Freedom’s Goblin gives Segall room to play with a dizzying array of styles and genres, yet his excellent taste and melodic sensibility ensure that the whole wild endeavor stays firmly on the rails.

Børns has improved technically as a singer since his last record, and he’s smart not to cede the spotlight to Del Rey, instead using the album to twist his peculiar brand of romantic retrofuturism into inventive new shapes.

The reworked M A N I A never coalesces into a satisfying or particularly listenable whole; in spreading themselves between sounds even more disparate than on 2015’s maximalist “American Beauty/American Psycho,” Fall Out Boy have only succeeded in diluting their strengths.

The disc exudes confidence on every front, though the group’s ambitions seem scaled up to world domination.

The record alternates between Crazy Horse-style rockers and gentle acoustic folk, though as always Young throws a few curveballs.

The shimmering War & Leisure, the singer’s fourth LP, finds him operating in a similarly creative groove [as on 2015's Wildheart] but tamping down wolfish eroticism in favor of breezier, tropical vibes.

The music draws on two decades of musicianship to showcase the indie veterans’ trademark versatility. Anthemic “We Were Beautiful” melds euphoric horns with programmed drum machines; elsewhere, “The Girl Doesn’t Get It” floats its lyrics across a sea of synths. Best of all is delicate opener “Sweet Dew Lee,” on which Stuart Murdoch’s honeyed delivery posits him as the missing link between Simon and Garfunkel.

It’s a short, casual release, so much so that it’s easy to miss just how expertly crafted these songs are.

Taken as a whole, Songs of Experience isn’t a bad U2 album--just an uneven one. For every dull rehash of past glories, there’s something like the slinky Zombies pastiche “Summer of Love” to restore one’s faith that U2’s well of inspiration hasn’t gone entirely dry.

Utopia is both resolutely avant-garde and absolutely beautiful, a combination those who associate experimental music with dissonance and ugliness will find utterly paradoxical.

We have Low in High School, which is sometimes brilliant, sometimes infuriating, and 100  percent Morrissey.

From a purely musical standpoint, it’s a pretty good album--even when she’s throwing this many ideas against the wall, Swift is too talented a songwriter to miss her target more than a few times per record.

The Dusk in Us is, then, a 44-minute master class in wielding extreme art toward human ends, using hardcore’s berating heft as a foundation for dirging experimentalism.

Meaning of Life has few weak links, unfolding instead as an album-long emancipation for one of our best female vocalists, released from pesky contractual obligations and channeling her delight at that newfound freedom into songs that, while signaling a new stage in her career, appear to flow directly from both heart and soul.

Aching, vulnerable, and unsparing in detail, her creations invite you to listen with your whole self and feel along.

Decisively unmodern yet not quite retro, The Queen Is Dead sounds every bit as ineffably marvelous now as it must have in 1986, and this reissue is as good an excuse as any to let it charm us all over again.

If Beck is Generation X’s answer to David Bowie, then “Colors” is his “Let’s Dance”: an intentionally lightweight, enjoyable mid-career effort with one eye on the dance floor and one on radio playlists. Whether it returns him to his former hitmaker status remains to be seen, but “Colors” definitely succeeds in putting the spring back in Beck’s step.

It’s a jittering, coruscating sucker punch of an album--and St. Vincent’s first bona fide masterpiece.

At a svelte 10 songs and 47½ minutes, Heaven Upside Down is the shortest Marilyn Manson album yet, avoiding the overstuffed redundancy of past efforts. No one expected this band to be doing some of its best work 20 years after it first shook up the zeitgeist, but here it is, continuing to evolve while toning down its more dated or cartoonish aspects.

Even now, more than four decades after being recorded, it still catches your ear as one of the most wholly original sounds in pop music.

The knock on them has always been that their albums surround great singles with skip-able filler, but this time out they’ve put together a relatively tight, cohesive record. It’s not without its flaws, but Wonderful Wonderful still might be the best Killers album yet.

Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 the rare double helping that doesn’t feel excessive or bloated. They’ve got the tunes; whether they’re acoustic or electric is beside the point.

Deer Tick Vol. 1 and Vol. 2 the rare double helping that doesn’t feel excessive or bloated. They’ve got the tunes; whether they’re acoustic or electric is beside the point.

There may not be any moments of dramatic catharsis to compete with “Sea of Love” or “Mr. November,” but the band’s gift for slow, sad beauties (“Nobody Else Will Be There,” “Carin at the Liquor Store”) remains undiminished. Even as they tinker with their style, The National can’t help but sound like themselves.

Full of irresistible grooves, quotable lyrics, and moments of spine-tingling beauty, American Dream is a worthy addition to the LCD Soundsystem discography.

Put some headphones on, find a good window to stare out of, and let time stretch to the horizon; A Deeper Understanding will reward your patience.

It leaves you yearning for an album that would have expanded the mature melodicism of those three tracks [“Electric Blue,” “Put Your Money on Me” and “We Don’t Deserve Love”]. Instead, their presence magnifies the smarmy, sophomoric awfulness of everything else here.

I Can Spin a Rainbow finds her bouncing ideas off of the Legendary Pink Dots’ Edward Ka-Spel, whose aggressively experimental approach to what a song can entail is so specific and unyielding that the album forces her into new modes.