She has launched the re-recorded Fearless (Taylor’s Version), adding a mellifluous upgrade to an already remarkable album. Sure, it works as a throwback, but it’s mainly a showcase of Swift’s mature, confident vocals, with a sharper sense of musicianship and instrumentation this time around.

Lout is a difficult EP to place. It’ll either entice long-standing fans with its heavier sound, fitting well with the band’s aesthetic, or alienate those who prefer the band’s early work. But this reinvention of The Horrors somehow works.

With Little Oblivions, the singer-songwriter has made her most cohesive record yet. The resuscitation of a heavier sound works in Baker’s favor, while she still adds hints of the fragile gentleness that has captivated fans since her Sprained Ankle days.

While the band’s smoothness may mirror the gentrification of the dive bars it once canonized, its empathy and affection for the dirtbags yearning for transcendence remains as strong as ever.

Heartbreak, anger, acceptance, new love, mental health, and hope converged into something a little more well-rounded. Flowers For Vases, for all its beauty, appears single-minded in comparison, focusing solely on pain-tinged recollection and the challenge of moving forward. But if Williams chooses to spend some extra time wading through the uncomfortable emotions that mark a particular breakup—especially when those feelings make way for more personal growth—then it’s a worthwhile bit of exploration.

It’s solid, in other words—which isn’t damning with faint praise, rather affirming that Weezer is nailing this material. It’s in the slower, more balladry-driven songs that OK Human (the latest in a long line of stupid reference-heavy album titles, this time nodding at Radiohead’s classic) finds its openly beating heart.

evermore is even better than folklore, thanks to greater sonic cohesion (Antonoff only has one production credit, on the superlative “Gold Rush,” leaving the bulk of the music produced or co-produced by Aaron Dessner) and stronger songwriting.

Fortunately, midway through the record, McCartney III starts to soar. When he’s not pouring his heart out into silly love songs, McCartney fares best harnessing his seldom-seen inner rage, à la “Helter Skelter.”

Positions isn’t a perfect album (and far from an instant classic in the vein of Sweetener or Thank U, Next), but the LP is a more-than-worthy stepping stone to whatever comes next for the artist.

His new record Letter To You is an absolute triumph, one that can take its place alongside the best albums of Springsteen’s long career.

A bloated and often beautiful portrait of political and emotional anxiety that longs for nothing more than to break away from the systems that brought us to this current moment.

So yes, Katy Perry has grown up, but in doing so, she’s abandoning some of the best things about “Katy Perry.”

Unlike the singer’s rootsy solo work, Down In The Weeds is rich in what brought many of us to Bright Eyes in the first place: the drama. ... There’s the mature reflection he intertwines with his urgency. There’s his hard-fought optimism. And there’s the embrace of community, the sense that Oberst doesn’t want to stare down these songs alone.

In the end, folklore may or may not reflect a permanent musical shift for Taylor Swift. But it doesn’t necessarily need to be a grand step forward—that it’s a whimsical and intriguing album offering new insights into Swift’s work is completely enough.

Whether she intended to do so or not, Phoebe Bridgers has created a musical monument to our dissociative age with Punisher. It’s an album about sleepless nights and sinking feelings in the pit of your stomach, wrapped in a musical package that’s both feather-light and lush enough to run your fingers through.

“Enigma” really is a fitting word for Gaga. Her choices can be puzzling, and not every song is a success, but that unpredictability is what makes her exciting and leaves us coming back for more. So maybe Gaga doesn’t know who she truly is yet. It’s still enjoyable to watch her figure it out.

The intensity and diversity of Part 1 hinted at even more bombastic and unexpected songs to come on Part 2, which instead mostly continues the sound he already mastered on Aromanticism. It’s not that Part 2’s songs aren’t gorgeous and poignant; it’s just that, given Sumney’s unwavering focus on shattering longtime boundaries, Part 2’s songs occupy shockingly familiar musical territory.

Though it contains mere hints of the scrappy rocker we’ve watched for 15 years, Petals Of Armor is the bold signature of someone who is more than ready to show off different sides of herself—yet has nothing left to prove to anyone.

If there’s a downside to the electricity in Williams’ veins on Good Souls Better Angels, it’s that the gentler material doesn’t have quite the same impact.

Fetch The Bolt Cutters is full of visceral, jittery, wonderfully imperfect performances that make the album feel like a dreamlike concert at Largo.

If you can get past the pall cast by that song’s sentiment, I Am Not A Dog On A Chain features some of Morrissey’s best songs in years, and a couple of his worst. It leans—in weird but not unwelcome ways—on electronics more than any record he’s ever done.

This is the sound of a band working hard to evolve, and if the strain of incorporating such a large swath of musical experimentation occasionally shows, well, maybe that’s the cost of attempting new tricks at an advanced age. Never let it be said that the band embraced different sounds at the expense of its tried-and-true formulas, however. Part of what makes Gigaton fascinating is the way these sonic departures actually fuse in unexpected ways with some of the band’s traditional four-on-the-floor stompers.

Moore has finally grown into the adult voice that sounded so jarring in her teenaged hits like “Candy,” and her songwriting also reveals a sadder, wiser maturity. ... Silver Landings’ best moments arrive when Moore’s explorations veer from her own story to the more universally relatable.

High Road works because of Kesha’s self-assurance and self-possession.

Fine Line proves that the musician has absorbed the best lesson passed down by California’s great musicians: Don’t be afraid to take chances within a folk- or pop-rock framework, as that’s how you create iconoclastic music that endures.

Overall, in spite of its goofy throwback artwork and the presence of Pharrell Williams, Hyperspace belongs on the shelf closest to Sea Change. There are more clunkers here than on that classic, but it feels similarly honest and world-weary.

Here’s what it is, though: quietly ambitious, occasionally ham-handed, decidedly political, dopily mystical, surprisingly pointed, and mostly pretty good. And, maybe most importantly, it is unexpected, in good and bad ways.

If the first half of Our Pathetic Age is DJ Shadow pushing forward, his muse challenging and expanding his sonic palette in ways not always accessible or satisfactory, the back half is his class reunion, a trip through nearly all 30 years of his career that revisits sounds and styles across his output, rejiggering them for an anxiety-inducing, more contemporary aural aesthetic. ... The two create an impressive testament to DJ Shadow’s creative nomadism, uncompromising and imposing in its aggressive music