It’s arguably the most modern score he’s ever composed, cutting with a minimalistic edge that might make Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross blush. Even so, the score never loses that Carpenter charm, keeping a tight grip on its origins without sneezing from all the dust.

MØ deserves credit for consistency; almost every song on Forever Neverland is pleasant enough, but few rise above “pleasant.” The everything-is-a-hook songwriting style works better in small doses.

QUAVO HUNCHO ends up being a half-and-half affair: half making it easy to hit the skip button and the other half highlighting the talents Quavo brings to Migos.

The heavy songs on Evolution should please longtime fans, with a couple harkening back to the dynamism of Disturbed’s first couple of albums, but the glut of softer tracks may have been served better on a separate acoustic EP.

On their debut, Greta Van Fleet proves their ability to resurrect the sounds of the past, but not necessarily that they’re ready to make those sounds into something they truly own.

A ferocious album that finds them diving headfirst into experimentation, it is filled to the brim with a driving energy that rarely lets up. Striking the precarious balance of melding their pop inclinations with uproarious noise, Cloud Nothings push the dial back in the right direction.

These woozy explorations don’t always result in anything more than a pleasant 10 minutes or so, but taken together, they combine to form one more data point for the argument that Kurt Vile’s artistic trajectory remains, as always, on an upward slant.

There’s an uncommon chemistry and flow between Gunna, Lil Baby, and the producers that makes this far more than your typical collaboration.

Look Now is another solid entry into an already healthy and vital body of work. It’s not his absolute best, but it still earns a spot in the meatier part of his iconic recording arc.

I Loved You At Your Darkest is another strong addition to Behemoth’s remarkable run, which has now lasted more than a quarter century. It reveals some welcome growth within a subgenre of heavy music that has often been resistant to evolution.

C’est La Vie has moments of real beauty and depth while reflecting on fatherhood and settling down. But Houck should keep pushing into the strange, uncomfortable places where his best music gets made; now’s not the time to shrug it off.

Yes, the listening experience would have been improved with tighter editing, but there are a great many sins in the world, and a soundtrack being too-faithful to the movie is hardly the worst. There’s real joy in this music.

It’s more streamlined yet just as powerful as previous albums. Although the flow of Electric Messiah occasionally drags in parts, it’s a welcome addition to the band’s discography.

If you’re already a fan of Voivod, then you know how incredibly unique they are, and the quality of songwriting on The Wake is top-notch, making it one of the strongest metal albums of the year. Voivod have progressed exponentially since their raw punkish days.

Wanderer is neither as harrowing as Moon Pix nor as kaleidoscopic as Sun, but it shows a mature artist who rides the waves of tumultuous experience--no less excellent for containing her multitudes.

After this long of a layoff, we’d probably be satisfied if a new Chic record simply ticked all of the expected Chic-shaped boxes and nothing more. However, for its first two-thirds at least, It’s About Time never settles for a pure nostalgia play.

Despite its intimacy, Piano & A Microphone doesn’t feel like trespassing on Prince because it doesn’t truly expose him. This recording doesn’t reveal the nuts-and-bolts inner workings of one of the greatest artists of all time. How could it? We get to listen as a visionary works with simple tools--and in the end, Prince’s genius remains as mysterious as ever.

Though compact, For My Crimes is far from slight and marks another welcome addition into what’s become one of the best runs of the 2010s.

Iridescence is full-to-bursting; it’s like almost eating too much food, almost drinking too much booze; it’s getting close to too much, and still asking for more.

Despite presenting a more interesting record after 2015’s tedious Pagans in Vegas, Metric undoubtedly falter on their latest release. Their emphasis on guitars has certainly helped them, but Art of Doubt feels lacking in creativity. It’s a safe album, but safety can be insipid.

It’s groovy and funky and sultry, and it takes things seriously while still being joyful. It encourages freedom of form, in the sense of both body and art. It’s the perfect second album for Christine and the Queens.

For her sixth studio album, Carrie Underwood has taken some modest political risks without changing her full-throated style. She knows what she’s good at, and Cry Pretty is full of the kind of songs that made her one of the most popular artists in the world.

The pleasure of Room 25 is in hearing a master wordsmith turn words into feelings so that the feelings linger long after the words have stopped.

Lyrics that need to be read aloud to be understood, plus an unsettling discombobulation of tempos, dynamics, and various internal compositions, plus Leschper’s monotonous drone, all co-existing for nearly one hour becomes mentally exhausting and almost frustrating halfway through Render.

Collapse is another entry in a remarkable run of work that Aphex Twin has been releasing since his return from a long and clearly necessary hiatus. It may feel like he is on cruise control a bit, but James’ coasting is any other artist’s magnum opus.

A more focused sonic direction would have been more potent and a more adventurous one would have been more exciting. Still, every track delivers a bruising and it’s hard to imagine anyone interested in the group being disappointed by the album.

It stands tall as a late candidate for the year’s best rock record. Spiritualized has added yet another chapter to its wild, dreamlike musical legacy, proving that rock isn’t dead and that maybe everyone else just isn’t trying enough.

As a whole, the album may not be impeccable, but it’s the best he’s released since 2010.

Egypt Station is a minor entry in a major catalog, a Paul McCartney record for people who like Paul McCartney records.

Bloom is a fun record, dreamy and vulnerable and urgently horny. Sivan has a fresh perspective, and his force of personality enlivens tracks that otherwise might sound conventional. His best songs perform a kind of magic, with sentiments that feel universal to all of us and as personal as a fingerprint.

This is great pop music with an edge, a record full of good vibes and bad attitude that somehow manages to work everything out splendidly.

There are moments when it feels admirable in its scope and ambition, but ultimately, the pure intentions get lost in the noise.

Negro Swan is a grand work that gives credit to the pioneers of the culture while building a path forward within that framework, placing Hynes firmly in the canon as one of the most insightful musicians of his generation.

While not the strongest of the band’s second-era output, it’s a nice addition to Alice in Chains’ impressive discography.

Marauder is still Interpol, and it’s still pretty good. It’s got mood and emotion for days. But because the album is marred by nonexistent bass lines and, most concerningly, production and mixing choices that run completely at odds with Interpol’s natural strengths and most beloved idiosyncrasies, it’s nowhere near great.

It’s rare for an album with so many stunning moments to suddenly become so aggressively mediocre. Still, the highs of Sweetener outweigh the lows. But with such lofty highs, it’s hard to be content with the album that is and not think about what the album might have been.

Thank You for Today is Death Cab for Cutie’s weakest album of the decade and either a transition towards something greater or the first harbinger of creative decline.

Be the Cowboy shows that love and loss can be grand and small at the same time. That two minutes is more than enough time to melt down emotion into a pure concentrate and nearly drown yourself in it. That every moment can be a epic love story, that every heartbreak can be as hard and small as a pearl and just as coveted.

At this point, she’s like a Starbucks coffee, a consistent product with a reliable buzz. The next cup probably won’t change your life, but it might just get you through the day.

Though it doesn’t quite reach the heights of his first two, his new album, Stay Dangerous, is another solid project from one of the best on the West Coast.

The music might take your breath away, if the worst of the lyrics don’t make you roll your eyes. He’s very good at what he’s good at, but he’s not what you’d call well-rounded. Still, not everyone who has something to say, says it in words.

A solid album throughout, Vicious is slickly produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Mastodon, Alice in Chains), who helped give the disc the big sound that these songs deserve.

Something about the tossed-off quality of Teatime Dub Encounters feels like a missed opportunity.

Though brief, a tardy reprise of the adventurous sound that opens the release is an exciting display of The Internet’s true brilliance, which finds them absolutely nailing every transition and avoiding the anticlimactic ending suggested by a number of the preceding tracks with a pair of stone-cold bops.

If one Ty Segall record a year isn’t enough for you, you’ll likely find enough muggy demo-grade fun amid Joy’s best moments. If you’re a dabbler who’s already given part of your 2018 to Freedom’s Goblin, though, you’re probably safe sitting this one out.

Longstreth may never be able to get out of the shadow of Bitte Orca, but Lamp Lit Prose finds him embracing his quirk, wit, and warmth, ending up with his brightest album yet.

Kim Gordon’s voice may have been the spark that lit the blaze, but now she’s using a guitar to conjure up sonic waves to keep pushing us forward.

Northern Chaos Gods is a source of comfort by showing that Immortal can weather seemingly any storm and come out strong. They might not actually be immortal, but the band, like their legend, show no signs of diminishing.

Ordinary Corrupt Human Love has moving, emotional pieces and sharp performances bolstered by a band clearly stretching out of its comfort zone successfully. The album is a refreshing new shade of their sound without abandoning the band’s core mechanics.

Unsurprisingly, his charm has worn thin. What’s left without it is a body of work that is self-indulgent, largely evasive, and frankly boring when the beat is not quite strong enough to steady the ship.

For now, Gorillaz seem content to oscillate between extremes, a futuristic pop powerhouse that cannot decide what the future looks like.

With Bad Witch, Reznor and Ross have proven their staying power as one of heavy music’s most formidable outfits, honoring their roots while looking forward into bold, new transcendent territory.

High as Hope is a marvel when Welch pushes past the boundaries both within herself and in the familiar structure of songs, but falters when stagnating inside those constraints.

Taylor creates an unapologetic record of late-night slow jams that stem from a more mature, experienced perspective. ... The forwardness [in “3way”] is welcome, but the angle Taylor takes is questionable.

As the album comes to a close, its success lies in the honesty and purity that went into its creation.

His lyricism, though timely at points, is largely impersonal if not flat-out pedestrian and makes NASIR the first album in Nas’ catalog that Nas has failed to show up for.

While it isn’t without a few bumps along the way, Liberation really is a welcome return to form for one of this era’s greatest vocalists.

After claiming his place in the spotlight by overwhelming force with The Epic, Kamasi Washington capitalizes on both his newfound fame and his journeyman work ethic to produce a follow-up that’s more intimate and just as daring at the same time.

Despite its heavy-handedness, the end of the album offers an equitable, full-circle resolution to this human drama: how to love, how to forgive, how to move on. ... However, on this album, compromising for her marriage also means compromising the art she creates.

The controlled chaos of the record is proof that somewhere beneath all of the public outbursts and musical misfires, Kanye West--not the old Kanye--but the actual man and his heart are still somewhere in the mix planning to raise the bar and occasionally executing to near flawless result.

The most dependable dance band of the 21st century continues its consistency streak on Head Over Heels, which contains enough radio-ready rump-shakers to earn a spot in your warm-weather playlist for this summer and a few more to come.

It’s a welcome addition to a genre that has become so occupied with spacey, bare-bones operations and overly simplistic results.

As a whole, Lost & Found finds Jorja Smith making a name for herself with presence and poise. Throughout these 12 songs, she commands a mastery of various styles, with enough experiments to flesh out a varied, captivating album.

Lush is one of the most engaging and relatable indie rock debuts in quite some time.

With No Shame, Allen has eschewed making an Irish exit from her days as a party girl and instead delivered a eulogy that gracefully buries the past while continuing to seek the sunshine of the future.

Although the trap-influenced style wears thin at times, so sad so sexy is a superb reinvention of Lykke Li.

Despite its sometimes grating protagonist, ye is a pleasant enough way to pass half an hour. Seven tracks is long enough to develop an idea without wearing it out. The production is typically lush. Kanye has returned to the kinds of soul samples that made him famous to begin with.

Through his distortion of smooth adult contemporary ballads, Lopatin proves that in the right hands, often-ridiculed elements of culture can be crafted into something transcendent.

While DAYTONA could easily have been Pusha-T’s victory lap, it only builds on the heft of his weighty legacy.

Faced with the unexpected, Prass evolved, trading inward-facing confessionalism for outward-facing perseverance and releasing one of 2018’s minor masterpieces in the process. Plus, you can most certainly dance to it.

Many of these songs will soar in arenas and on festival main stages. They’re expansive, epic, and Mayberry’s powerful voice never wavers. But that openness comes at a price, and throughout Love Is Dead, every time CHVRCHES have the chance to get stranger, messier, and more unique, they rein in their eccentricities, going cleaner and more general.

The end result sees Misty at his most desperate, heartbroken state, making a solid comedown record from I Love You, Honeybear and Pure Comedy that doesn’t quite hit the profound highs of its predecessors, but gets carried quite a long way on the backs of its honest songwriting.

Lyrically, Barnett feels more accessible this time around, letting us share her anxiety when it comes to daily threats like toxic masculinity (“Nameless, Faceless”) and even scaling back the syllables (again on “Charity”) to simply reassure us that we’re not alone.

Sparkle Hard is at once his most sonically adventurous and structurally tight set of music in over a decade and easily stands among his most rewarding work with the Jicks.

Easily the weirdest record in the band’s catalog, Tranquility Base Hotel & Casino is a fun, flawed aberration (at least, for now). Even in failure, there’s enough to explore within Turner’s thicket of lyrics and the haze of this inviting, yet not quite fully realized sonic setting to warrant a few active listens.

7 is a lush record that grabs you from the onset and contains tremendous depth beyond the surface. Not quite a full rebirth, the band feel free to indulge their experimental inclinations and loosen up, filling the record with a bright spark that makes it as exciting to listen to as it must have been to make.

Tracks like “An Urn” and “Blessed Alone” are some of the best material The Body have released to date due to strong vocal performances and powerful lyrics. A few tracks feel predictable, though, and as a whole the project feels like the band dipping their toes into new territory rather than jumping all the way in.

On Sr3mm, Discs One, Two, and Three are all hanging out on the same street corner. There are plenty of interesting moments. But it would have been nice to go on a journey.

Roughly half the tracks being available prior to this release isn’t much of an issue when they are of such high quality, and the fresh tracks are some of the best the band have ever written. The group seem rejuvenated with a long road ahead of them.

“Same Bitches” sounds like a song Ty Dolla $ign once made and ultimately scrapped, and Post was more than happy to turn another man’s trash into his treasure, no matter how awkward or forced he sounds among more natural fits G-Eazy and YG.

Monáe is, as always, a true master of melding genres, influences, and styles. Her central themes of identity and internal conflict are as tangible on Dirty Computer as they ever have been.

He doesn’t finesse his points; he douses them in gasoline and blows them up. And that’s great! We could all do with more fiery explosions in our music. Sometimes Cole gets wacky, but thankfully he’s never dull.

Essential for fans and sporadically thrilling for newcomers, Eat the Elephant is the kind of reunion record that most bands would kill for. While it doesn’t court the same kind of controversy as the band’s previous political statements, it rewards multiple listens enough to overcome the vast majority of its shortcomings.

It’s a grief we hope to avoid and yet a grief we can’t help tasting. Saba makes it near impossible to turn away.

On Isolation, she never sounds trapped in another era; she sounds free and inventive. And with nary a dud to be found among its 15 tracks, Isolation deserves a spot in the dance pop and neo-soul pantheons.

It’s not perfect, but the album is remarkably cohesive, the right length, and filled to the brim with songs that already feel like inevitable summer smashes.

My Dear Melancholy, has cohesion, but it’s a listless, murky sound that never unhinges the way you want it to. Had he pushed a little further, it could have made for something more substantial, rather than walking up to the cusp and then backing down.

Virtue delivers a bracing set of experiments and amounts to the most interesting record of Casablancas’ career.

PRhyme’s progressive approach to the evolution of “real hip-hop” suggests that somewhere beneath the growing pile of impassioned, but largely semantic internal arguments plaguing rap might lie the reconciliation and unity necessary to elevate the art form in a manner that allows all parties to avoid a messy, public divorce where the kids are forced to pick sides.

Musgraves hits one high note after another on Golden Hour; her talent as a songwriter and melody-maker is second to none, and each song is thoughtful, well-formed, and a delightful experience on its own. Together, the tracks on Golden Hour add up to an honest, cohesive musical experience that will linger in your mind and heart long after the final notes have faded.

White’s reverence for classic music of the past is still a big part of who is he here; he’s just shifting focus with a more manic and multi-faceted approach. That’s not weird. That’s smart.

While this new self-titled album may point to a band dedicated to writing a new chapter for itself, the music they’ve made here only acts as the tentative (and skippable) introduction.

Sunflower Bean have all the ingredients at hand to achieve something truly spectacular. And they’re right on the precipice.

Though it contains a number of experiments that don’t quite work, I’ll Be Your Girl offers tracks that point to a very exciting way forward for the band.

It’s a worthy effort from a living legend, full of songs that are at least interesting and at times breathtaking.

This LP is loud, clanging, and communal, but also, in its own way, dreamlike. There’s something warped at the core of these songs, as if they’ve been yanked through some kind of wormhole and have reemerged into our world as aliens. And, for the most part, that makes for some fascinating listening.

All Nerve finds The Breeders sounding more ecstatic and less restrained than anytime since Last Splash originally soaked the alt-rock scene.

He’s turning them [conflicting emotions] into a rapturous piece of art like this instead of venting his spleen in the echo chamber of social media is worthy of praise and attention. Just do yourself the favor of taking this album in moderation. A little goes a long way.