its rightful place, nuzzled between a loose, rowdy medley and the gem “Dig a Pony.”

Her full-length debut--about a robot-populated utopia based on Fritz Lang's classic 1927 film Metropolis--is so ambitious, so freighted with sounds and ideas and allusions, it threatens at times to sink under its own weight.

The music is full of teenage dreams crashing up against reality, dusting themselves off and trying to figure out the next move. If we're lucky, it's a story that never stops.

It rings true to one man's unshakable vision.

Her excellent new Guts is another instant classic, with her most ambitious, intimate, and messy songs yet. Olivia’s pop-punk bangers are full of killer lines (“I wanna meet your mom, just to tell her her son sucks”) but she pushes deeper in powerful ballads like “Logical.” All over Guts, she’s so witty, so pissed off, so angsty at the same time, the way only a rock star can be. And this is the album of a truly brilliant rock star.

For now, the Strokes have mastered their style; they have yet to come up with the substance to match it.... But the music leaves no doubts - more joyful and intense than anything else I've heard this year.

A record rooted in anxiety and mourning, We Got It From Here remains musically as dark and electrically relaxed as 1996's Beats, Rhymes and Life and 1998's The Love Movement.

S.O.S., SZA’s long-awaited sophomore album, is even more enjoyable than her 2017 debut, CTRL. The songs are looser and more confident. And the worthy themes—retribution, nostalgia, ego—amount to the most intimate and juicy self-revelations since the Real World confessional booth.

Quadrophenia, as delivered the first time, is still one of his, and the Who's, greatest albums--and the better opera.

For a musician like Stevens, going too far and trying too hard is the point, the way to get beyond where a more austere songwriter could get with a more naturalistic pose. So the most pleasurable music here is the most ambitious.

Stevens strips his sound far enough to reveal his deepest anguish; neither the Disney-style orchestras of 2005's Illinois nor the synth-pop-as-craft-project of 2010's The Age of Adz peek through his acoustic fingerpicking and warm-milk voice.

The most exciting thing about No Cities is that Sleater-Kinney are one of those bands again--they sound as hungry, as unsettled, as restless as any of the rookies on their jock.

Eve is more than a sign of the times. Easily one of the best rap records of the year, it’s the sound of a skilled artist becoming a vital one, and asserting her place not only in the genre but in the world.

This five-CD box set features the band's three great studio albums, plus terrific bonus tracks and dub versions, and a slew of live recordings in which the Beat unleash their dance-floor fury and their Thatcher-era protest politics.

In tracing the way Mitchell’s songs mutated from bare-boned recordings to fully realized tracks with more musicians than she’d ever used before, Archives Volume 3 finally allows us to hear those steps along the way. That evolution is most apparent in the making of Court and Spark, an album that was both a beautifully crafted piece of adult pop on par with Steely Dan‘s work and a warm, intimate, emotionally conflicted meditation on love and relationships.