Beaty and bouncy but less meaty, Palo Santo is for now an unsatisfying follow-up to a terrific debut.

Since the release of Fractured Orgasm, this duo’s 2011 cassette debut, they’ve proven themselves adept at subtly but profoundly shifting the mood of whatever studios or venues they happen to be exorcising. What The Switch demonstrates is that Gordon and Nace have gotten better at being overt.

If it’s not Giant Steps, the album that type of casual Coltrane fan knows is A Love Supreme. Both Directions at Once isn’t definitely isn’t Supreme, but it enhances our understanding of how that group of musicians came to make it.

Scorpion is stronger when Drake stops narrating the circumstances of his own life and simply writes more of the breezy, cocksure songs that seem to come so effortlessly to him.

A record that’s more reflective and human than you’d ever expect from a band of literal cartoons.

The most rewarding Florence and the Machine full-length yet.

Blawan never forgets that in addition to turning our rushing heads and moving bodies inward, which Wet Will Always Dry most assuredly does, this sort of music can and should also, you know, entertain.

A blatant 180 degree shift from the confines of his wretched comfort zone, Redemption is full of creative risks that pay off in spades.

Aguilera lets her talent fly as high as her freak flag, solving pop’s current obsession with box-ticking by nudging their lines into shapes more her liking.

Bad Witch, like its two predecessors, contains glints of exploration tempered by maturity and consistency. ... It’s a strangely tentative gesture from an artist who made his name as a longform auteur.

It all rings hollow due to how thinly sketched out the writing and production is. Much of it is awkward, directionless, and, at times, just confusing--showing an artist grasping at a million ideas and hoping to grab one, with none of it being done in any interesting or shrewd way.

The resulting soil is almost tangibly immediate.

Even at their most fervent, the characters of Hope Downs remain soaked in sun, able to convince themselves that one great night could be enough to set them straight again. At about 35 minutes, Hope Downs is a brief vacation, and so are many of its songs.

An odd gem in a catalog full of them, 1984 is a rewarding left turn from a band who’ve remained interesting for so long because they’re less likely to fall off than wander.

Packed with more than enough ideas to constitute what’s still ostensibly a “debut album,” OIL OF EVERY PEARL’s UN-INSIDES pushes new limits of bombast only to settle into the same sort of razor-sharp, high-concept pop that’s worked for SOPHIE since the beginning.

After last year’s uninhabited Kurt Vile collaboration, she has a second album called Tell Me How You Really Feel that restores confidence in her tunes and the way her guitar lines snake through them. ... Settle into Tell Me’s crinkled smarts and Barnett remains as observant as Sometimes demonstrated.

A collaboration that alternates from alienation and sadness to melodic tenderness, punkish rap bravado, and triumph in 23 minutes. It’s both embarrassing and gripping: never boring and often euphoric. ... It makes for a perfect version of a Kid Cudi album, with Cudi taking center stage under the guiding hand of Kanye’s stellar production.

Many of the tunes emerged after the duo’s chance meeting in Todos Santos, the Mexican town Buck calls his second home. This sense of discovery shines through the record’s layers of polish. Its immediacy makes Arthur Buck a rarity in 2018: a record that wears its messy heart, as pleased with its flaws as it is with its power.

Lykke Li’s songwriting is strong here, but the excess of electronic manipulation sometimes resembles a bedroom experiment.

The record’s brutal frankness belies its lyrical depth–small touches, like the reprisal of the intro track “Anytime” as the album’s closer, leave the listener with a sense of a hopeful, if ambivalent, closure.

The feeling is more of what comes when the drugs wear off: there’s a hint of euphoria, but moreover, it’s a sparse and sometimes desperate reflection on working through anxiety, somewhere between the realms of T-Pain and Tame Impala. As a result, this might be the best BMSR record yet.

There is nothing new to be learned from this album burdened by crudely formed raps about his already exhaustively covered life and deeply muddled politics. ... Still, the music at times almost makes it worth it.

“Late to the Flight” is also indicative of Marling’s range on this album: She hits contralto notes on “Shake Your Shelter” and enters soprano territory for multi-tracked harmonies on “Hand Hold Hero.” The instrumentation, almost entirely performed by Mike Lindsay, is more varied than any Marling record to date.

It’s as good a model of modern folk music as has come along in some time.

For now, we’re stuck with a record that’s both intentionally and unintentionally frustrating: A record about self-loathing where the actual remorse is absent, where its creator would insist that’s the point.

The strangest and most ambitious album yet by the electronic composer and producer born Daniel Lopatin. For all its references to the past, Age Of is a distinctly 21st-century collage. ... When the Baroque arpeggios that close “The Station” enter a lockstep reminiscent of his synth-drone score for the 2017 thriller Good Time, for instance--it’s a musical thrill that renders questions about historical fidelity irrelevant.

From murky ambience to noise, free jazz, and beyond, Hval deploys sounds with a careful attention to feeling, building lush collages with a strategic intent further amplified in the lyrics. While ultimately smaller and less ambitious than her previous full-lengths, The Long Sleep grasps at ideas about presence, affect, and influence, recognizing the important potential of networks of all types in the lives of all who listen.

The album is claustrophobic and unrelenting, but also intensely exhilarating in its brevity.