The level of discourse on Run the Jewels 3 may be higher than your standard hip-hop grandstanding, and the references may be current and the beats may be more intense, but the album remains too entrenched in the grammar of the past to ever feel entirely fresh.

Anohni’s charting of various cycles of decay and change have the weight and import of a Greek tragedy. It’s a pity, then, that so much of the music on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross underserves her anguished storytelling.

While the “Bright Side” mixes bring out the album’s more dynamic range, the lyrics lack the edge of Gabriel’s early music. The earnest perspectives of songs like “Love Can Heal” and “Live and Let Live” are apparent right from their titles, with the latter in particular succumbing to cliché. And the more subdued “Dark Side” mixes only highlight those flaws. i/o is heartfelt and meticulously crafted, but its impact is muted by its splintered presentation.

When the singer finally begins to emote dynamically in the album's second half, that's also when Vulnicura's musical foundation comes apart.

Murphy's willfully pretentious métier, his intentionally inadequate lyrics, and his monotonous sequencing expose a genuine fear of dance.

Elaborate time signatures and clever tape manipulations abound, and there's some fun trying to guess which instruments are synthesized and which are authentic, but Mirrored suffers from being too bright and spirited.

They're driven, even though their latest venture is stylistically the most inert, contemplative, offputtingly soft music they've possibly ever released.

Book Burner is defiantly hideous and if you love it, you love it for its ugliness or not at all.

Pretty but formless, Shields plays like a calculated retreat into something altogether indistinct and inconsequential.

R&B's menu has never looked so diverse or enticing, but Stone Rollin' is overcooked comfort food dressed up as haute cuisine.

While the album undoubtedly brings more than a few great moments, what is most disappointing is that instead of celebrating the past two decades of Dylan's career, it calls the idea of such a celebration into question.

Spoon has hit something of a dead end with Lucifer on the Sofa. The album gestures toward breaking free of old habits, but it doesn’t present any new ones, musically or otherwise.

The end result is a strange, and strangely pretentious mess: an album pitted deep in the psychic world of stories that nonetheless can't figure out when it should begin, when it should end, or which parts are even worth the audience's attention.

The voices that accompany him here are by turns syrupy and overwrought, and they work less to melt the icy tenor of the singer's voice than to soften the tracks into complete mush.

“Ancestress” is one of the most accessible songs on Fossora, not just for its mortality-confronting emotional narrative, but its more recognizable song structure. The album’s other highlights get mileage out of their heavily multi-tracked and harmonized vocals. ... Where Fossora missteps is in how it pulls all of its disparate musical influences together.

The album eschews the extroversion of the singer’s best work, like her 2007 breakthrough, The Reminder, and ultimately struggles to fully elucidate her multifaceted talents.

If this is truly the end for Scarface then Emeritus is a backdoor exit, an unassuming, professional album that quietly gets the job done.

No matter how sublime Rossen's voice may be, Silent Hour/Golden Mile simply can't transcend the limitations of its origin as a collection of incomplete Grizzly Bear B-sides.

So while Trouble Will Find Me remains well crafted and satisfying, there's something inherently stultifying about it as well.

Thus, when not overextending the disappointing, unfinished musical projects on Fall Be Kind's, the Collective are busy beating their promising ideas into monotony.

Feels fails to come together as a coherent whole.

From a production perspective, it's a smash. The beats remain head-spinning. But 'Ye's lyrics feel lazy rather than merely drawled, and he's seeking social-commentary cred that he hasn't earned--a posture that can't help but grate.

Nothing on this album hooks quite like True Widow's darkly romantic highlights (check out "Duelist" or "Bleeder" if you want to hear True Widow's gothic revision of the '90s alt-rock template); instead, all but a few of the tracks here sound like variations on that album's "Sunday Driver."

Though Sometimes, Forever is more sonically diverse and lyrically cohesive than Soccer Mommy’s previous albums, its lyrical themes and melodies aren’t nearly as indelible.

Snaith eventually does work his way out of the darkness, and while the consistent production value and a pair of vibrant, energetic closing tracks keep the album from feeling like a total wash, it's also an uncharacteristically uneven effort from a generally consistent artist.

While their jazzy arrangements channel the pleasant air of ‘70s AM folk, Sling’s 12 tracks tend to fuse into an unassuming whole that veers perilously close to easy-listening ennui.

While Birdy meets the warmth of the album’s production with vocal skill and sensitivity, the overall effect is a very beautiful album littered with clichés that muddle its emotional impact. Still, there are seeds of great ideas here.

Strays continues in the classic rock-inspired direction of 2020’s That’s How Rumors Get Started, breaking from the neo-traditional country music that put Price on the map. The arrangements employ slide guitar and keyboards—even xylophone on “Time Machine”—with a punchy yet spacious mix, but the album flaunts its influences a bit too transparently.

The album both sees Styles cementing his status as music’s premier sensitive, shy guy and growing comfortable enough within the pop idiom that he inhabits to push against it—but only ever so slightly. Styles may be a fashion trendsetter, but with Harry’s House, he continues trying on different styles in an effort to discover his own.

The scuzzy guitars, driving rhythms, and yelled vocals are all here, but Mommy fails to recapture the lightning in a bottle that made their initial run so magnetic.

Here Bruner again shows that he has the tools for crafting tuneful compositions, but presents little that's dynamic enough to anchor an entire album, resulting in innocuous background burbles that never come off as especially attention-grabbing.

Each neo-soul nod to the R&B sound of Detroit, immediately post-Holland-Dozier-Holland, sounds more claustrophobic and limited than the last.

["Should’ve Been Me" is] a fascinating, fresh take on relationship dynamics that makes much of the rest of Laurel Hell sound boilerplate by comparison.

What gives the duo character and what salvages the album, then, are frontwoman Jennifer Nettles's performances and a handful of cuts that rise above the middlebrow songwriting and production.

The singer-songwriter is more sympathetic when tackling his struggles with mental health. Indeed, God's Favorite Customer hits its stride with its most emotionally naked pair of songs.

In casting off the lo-fi chaos of Live Forever and, thankfully, most of its flirtations with hip-hop, Bartees strikes a somewhat anonymous note with this album’s well-executed but rather straightforward rock, replete with several showy guitar solos.

Ultimately, then, Weathervanes showcases both the Isbell who can bring the entire world into focus with just a few lines and an acoustic guitar, and the Gibson-toting Isbell with the hot-shit backing band. But he continues to come so close yet so far from reconciling the two.

Reset revels in the whimsical sounds of ‘50s and ‘60s pop and rock but lacks the memorable songwriting that made much of the best music from that era so indelible.

Still a little dry at times, Curse Your Branches is saved by its attempts at lightness and levity, a positive step which shakes the singer out of a funk of self-serious gloominess.

These songs are littered with allusions to Price's difficult past as a broke, troubled magnet of misfortune with a late-blooming career, but they're by and large so vague that they don't have much of an emotional impact.

While Swift did an admirable job of re-recording Fearless, tweaking the production in subtle ways that give the album a slightly different texture (note how much more prominently the banjo figures in the mix of “Love Story”), the songs themselves are largely unchanged. ... The album’s bonus tracks—all written during the original Fearless sessions—don’t move the needle much in terms of the project’s overall quality. They all showcase Swift’s preternatural gifts for song structure and melody, but again, the lyrics are a mixed bag

Fever Ray circa 2023 feels admittedly a little quainter than they used to.

That Wolfgang positions Phoenix as a slightly hipper alternative to the Killers may finally break the band to a wide international audience, but it ultimately draws attention to how quickly trends shift in contemporary rock and how difficult it can be for even the most progressive bands to sustain their relevance.

The album doesn’t possess the observational heft of 2017’s Pure Comedy, a post-apocalyptic survey of America’s anxieties and lamentable cultural habits. Rather, the narratives and wordplay found on Chloë and the Next 20th Century, while at times evocative given Tillman’s way with language, are comparatively toothless and too clever by half.

This album lacks the stitched-together quality of FLOTUS, that certain emphasis on atmosphere, texture, and the unexpected, rather than structure and melody, that makes that album alternately impenetrable and transcendent.

Koffee is charming and winningly wholesome in the first mode [expressing her gratitude to be alive], but her attempts to meld tributes to family and life’s simplicities with designer name drops and empty boasts can feel awkward and misplaced. ... An album that doesn’t always play to its young creator’s strengths.

In the end, The Magic Place is a beautiful, ambiguous diversion better suited as a companion soundtrack to some experimental film or art installation than as the debut for a promising young singer.

There's lots of sunny '60s pop that was prominent on PB&J's previous records ("Start To Melt" is the most successful one here), but the group has expanded their palette and broadened their strokes.

Pissed Jeans's jokes aren't yet falling flat, and their balls-to-the-wall throttle has hardly been tamed, but King of Jeans sees the band for the first time failing to avoid passages of power-chord monotony and instances of off-target ridicule.

With a little more time to perfect their style, the War on Drugs would be well-positioned to win converts for both camps, and also their own.

Quaranta makes for an often frustrating experience, where tracks will circle around a topic with some level of pathos but seem incapable of ever reaching their full potential.

Hot Thoughts is often at its most appealing, though, when it sees Spoon sticking to what they've long proven they know how to do best. That's not universally the case: The album's only straight-ahead garage rocker, the thudding “Shotgun,” is so uncharacteristically regressive and lunkheaded that it might as well be a Kings of Leon song.

While the latter half of Wildcard constitutes a bit of a shuffled deck of genres, there’s enough of a kick to the album as a whole to warrant its title, and Lambert certainly has the chops to sell it.

When the band dabbles in more disruptive sounds that deviate from A Black Mile to the Surface, the effect is fresh and exciting. ... The remainder of the album, however, is composed mostly of midtempo songs that all similarly build to predictable climaxes.

Genre formalism is all well and good when there's genuine creativity and exploration behind it, but Tear the Woodpile Down exposes the limitations of Stuart's hardline conservatism.

Blank Face LP is ultimately an unfocused album, one caught between reportage and repugnant opportunism.

Onion mostly attempts to wring earnest feeling from platitudes.

The creaky structures he inhabits and the source material he chooses to pilfer are smart choices, good things that are highly redolent on their own. But the atmosphere of rough, old conceits scrubbed clean, with just enough dirt left to seem genuine, is ultimately a disquieting one

Sadly, there’s nothing on Fear Inoculum as immediately accessible or anthemic as past Tool glories like “Sober” or “The Pot,” but what is here will reward repeated spins, even if listeners initially find themselves waiting for those mammoth riffs to show up, a la “7empest,” or for Maynard to finally kick into high gear, as in the rousing refrain of “Descending.”

Ultimately, Salutations abandons the potent vulnerability found on the sparer versions of many of these songs, and muddies its tone with the uneven newer ones.

The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.

Ultimately, for all its globalized interest in mixing world cultures, Cervantine is about noodling, fooling around with different styles via extended jams, which the band at least has the good sense to spice that up with a worldly palette. Yet too often the songs seem drained of any feeling.

Whereas both Deerhunter and Atlas Sound albums typically reflect the obsessive brilliance and meticulous pathos of Cox's personality, there's few signs of either on Monomania, which is in dire need of a little less impulse and a bit more OCD.

Even if the album is stagnant from an artistic point of view, Jones and the DAP-Kings really do their damnedest to make it seem fresh.

For a beginner, even one whose big-time endorsements seem to have cemented a promising start, So Far Gone is a pretty brave effort, and Drake's ability to juggle standard bling-and-bluster narratives with intelligent narratives bodes well for his future.

At times, it's as if Smith's sheer vocal talent becomes a crutch that restrains her from treading into riskier musical terrain. A large part of the singer's allure derives from her vocal prowess, but she sacrifices invention here, letting the album fizzle out too quietly. Smith is at her best when she reinterprets classic R&B sounds and experiments with the color of her voice.

The Obliterati is underwhelming not because it's bad, or weak, or mediocre, because it's none of those: it's just not essential.

Richard is a talented artist, and her musical palette and tenacious personality remain consistently interesting, but when it comes to conveying emotion, falls back on the same tired tropes that have made many conventional R&B acts feel so exhaustingly familiar.

Ultimately, the problem with Beast is that both its concept and its performance are so defined by their academic removes that it's impenetrable.

The album, which at just seven tracks long (and none of them 15-minute monsters on the order of “Juanita”) feels almost like a two-fisted EP.

There are some traditional country ballads and some flourishes of Dixieland-style jazz that give character to the album's production, but the overall collection comes across as slight, even fragile.

However gorgeous and warm Feist's voice may be, Metals is just too dull for her to overcome.

It’s an atmosphere-focused album that attempts to express the nastier side of being alive. The result is evocative but not necessarily satisfying.

With [Jim] James, Veirs has proven that she's capable of breaking out of this pattern. Now she just needs to learn to do it on her own.

With Ocean to Ocean, it seems as if Amos has all but given up on pushing the limits of her instrument. Which would be more forgivable if the songs themselves didn’t play it quite so safely.

The psychiatric exercise of creating the album may have done him some good, but fans of Deerhunter's transcendent rock will have to wait for the band's next album if they want the kind of catharsis that is only hinted at here.

The 12 tracks here—which veer from pretty hooks and acoustic guitar to blast beats—linger in an in-between space that doesn’t fully embrace either noise or pop.

Embryonic, then, sounds like an over-correction to that trend, pushing the Lips's sound back into more experimental territory.

Like any rapper, Pusha is still heavily dependent on the talent surrounding him, and these connections keep things on an even keel, with mostly strong production work presented throughout.

The album's lyrics, however, can't match this same level of musical precision, and Granduciel too often repeats the same vague sentiments using threadbare imagery.

Throughout Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the lyrics are as thin as the songs are bare, and with lines like "Don't play with fire and you'll never get burned," the band feels dangerously close to becoming a parody of itself.

Its spaces of hollow inaction are far too big, and the concessions it expects of its audience far too large for so little payoff.

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

What's most disappointing of all about The Future's Void is that, for all its heady ideas and pretty moments, in almost all ways it's a regression from Anderson's earlier work, a mishmash of half-completed thoughts that fails to ever fully connect.

Devoid of the brawn that makes the Truckers so powerful and without a complementary voice off which to bounce, Hood's songs fall into a folksy rut.

The whip-smart hooks and spot-on production on Heart mask Walker's vocal deficiencies, which might otherwise be a more serious liability.

Simple beats and waves of synthesized strings don't, in themselves, make for neo-disco euphoria.

Dye It Blonde may be a more accomplished production than Smith Westerns, but it's also a roundly enervating creation, drained of the fuzzy promise that defined the band's debut.

A little muscle, and maybe even a little heavy-metal menace, would have balanced the album out nicely.

You're Nothing provides another solid 12 tracks of loud, bleak teenage ennui, but with a comparative lack of genre diversity.

The highlights demonstrate that these guys have yet to exhaust their uncanny vision, but by and large this is Lightning Bolt doing a Lightning Bolt album.

After a while, Crutchfield's melodies also blend together, especially during the album's middle stretch, where the similar-sounding “Sparks Fly” and “Brass Beam” are sequenced back to back.

Canterbury Girls still succeeds at being Lily & Madeleine’s most personal and cohesive work to date, but the siblings too often seem as if they’re reluctant to let loose and lean into the music.

As a pairing between two artists, the album works, though not nearly as much as it could have if both were at the top of their game.

The reinterpretations offer interesting what-if scenarios, tweaking and altering familiar material, but inevitably reveal more about Bush's fussiness over her own legacy than anything else.

At nearly 38 minutes, the album stays around long enough to where its effervescent nature starts to serve as a hindrance rather than a strength, where the age-old idiom of “in one ear and out the other” begins to ring truer than ever before.

They were probably aiming for hypnotic or dreamy, but except for the cinematic bookends 'The Stations' and 'Front Street,' the slow dances mostly crash-land in Snoresville

The sneaky-sounding arpeggios and the hushed, fragile vocal performances that defined albums like Our Endless Numbered Days are eschewed in favor of bright strumming and unbridled joyousness, rendering most of Beast Epic undeniably pretty but ultimately toothless. That's not to say Beast Epic doesn't sometimes explore hefty themes.