Much of the music feels transitory, like smoke escaping. But “Notes on Water,” the last part of the suite, wants to stick around.

The atmosphere of this music is lighter and less haunted than some of Mr. Hecker’s past work; some parts of the new album, like “Music of the Air,” can be thrilling in its evocation of a seamless connection between the physical and the synthetic. It also, sometimes, seems more impersonal, as if the ideas have the edge over their physical manifestation.

It’s a move away from crowd-pleasing ditties, a valiant turn inward and, at times--in “Gale Song,” “In the Light” and “Angela”--the songs reach a distillation of yearning and solitude. But over the course of an entire album, a glint of the Lumineers’ old whimsy would have helped.

Her outrageous self-possession plays out more vibrantly on some of these tracks, like “Big Talk,” which puts her up against the rapper Rick Ross, and “Riot,” which has a klaxon-like hook handled by Nina Sky. There’s no end to Ms. Banks’s swagger, though her toughest moments veer toward the style of a hometown rival, Nicki Minaj.

The album has a few missteps, like the goopy arrangement on the ballad “Sueños” and some hokey lyrics. But what comes through nearly every song is a sense of camaraderie and joyful relief: no more kowtowing to radio and countless ways to jam.

Between the giant, smiley singalongs, there’s a little more darkness than the band’s sound suggests. The verses grapple with impulses toward destruction and self-destruction. “If I weren’t so selfish/I could hear your calls for help,” Mr. Ward sings in “I Still Make Her Cry.” But it’s rarely long before another huge chorus arrives to banish all misgivings.

Overall, Views contains Drake’s most straightforward lyrics, and his emotional excavations aren’t as striking as they were a few years ago, when they had the sting of the new to them.

[Will] may be Ms. Barwick’s most conventionally light, soothing record, and is sometimes a little inert as a result.

Even though structurally Strange Little Birds evokes the band’s early work, it’s clear there’s mellowness afoot.

The record feels short, which might be a good thing: She leaves you guessing what she’s up to.

More often than not, Mr. Marley lives up to the ambition that his last name demands of him. With any luck, his next album will have fewer guests and more of the introspection and steadfastness he reveals in “It’s Alright,” a hymnlike ballad that he sings on his own.

Rae Sremmurd is particularly well-suited to the carnival sounds of its debut, but in many places here feels as if it’s getting squelched.

On some level his songs are all age-old tales, but put together in his own exacting way, which makes them new.

The results are, in many places, as ethereally and lustrously beautiful as the best Bon Iver material but more removed. ... Because this album travels in so many directions, there are places where Mr. Vernon sounds unanchored, and where his reluctance gives way to lack of commitment. His naïveté has always been carefully studied, but sometimes here, especially in the middle of the album, it feels just vague.

13 has enough ominous tension to justify numerical superstitions. In fact, you could do worse than to make this album a cornerstone of your Halloween soundtrack this year.

The new songs--is most diverse set to date, and mostly rigorously executed and fun--show Mr. Mars to be interested in different musical eras, different production approaches and different singing voices without veering into chaos. Mostly his songs are like cotton candy: sweet, sticky, structurally impressive but not especially deep.

Some of the most exciting songs on Starboy are the least expected. ... But brevity is almost too central here: Some songs (“Love to Lay,” “Nothing Without You”) have barely any verses at all, largely relying on pre-choruses and choruses.

The electronic musician who calls himself Burial deals in blurry, melancholy, ominous implications. His first release since 2013 is a pair of tracks that are never far from dissolving into entropy.

A csometimes fascinating collection of alternate-universe hip-hop and pop from a sui generis character.

A batteries-fully-charged assault on the pop charts from a performer skilled in musical osmosis.

Playboi Carti’s self-titled major-label debut album, which was released in April, is erratic, sometimes transfixingly so.

Sometimes great, sometimes foggy album, which is almost bold in its resistance to contemporary pop music aesthetics.

Only one song quietly stands out from the album’s flow: “Hard to Say Goodbye.” ... Mister Mellow is by no means the aural tranquilizer that its lyrics and packaging pretend to call for. The songs, for all their pretty, prismatic intricacies, are remote and forlorn.

Mr. Grohl and Foo Fighters wear their influences so openly--Pink Floyd in “Concrete and Gold,” Led Zeppelin in “Make It Right,” the Beatles all over the album--that they still come across as earnest, proficient journeymen, disciples rather than trailblazers.

It is also Ms. Swift chasing that good feeling, pushing back against a decade of following her own instincts. And it works. Reputation is fundamentally unlike any of her other albums in that it takes into account — prioritizes, actually — the tempo and tone of her competition. Reputation is a public renegotiation, engaging pop music on its terms, not hers.

Throughout this album, there are melodies, chord changes, lyrical images and structural tricks that feel indebted to Ms. Swift’s first three albums. Even the way Ms. Ballerini lingers over certain vowels suggests the shadow of Ms. Swift. In order to fully come into her own, though, Ms. Ballerini needs to shake free of that as effectively as she brushes off country music’s simpleton men.

There are occasional intrusions of other ideas, like the agonized rock on “Over Now,” and when far more formalist artists like Nicki Minaj or G-Eazy arrive, they sound like teachers trying to enforce order in detention. But in total, Beerbongs & Bentleys is admirably committed to form, one long song of the decontextualized now.

[Swae Lee's] “Swaecation” is the most liquid, the most soft-focus of the three. (The duo album is a close second.) At times verges on the quiet-storm R&B of the early 1980s, though he is far more flexible with tempos than Post Malone, and sometimes veers toward ecstatic 1980s synth-pop. By contrast, Slim Jxmmi’s solo album, “Jxmtro,” is a more conventional contemporary hip-hop album, buoyant and loose. Sr3mm is long, but listening to it in one sitting, on its own, from top to bottom, is not how it’s truly designed to be engaged with.