Rodney Crowell’s Christmas Everywhere is good-natured and wry, an album about how adults struggle to process a holiday oriented toward children. ... Throughout most of this album, Crowell is having fun--singing with arched eyebrow and tongue firmly in cheek.

Cara offers up her own candid gawkiness in tidily constructed pop, and even her near-misses are endearing.

JD McPherson is a vivid reinterpreter of the strutting rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s. His holiday album, Socks, is a collection of original songs with startlingly original conceits.

The beginning of Hey! Merry Christmas!--the first holiday album by the country music interrogators the Mavericks--strolls along at a friendly pace, their original songs touching on Western swing, 1950s rock, traditional country and more. But midway through comes a bawdy new cabaret-esque number, “Santa Wants to Take You for a Ride,” that feels less like an apostate take on holiday good will and more like a lost Blowfly original.

The music is rich with low end, serving as ballast for ethereal, sometimes claustrophobic synths. There’s little breathing room on these songs--both Bad Bunny and his music seep into all the available space.

Like the rest of Blake’s albums, Assume Form opens into haunted, rewarding depths. All that’s missing is one luminous, fully focused pop chorus, like “Retrograde” on Blake’s 2013 “Overgrown” or “My Willing Heart” on his 2016 “The Colour in Anything.”

[Clementine Creevy] sounds less guarded and more direct than ever, owning up to confusion and insecurity even as her guitar riffs counterattack. ... Creevy’s voice is high and thin but determined, and bolstered by the studio; her melodies take unexpected, angular leaps, while her guitar parts underline her solitude or blast it away.

Thank U, Next has some hiccups but is still her most musically flexible and au courant release to date. ... The [Max] Martin songs are crisp, as always ... [But] It’s in the other songs [not produced by Martin], however, that Grande takes her most intriguing leaps, largely because of the new fluidity she brings to her singing.

Gunna has a penchant for rapping over beats that include guitar, like on “Richard Millie Plain,” but he doesn’t use them for rock scabrousness. Instead, they’re caressing, soft-edged beds, elegant accompaniment for a rapper who makes his points with textures more than words. That said, there is a tenderness that peeks through here, not just in the gentleness of the sing-rapping, but also in some of the lyrics.

While it may not be his most immediately affecting album (that remains “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow,” from 2010), it offers the kind of slow-burning immersion that most of his recent records have only gestured at.

In some ways the album arrives as a continuation, not an introduction.

On the new album, Khalid embraces a fuller sound that often harks back to the 1980s and 1990s, with pillowy synthesizers, tickling guitars and multiple layers of his own vocal harmonies.

One more daring, rewarding turn in his catalog: 10 knotty, thoughtful yet rambunctious songs that juggle scientific concepts, history and human relationships.

But even as the lyrics detail troubled thoughts, the music staves off self-pity with distorted tones, obstinate drumbeats and unhistrionic vocals.

The tracks are playfully, restlessly inventive.

Legacy! Legacy! is a fully realized follow-up, sure-footed in its blend of what was, what is and what might be.

Megan Thee Stallion’s sex raps (“Pimpin,” “Sex Talk” and many more) are raw, luridly detailed and completely unfazed. On Fever, there are only two guests, both men: Juicy J, a pioneer of hip-hop filth, and the up-and-comer DaBaby. Both provide verses that, had they appeared on their own albums, might have seemed unduly crass or cringey. But here, the ridiculous brags seem almost charming--they’re just trying to keep up.

The music reveled in elaborately understated analog production, full of acoustic intricacies and subtle layerings of voices and instruments, hand played yet exquisitely polished.

Both the boxed set and the film sprawl proudly and unpredictably, just as the Revue itself did. And both projects traffic in revelation and put-on, sometimes simultaneously. ... Dylan completists will likely cherish newly unveiled rehearsal tapes . ... For those willing to dig in, the new box also makes clear how consistently impassioned Dylan’s Rolling Thunder performances were.

On Western Stars, a few songs — “Tucson Train,” “Sundown,” “Stones” — sound like the E Street Band could be swapped in for the orchestra. But Springsteen strives to meet his chosen idiom more than halfway. He wrote songs that thrive on the swells and undulations of orchestral drama, and he sings with long-breathed phrases that aren’t exactly crooning — he’s not built for that — but that set out to sustain more than they exhort.

The songs teeter on a psychological divide between intellectually informed glumness and the physical pleasures of rhythm.

Hoop has made her quietest, most contemplative studio album.

Each song on “i,i” is an intricate, labyrinthine, multilayered construction. But the marvel of Bon Iver is how fragile and conditional each song seems; not monumental but precarious and permeable, susceptible to chance or whim or fate. All the planning creates music that feels as impermanent, and illuminating, as a sunbeam.

“Lover,” her reassuringly strong seventh album, is a palate cleanse, a recalibration and a reaffirmation of old strengths. It’s a transitional album designed to close one particularly bruised chapter and suggest ways to move forward — or in some cases, to return to how things once were.

Even when he is stretching the boundaries of his sound, as he does in several places on “Hollywood’s Bleeding,” the results feel the opposite of experimental. When you’re an omnivore taking a mortar and pestle to six decades of pop music history and turning it into a smooth slurry, it’s nigh impossible to shock. ... Whatever someone might be hoping to find is in there somewhere. Post Malone is emotional tofu, a skill, not an accident. ... His ambiguity is of an elevated, refined sort.

There’s something alluring about this odd little gift of a session, which for Coltrane must have landed somewhere between “just a gig” and “just a favor.”

“Ghosteen” is an eerie, somber monolith, a set of 11 songs that stretches over an hour and is grouped on two CDs.

The music is denser and more intricate, conjuring symphonic grandeur alongside overdriven noise. The jokes are gone; the stakes feel higher. But the band’s underlying moxie hasn’t changed.

While King Princess writes about 21st-century romance — one new track is “Watching My Phone” — the music places her songs on a longer timeline, full of ghosts from previous pop eras.

Despite the album title, religion barely figures on “Magdalene.” FKA twigs seeks a person to believe in, not a creed. In these songs, that would be vocation enough, a chance to find transcendence by giving everything. It’s the faith of so many pop songs: the glory of love.

“Wildcard” isn’t as intimate as her 2016 double album about her divorce, “The Weight of These Wings,” or as musically adventurous as its predecessor, “Platinum.” What it does have is some sharp songwriting.

Throughout “Romance,” the pop machinery clicks cleverly and efficiently into place around Cabello’s voice. The productions tend to be sparse — spooky electronic sounds, an occasional acoustic or electric guitar, hefty but discreet drums — and even where the choruses ratchet up, Cabello’s voice often stays close and confiding.

The album is a production tour-de-force. There are plenty of moments, even in lesser songs, when instruments merge in shimmering brilliance and voices stack up in surreal stereo fireworks.

Grimes doesn’t make her songs depend on the words. The nervous energy, dread, anxiety, death wish and poppy nihilism are also in the sound of her music. Throughout “Miss Anthropocene,” personal and societal disasters seem imminent.

It is part old-fashioned bluster, part flamboyant style exercise, all rowdy thrill.

Confident and accomplished fifth album.

Reznor and Ross revisit some of their most distinctive sonic vocabulary on the new albums. ... “Ghosts V: Together” has prettier, warmer ingredients. There are serenely elegiac piano melodies, counterpoint in plinking bell tones and choirs of sampled voices.

The strikingly good “YHLQMDLG” (which stands for “Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana,” translation “I Do Whatever I Want”) moves in a different direction, looking deep inside the genre’s long history and proposing that there is enough information in the past on which to build a whole worldview.

Reznor and Ross revisit some of their most distinctive sonic vocabulary on the new albums. ... “Ghosts VI: Locusts” thrusts the anxiety upfront. Tracks tick and pulse with the tensest kind of minimalistic repetition, and when piano and bell tones appear, they’re usually brittle, not cozy.

Many of these songs sparkle with insight and the daring of a shape-shifting vocalist, but a handful assume too readily that maturity and seriousness are only achieved through dour restraint. Still, as she and her band proved on Paramore’s excellent 2017 record “After Laughter,” Williams was already a pro at packing complex emotions and perceptive wisdom into bright, technicolor pop-rock songs.

The sturdy structures of pop only go so far in Perfume Genius songs. They provide reassurance that others have found ways to capture similar feelings. But they can’t hold back the immediacy of longing, the all-consuming physical need. That’s captured in a pair of songs near the end of the album.

It’s hard to imagine many of its songs being performed onstage, even before the pandemic — even as it encompasses more sonic possibilities, from the orchestral to the surreal. ... Sumney doesn’t have to explain himself in prose. His songs do it even better.

For an album as expansive and big-swinging as “Notes,” its hit rate is surprisingly high. The 1975 is still walking that tightrope of self-indulgence, but more often than not it has learned how to retain its balance.

Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. ... His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone. But for those who have stuck with him this far, his new album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” is at once a summing-up and a taunt, equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous.

This newfound looseness and fluidity suits them. Best believe that Haim still has chops and a bar band’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock riffs, but on its third album it’s finally learned how to carry those things lightly enough to move with its own particular stride.

[Tony] Allen’s drumming propels five of the album’s nine tracks, spattering syncopated accents, quick little snare-drum rolls and hissing cymbals all around the central beat — and constantly striking sparks. ... Coldcut’s presence is ubiquitous; it was the duo that put all the scattered pieces of Keleketla! together. But the thoroughly hybridized music makes clear that in Africa, Coldcut was ready to listen above all.

The songs illuminate passion, impulsiveness, ambivalence and uncertainty, yet the structures La Havas created are lucid and poised. While matters of the heart may be out of control, her fingers and voice are impeccable.

If “RoundAgain” has anything notably in common with “MoodSwing,” it is the feeling of musicians with a scary level of talent playing into the moment, with full faith that they belong within a lineage.

Keys reclaims most of her usual composure on “Alicia,” but it’s often tinged with ambivalence, even in love songs. The music often hollows itself out around her, opening deep bass chasms or surrounding sparse instrumentation with echoey voids.

“The Ascension” is single-minded, but far from simplistic. Most of Stevens’s new tracks are thickets of counterpoint, dissonance and noises that can be comic or ominous. And he never reduces his messages to preaching or polemic.

Many of the songs are strong, but they largely bolster the story Carey has long been telling. The more revealing document, however, might be the second disc of the release: “Live at the Tokyo Dome,” her first concert in Japan, recorded in 1996. This is Carey at the peak — one of the peaks, at least — of her vocal authority and pop fame.

The sound of “Love Goes” is sweeping and luxurious: intimacy blown up to cinematic scale. Each song feels elaborately hewed.

“Positions” isn’t quite the reinvention that “Thank U Next” was, but it continues Grande’s effort to make the mainstream pop album a looser, weirder and more conversational space. ... Many pop stars attempt to take their sound to the next level by making increasingly grand and bombastic big-tent statements. Grande has succeeded largely by doing just the opposite.

“Good News” proves Megan’s prodigious talent, but it also suggests that, with a bit more digging, this gem could emit an even more prismatic shine.

“Plastic Hearts” is not a trendy rebranding of Cyrus so much as a convincing argument that she’s always been something of an old soul.

Spoken-word “tales” from six women — confessions and hard-earned observations — are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.)

“Palberta5000,” the first album it recorded with the producer Matt Labozza, has a newfound lucidity and oomph without sounding over-rehearsed, likely because the band recorded it in just four days and never attempted more than three takes for each song.

As on Parks’s EPs, the music on her album is restrained but far from austere. She coos the melodies over low-slung hip-hop beats and guitars that can tangle like indie-rock or syncopate like funk. ... Meanwhile, her vocals arrive in layers of unison and harmony and from all directions in the mix, conjuring both solidarity and spaciousness. Her music inhabits a private sphere, but not an isolated one.

“Flowers for Vases/Descansos” has a narrower, quieter palette, though Williams easily handles guitars, keyboards and drums on her own... The songs on “Flowers for Vases/Descansos” are finely polished: every vocal phrase, guitar tone, piano note and studio effect has been thought through by Williams and her engineer and producer, Daniel James.

At best, Del Rey’s hyper-referential music convincingly recreates the particular feeling of encountering art in a postmodern age, when the past is so cluttered with worthwhile cultural artifacts that everything new reminds one, at least a little bit, of something old. But as she dances on that fine line between evoking and signifying, Del Rey sometimes risks outsourcing her profundity to things other artists have said more vividly before. Such is the gamble of ending an album with a Joni Mitchell cover — though here that’s a risk Del Rey pulls off.

Not until the latter half of the album does the orchestra fully come alive, with a rich and immersive passage on Track 6 — sometimes regal, sometimes bluesy — that almost eclipses the motif, but not quite. And then there is Sanders’s tenor saxophone, a glistening and peaceful sound, deployed mindfully throughout the album. He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected.

Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades.

On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics.

On Bachelor’s album, “Doomin’ Sun,” Kempner and Duterte brought out the best in each other. ... There’s nostalgic comfort in the ways Bachelor looks back to 1990s rock, and Duterte and Kempner project a heartwarming unity.

A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways. ... Intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. (Fittingly, the title “Call Me if You Get Lost” reads either as a statement of generosity or a plea, depending on your lens.) Songs like the less emotionally ambiguous “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance” are generally less impactful — Tyler thrives on discord.

Gold-Diggers Sound” — named after the Los Angeles studio where the album was made — is more confidently single-minded [than his previous albums].

“Welcome 2 America” balances hard insights with visceral joys.

She never appears to be singing to convince you — her voice, which is modest in scale but deadly precise, connotes the power of malaise and exhaustion. It is regret embodied.

Lil Nas X has little interest in deconstructing the conventional structures of a pop song or the traditional narrative arc of an album: He clearly wants these songs of queer yearning to be legible to the mainstream. Working mostly with the production duo Take A Daytrip — who favor melodic hooks and bright, flashy sounds — “Montero” funnels the more fluid and outré aesthetics of SoundCloud rap into familiar pop-musical shapes.

The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but even prohibitive genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.

This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in. ... On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it.

[Mars and Paak] flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time. Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak.

While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. ... Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002.

She’s constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements, largely constructed by Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.

The new album presents Hval at her most approachable, with upbeat tunes and consonant sounds, both acoustic and electronic.

“Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.

[“Livin’ for the Ones”] draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost. ... Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That…”. ... The rest of the album features Raitt’s more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart.

“Blue Water Road” instead radiates delicate warmth. In a creamy, full-throated voice, Kehlani exudes a tenderness not felt since their 2017 studio album, “SweetSexySavage.” ... But it’s Kehlani’s candid ruminations on queer desire and estrangement that resonate the deepest here.

On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.

Astute and piercing.

Some of Post Malone’s brightest sounds to date: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has 1950s sweetness and 1980s syntheticness, and “I Cannot Be (a Sadder Song)” has a bubbly undertow that recalls some of the squeakiest K-pop. “One Right Now,” with the Weeknd, is more zippy dyspepsia. But even the chirpy moments don’t detract from the album’s tonal consistency.

Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts.

A small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.

Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship.

The music draws pleasure from every strategic detail: from the weave of sampled and echoing backup vocals in “Different Size,” from the percussive syllables that break up the title and refrain of “Kilometre,” from reversed guitar tones and distant reggae horns in “Jagele,” from the saxophone curlicues that answer his voice in “Common Person.”

For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.

“Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.

A mournful, contemplative album. ... Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.

With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. ... The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona.

Throughout the album, Algiers lashes out at injustice, exults in its sonic mastery and insists on the life forces of solidarity and physical impact. But it refuses to promise any consolation.

Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh. And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence.

The years between boygenius recordings have made all three songwriters more confident and more levelheaded.

“Multitudes” is Feist’s sixth studio album, and it embraces both delicacy and impact. It’s at once her most intimate-sounding and her most ambitious set of songs.

“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums.

It reaffirms what she’s been doing right; it also claims new possibilities.

With a voice that often sounds like it’s on the verge of tears, she brings flickers of vibrato, jazzy curlicues, grainy inflections and subtle pauses and accelerations to her phrasing. It’s not modesty at all — it’s precision, and it has been ever more sharply honed.

In the new songs, he works his way through familiar topics: wealth, parties, sex, fame, autonomy. And even in well-trodden sonic territory, he can create arresting songs. .... But as the album ticks and hums along, the songs that linger are the ones that break away from standard Latin trap.

The finished track simplifies Lennon’s emotional give-and-take; it edits out his misgivings about himself. .... As in many Beatles songs, “Now and Then” has an unexpected closing flourish: a decisive, syncopated string phrase. And low in the mix, after a final shake of a tambourine, a voice says, “Good one!” Like the other posthumous Beatles tracks, “Now and Then” leans into nostalgia. Its existence matters more than its quality.