On Pompeii, Le Bon is direct and poignant, honing in on a polished sound while using classical, tragic influences to help her make sense of the urgent, unfurling present.

It’s always been about the process of making music for this band, and after a decade of critical busts and two years of a global pandemic, the passion that’s present here begs the belief that they’ve finally regained that unbridled joy, once again finding something really sweet happening amongst themselves.

Ants From Up There feels like the work of a band figuring itself out. ... This is a record that sees Black Country, New Road reestablishing themselves.

When Mitski veers jauntier and more upbeat, the album soars.

After the breakthrough of their incredible 2016 album Cardinal, Hall and Pinegrove faced the tall task of trying to match or surpass it. They haven’t quite done that, but they have built an impressive catalog of albums that spill over with compelling songs and affecting performances. From that perspective, 11:11 fits in perfectly.

Three Dimensions Deep will doubtless make it onto many a Spotify playlist; the record boasts club-ready bops and chill bangers that can please almost any aural palate. When you dig beneath the surface, though, Mark imparts universal wisdom and gives listeners a much-needed moment to appreciate ourselves.

Bazan evokes the tumult of emotion that accompanies the middle school years, sometimes so well that it’s uncomfortable, as he chronicles the year or so he spent in Lake Havasu before his family moved again.

The Alien Coast’s varied array of influences sound wholly unfamiliar coming from St. Paul & The Broken Bones, but they work. Whether they’re welcome is another question. No one wants to think about annihilation when they’re engaging with art to find respite from annihilation, but The Alien Coast’s fluctuations in tone are so rewarding to confront that they make the record’s message that much easier to absorb.

Anaïs Mitchell is a grownup album. It’s the first great folk album of the year, but more crucially, it’s a quiet personal triumph for Mitchell herself. Disclosing one’s own truths rarely sounds this graceful.

A little bit Sleaford Mods, a helping of The Fall and a dash of Pulp, the group craft smart vignettes of modern life with a confident, witty delivery across their debut full-length, The Overload.

W portends a bright future for Boris, even this late into their career. If their new material is any indication, they may never run out of ideas.

Whether all our efforts on this dying world will be for naught is an open question, but Silverbacks bear witness nonetheless on Archive Material, advancing their craft even as the ship sinks beneath their feet.

It is brief, for sure, but it is packed with densely packaged rhymes and rewarding musical numbers that are majestic.

With The Boy Named If, Costello and The Imposters show they are still capable of kicking each other under the table at the restaurant, showing their fangs to the manager when they’ve been told to leave.

The album’s features are among the best in the Weeknd catalogue, highlighting love and loss spanning decades.

Her sound on Sensational is seductive and hushed, and she adopts a poise that can easily draw a cult following. Give into de Casier’s allure, before her enchantment becomes far more than just a whisper.

Every song on the album is warm and beautiful, marked at different points by laidback acoustic guitar, old-timey horn sections, driving percussion, cinematic string arrangements and morose piano.

This long-lost document may be the most important live offering there is of Neil Young and Crazy Horse—or at least the most important Young has shared with us.

She offers a vulnerable meditation to soundtrack the ways in which our hearts reach outwards towards the loved ones we miss and the loved ones we haven’t met. And if the music world gifts us all with more pro-mom records in 2022, may we return to them just as soon.

With Hayter’s intentions fully understood, Sinner Get Ready not only gains more gravity acting on the guillotine blade as it comes down, but the head that it intends to decapitate has a face that we all can now recognize.

The eight tracks here were intended as experiments in sound, and Vega shows almost no interest in conventional song structures or, for that matter, melody. Instead, he focuses on atmospherics, creating moods that are frequently disjointed, sometimes oppressive and often deeply charismatic.

It’s a breathtaking, immersive, often mournful exploration of the fundamentally transformative, ever-changing nature of feeling.

They’ve followed up a cult-fave album (or in this case, two) with an effort that preserves the band’s strengths while also showcasing artistic growth and illuminating a path forward.

It’s an uncanny understanding of not forcing the muse that she maintains on her brand new album, I Thought Of You.

Flying Dream 1 is in no rush to get anywhere. Its lyrics and music are more lovely than ever before, chock-full of gorgeous piano lines to match Garvey’s husky croon.

Despite the songs’ substantial vigor, they don’t build to obvious climaxes, and their intros and outros are often abrupt. The twists and turns that occur within the thick of things are where songs really take off, as elements elegantly alternate between the foreground and background. The album features some of their most endearing and memorable vocal moments yet.

Korkejian has proven her ability to forge closeness and sincerity in past works, but her third album feels like her own secret, not only because the songs haven’t been shared before, but also because her development as an artist and person is now a bit more overt.

Perhaps the most appealing part of the album is that regardless of what sound, style or location these songs came from—British folk, New Orleans soul, Bakersfield country—they sound cohesive and of a piece in the hands of Plant and Krauss. In other words, the singers make these songs sound like their own.