While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.

It’s Metro, though, who elevates 21’s stories to something approaching greatness. ... This sequel is a ratification of the “bigger and better,” an example of steady improvement through impeccable craft.

Crammed chockfull of crowd-pleasing EDM pyrotechnics and cheeky one-liners, The Album is undeniably a product of a well-oiled, state-of-the-art pop machine, but it feels stuck looking back to tried and true trends in both K-pop and Western pop music.

“Here We Go Around Again,” an unreleased song from Mariah’s demo tape, and “Can You Hear Me,” a Whitney-esque piano ballad from the Emotions sessions, find her in fine voice but offer little insight into Mariah the burgeoning artist. By contrast, a live rendition of the jazz standard “Lullaby of Birdland,” recorded during her 2014 tour, allows Mariah to fully exploit the imperfections of her voice, lending the performance a lived-in authenticity often missing from the earlier tracks.

Stylistically, Shamir is a hodgepodge of the different approaches the artist has employed in the past, synthesized into a mostly satisfying pop-rock sound.

While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.

Alicia is at once her most accessible and forward-minded album in years.

Producer Shane Stoneback resumes his role as the unofficial third member of the group, ensuring that Host, in spite of its dabbling in live instrumentation, springs from the same atmospheric vein as previous Cults albums.

Orca may be enjoyable in the moment, but it doesn’t have staying power.

What the rapper lacks in flow experimentation and dexterous rhyme-craft, he makes up for with his knack for sincere storytelling.

Though the current incarnation of the Flaming Lips has been together since 2014, and thus responsible for these various digressions, the band has undertaken a sonic overhaul here that matches the emotional, sentimental tenor of Coyne and Steven Drozd’s new compositions.

Burton was a classical music aficionado, and was said to have introduced elements like harmony and sophistication into Metallica’s early no-frills thrash. S&M2 puts that influence on full display.

Not all of Mirrored Aztec is as great as “Thank You Jane” or any of the previously mentioned highlights.

Though Club Future Nostalgia lacks the joyous, adrenaline-fueled arc of the best DJ sets, it honors both Future Nostalgia’s original spirit and that album’s unintentional service as a gateway to a virtual dance floor.

Energy demands your attention with inviting, joyous beats and its vocalists’ direct appeals.

Rather than build on any of the sounds she experimented with in the past, Perry seems content to stay in her lane when, at this point, she has nothing to lose.

The result is an album that appears caught between modes, playfully riding cascading synths even as it lyrically subsumes itself in dourness.

“Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal.

The songs on Down in the Weeds reprises the sheen and clarity of Bright Eyes’s later records, like Cassadaga and The People’s Key, and mostly eschews the rawer qualities of their early recordings. But the band also continues to pick up influences and incorporate new sounds into their foundation.

Three tracks, including the opener and closer, are short instrumentals that might have been elongated for further immersive and exploratory effect. Otherwise, the album is an off-kilter musical gift born of Osborne’s sacrifice of conventionality for weirder, wider possibilities.

In melding traditional hip-hop form with just the right amount of modern trap verve, Limbo makes the case for Aminé, if not as the next great rapper, then as a pop-rap workhorse. The album proves that he can keep pace with his contemporaries while drawing on the history of the genre in ways many of today’s innovators are unconcerned with engaging.

Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.

What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction.

For the most part, she doesn’t have the chops or soul of contemporaries like Florence Welch, who sings of similar subject matter with a real torch, and who shares a collaborator in Joseph Kearns, who produced almost every song on Brightest Blue. At Kearns’s behest, the album takes a relatively new tack for Goulding, trading the garish for the palatable, but it’s no less grating as a result.

The album is almost too neat, given Protomartyr’s newfound use of saxophone, self-conscious touches like the chirping crickets at the beginning and end of a few tracks, and the seamless sequencing of songs. But the restless punk spirit and flippant, downtrodden ethos that prevail over the project render Protomartyr’s painstaking intellectualizations as fuel for a visceral winding up and release of discontent.

The album instantly feels more purposeful than its predecessor: Where Blood can feel labored over, perhaps too hungry for hits, Lianne La Havas isn’t seemingly beholden to such expectations.

By incorporating country signifiers into what is otherwise a terrific, of-the-moment pop album, Antonoff and the Chicks could have come up with a style that’s even more progressive, akin to the production on Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour. If nothing else, that highlights how the Chicks still have room to grow, either with or without Antonoff, as they move into this new phase of their career. Gaslighter may not have been the album that country music needed, but it’s clearly the one that the Chicks needed to make.

Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music’s accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.