About half the album has West as a role player on tracks that suggest a theater scene, with a handful of voices playing characters (quite possibly all living inside West’s brain). The album moves from spoken-word monologues to more expansive musical settings that try to “take the top off (and) let the sun come in.”

As usual, there’s a lot more going on than first meets the ear.

Barnett isn’t necessarily trying to reinvent rock with her songwriting. Instead, she strives to reveal something about herself within the context of relatively straight-up verse-chorus songs. Her playing is rarely flashy, but it is devastatingly efficient, a procession of riffs, fills and sculpted feedback that stamps her as a--here’s that word again--modest master of rock guitar.

Friedberger’s economical way with language, the way she can pack complex emotions into the space of a few lines, testifies to her craftsmanship. Though its origins are relatively modest--a woman alone with her thoughts and a cheap keyboard--Rebound doesn’t sound like a bedroom record.

It’s a rawer, less elaborate work than its predecessors, yet still hugely ambitious.

This is the kind of record that preschoolers would find catchy enough to sing along with, accompanied by their grandparents. And yet, the wry, trippy humor and image-rich wordplay often feel futuristic, in the way they conflate time and space, sometimes wondrously, sometimes darkly.

In contrast to the North Carolina songwriter’s rushed but rousing 2015 debut album, “Sidelong” (reissued last year by Chicago-based Bloodshot), Years is a more measured but no less bracing listen. Shook’s backing band, the Disarmers, holds a steady flame without letting things get out of hand.

Nashville pros help with the production and songwriting, and they keep this album from becoming quite as radical a statement as it might have been. Tracks such as “Wonder Woman” and “Velvet Elvis” drag “Golden Hour” back toward assembly-line country-pop. The singer is best when she upends convention.

As good as “No Burden” was, Historian is better: songs like short stories; sneakily hard-hitting arrangements; dreaminess and catharsis, often in the space of a few verses.

What a Time to be Alive roars.

Little Dark Age does return to some of the “form” of “Oracular Spectacular” with its greater pop accessibility, but it also embraces a less obvious and more intriguing path on several songs.

Too often, Timberlake sounds adrift.

With 10 tracks spread across a mere 36 minutes, Segall’s self-titled 2017 album functioned as an instant career overview. As the longer, less-focused sequel, Freedom’s Goblin comes off as almost too much of a good but increasingly overfamiliar thing.

The merger of a furrowed-brow intellect and hip-freeing rhythm has been a Tune-Yards constant since Garbus made her 2009 bedroom recording, “Bird-Brains.” I Can Feel you Creep into my Private Life is both more refined and yet more raw.

His most accomplished album yet.

A typically diverse, trippy ride.

Savage Young Du contains nothing less than the foundation of that towering legacy.

It’s tactile and visual as much as aural, a continuation of her richly rewarding collaboration with Venezuelan-U.K. electronic artist and producer Arca.

If anything, the songs are more dramatic than ever, making greater use of near-silence and dynamics to underline hooks and refrains.

But the Swift who used to treat her fans like confidantes instead of a marketing demographic resurfaces only as the album winds down.

On Revelations, he serves notice that his sound and vision have returned intact.

An album that turns its predecessor’s intimacy into something far more ambitious.

She drops some of the emotional armor on her fifth studio album, Masseducation, which comes off as not only one of her most ambitious works, but also her most transparent.

With each album the Detroit quartet retains its deceptively casual air while pulling triumphant moments out of the noise. It can also conjure surprising tenderness when you least expect, or turn darkly comic in one verse, and lash out in the next.

It’s a convivial though seldom revelatory collection of straight-up verse-chorus-bridge pop-rock songs.

The album gets personal, but in a more low-key way than ever before.

An album that makes a virtue of its uneasiness, its unwillingness to settle down. Homme turns his restlessness into a virtue.

The Providence, R.I., group’s third studio album, Cost of Living (Sub Pop), marks a step up in production clarity, with Fugazi’s Guy Picciotto slightly altering the band’s balance of power while retaining its not-having-it attitude.