Over 11 songs in 33 minutes, Lizzo rarely lets up, a relentless assault that favors excess verging on camp over subtlety.

The follow-up amplifies the hooks, widens the scope, deepens the wordplay.

The Mekons thread humor and poignancy through songs that crackle, veer, swoop and combust.

There’s loneliness, heartache and regret mixed with more than a pinch of decadence in these songs. The boozy, druggy indulgences match the haziness of the best songs, the self-medication of a generation of Los Angeles kids raised on broken families and bittersweet relationships.

Nick Waterhouse (Innovative Leisure) occasionally comes off as a little too clean and polite. But when he loosens his tie a bit, Waterhouse brings a spark to his songs that transcends era and genre.

Though the songs are broken up into two- and three-minute arrangements, they seamlessly blend with the interludes to create a continuous mood piece designed to be absorbed in one 38-minute listen. In contrast to the more traditional song structures and insinuating melodies on “A Seat at the Table,” the new album lacks a signature tune. Only the reggae-flavored playfulness of “Binz” cuts through the haze on the first few listens, though shimmering moments of beauty flutter to the surface throughout.

That sense of surprise, the risk-taking of an artist daring to dig for truth, no matter how inconvenient or uncomfortable it might be, isn’t something to be taken for granted. That it informs every song suggests that “Crushing” is likely to become one of the year’s enduring albums.

A carefully integrated mood piece, and the mood is bleak.

“Sugar” carved out a path to the dancefloor, but it also made Khan sound like a heavily filtered singer-for-hire as she belted out the hook. The song anchors “Hello Happiness,” and the remaining six tracks are essentially more of the same, with Khan’s voice rarely in the forefront. Her vocals become just another texture in stretches of the title track. ... “Too Hot” provides the sole exception. ... It’s terrific.

Beneath the energetic exterior, a steely resolve informs the songs.

Rather than singing from inside the darkness, he steps back and tries to find glimmers of hope and, dare it be said, happiness. The dozen songs offer a more forgiving perspective on time, memory and the past and how to live with and move beyond it.

Rogers is listed as coproducer throughout, but her distinctiveness only comes through when Kurstin and some of his other high-profile production accomplices (Kid Harpoon, Ricky Reed) take the day off. ... In contrast, Kurstin--with Rogers listed as a co-conspirator--swamps many of the remaining tracks in virtual choirs of wordless backing vocals and squiggling, squirming keyboard and synthesizer textures.

At times in the past, Gunn’s songs felt like they were skimming the surface of multiple genres. On The Unseen in Between, the guitarist more fully submerges himself--and by extension, his listeners--in his most personal songs yet.

The tension between Van Etten’s melodies and Congleton’s sometimes chaotic sonic coloring makes for a bracing listen on the album’s best tracks.

Bowie at his best was both a crowd-pleaser and provocateur, a pop visionary and an avant-garde subversive. The crowd-pleaser is on full-force display at Glastonbury 2000, but the facets of his stage persona that made him the most unsettling of rock stars are nowhere to be found.

He makes the 11 songs on Warm (dBpm Records) sound effortless, sprinkled with Byrds-gone-country twang and touches of ambient dreaminess and acid-tinged atmospherics.

Bedroom jams, cameos and gimmicks pad the album’s second half. Paak resorts to a corny-sounding Jamaican patois on “Left to Right,” a cheesy saxophone disrupts “Cheers,” and Snoop Dogg appears like the avuncular ghost of G-funk’s past on “Anywhere.” After raising the bar with “Malibu,” Paak doesn’t quite reach the same heights this time.

Her first album in four years, the singer navigates the uncertainty of today. It toggles between stark reality and more abstract images, sometimes blending them in ways enhanced by the production.

Though the album is less immediate than “Body Talk,” the choruses not as insistent, it exudes a hypnotic pull nonetheless: this is a gentler brand of body music about absence and need.

Greta Van Fleet now adds its name to the list of Zep disciples who have made albums that sound kinda, sorta and sometimes exactly like its primary influence. If nothing else, the quartet has demonstrated that guitar-rock can still be popular with a young audience that either hasn’t heard of Led Zeppelin, or prefers Greta’s version to their grandparents’ original.

As self-effacing and understated as Noname can appear, the weight of her songs and words eventually can’t be denied.

The vulnerability is one of the album’s most endearing features. It skirts the-great-man-stares-into-the-abyss-of-mortality melodrama that has become a late-career-album cliche for many of McCartney’s peers. Instead it presents a plainspoken realism, an earthiness in keeping with his working-class upbringing.

It’s a microcosm of Brexit England and Trump America, a distillation of pressure points that becomes audible with the ominous clickety-clacking drums and bass that usher in the staggering “Colossus.” And yet Talbot’s narrators find a way to rise above, and the songs turn strangely celebratory just when things seem to be bottoming out.

[“If You Really Love Nothing” is] one of Interpol’s best recent songs, but its standard proves difficult to maintain on what is in many ways a typically hit-and-miss latter-day Interpol album.

Chicago-based multi-instrumentalist Fulks wrote the bulk of the songs, sang, played guitar and banjo and produced, all in service to Lewis, who sounds as if she’s having a blast.

Shires’ fifth album, is in some ways an attempt to bust down some of the cliches that inevitably attach themselves to an artist stereotyped in that way (acoustic, folk, introspective, sad). And it does the job well. Shires’ way with words is still very much intact.

About half the album falls into a bland exercise in proficiency for these rock lifers, flavored by horns and saxophone that sound tacked on.

The California quintet is as comfortable submerging itself in cheesy beauty as it is in conjuring mayhem, all in service to the neo-poetic lyrics of singer George Clarke. That boundary-free approach makes the band’s fourth album, Ordinary Corrupt Human Love (Anti), both a divisive and energizing listen.