The songwriting across all 11 tracks is accessible and familiar—and yet, Cilker’s world that she’s created is fully under the rule of her genius penmanship. It’s sharp and far-ranging; anyone who has run from something can tap in and find ecstasy; anyone who has stayed put can achieve the same baroque fate.

You don’t emerge from the LP with a sense of linear narrative. Across 16 songs, relationships fail and prosper and then fail again; hope deteriorates and grows, only to deteriorate again. What Zach Bryan is is a moving portrait of life’s knottiest, in-between moments.

Their power remains in full effect on their latest, Hollow. At 11 new songs, their first LP since Unseen in 2016 strikes a balance between foreboding quiet numbers and deceptively airy tracks that belie the fatalistic lyrical content.

GUTS is a brash, sobering look at the totality of fame on a young woman—how it consumes, abuses and isolates.

While the tribute’s best moments reveal new and rewarding dimensions to his immortal songs nearly seven years after his death at age 74, the collection doesn’t move the needle when it comes to building more awareness around the visionary’s innumerable contributions to pop music.

everything is alive, prioritizes progression and refuses to stay stagnant. Sure, Slowdive glance back at their past every now and again, but it’s clear that their focus is fully set on the future.

Rabbit Rabbit sees the band writing some of the biggest and most gripping music of their career, all while still delivering the winding, twisting arrangements that drew fans to them in the first place over 10 years ago.

Although the highs are as high and electric as ever, the softer, slower moments take a little bit longer to come around to, sanding down instead of expanding on the album’s scope. The best parts of the album, particularly in the first half, illustrate the different kinds of dread gnawing at Rosenstock in straightforward yet colorful detail.

I Keep My Feet On The Fragile Plane is a wildly successful catalog of the trials of early adulthood, providing a comfortable space to explore painful points of unrealized promise and acceptance. Krieger seems at home within the structures of her languid, smoldering ballads–though the fire burns hot when she picks up speed just a little bit.

The occasional misstep aside, Capricorn shows another side of a young artist who is still growing into his full potential. Not only can Eddie 9V play the blues, he’s got plenty of soul, too.

Mommy flushes out all the misplaced pressure and instability that defined the group’s first go-round, while making it clear that Be Your Own Pet remain a force to be reckoned with—but on their terms.

SPELLLING has shown how she can transform her project from peculiar, interior pop to something grandiose—and Mystery School demonstrates her versatility: Not only can Cabral reorient her sound, she can fashion her existing songs with a new, consistent approach, closely tying all of her eras together under one project.

The Window, may, in fact, be the band’s best yet. .... Ratboys showcase, over and over again, their considerable skill for making songs that are emotionally raw and sonically polished, intrinsically rootsy and invariably catchy.

Nothing on Appaloosa Bones will blow your mind or stop you in your tracks, but it’s reliably beautiful and starkly self-possessed throughout, simultaneously free of forced erudition and mass-produced pandering. It is, perhaps, not music for everyone, but fans of Isakov’s stylings will be thrilled to introduce his latest venture into their daintily-plucked campfire song repertoires.

It’s a deeply fun album that beckons the listener’s attention immediately.

Unreal Unearth is packed full of poetic lyricism, heavyhearted remorse, hopeful anticipation and an honest expression of the joys and sorrow of being a human. This is undoubtedly his best work. The more straightforward tracks may be too saccharine at times, but Hozier’s gravitational artistry more than makes up for any slight missteps off the path.

Homo Anxietatem is a stroke of brilliance not for how many different landscapes Shamir wanders across, but for how generous and relentless in the pursuit of transformation they become as the album unfolds.

Chrome Dreams, despite sitting on a shelf for nearly 50 years, falls into our laps as one of Neil Young’s boldest works.

The Death of Randy Fitzsimmons boasts some of the band’s most exhilarating material in a career that has never lacked any superheated songs or top-shelf showmanship. Maybe that counts as maturity after all.

Radio Red is a crystalline, shimmering pop enterprise that dares to ask what a project might look like when a synthesizer takes a backseat to a career-defining vocal performance. It’s a signal that what’s next for Laura Groves is sure to be another marvel just as mythical, intricate and rewarding.

Even if the album sometimes feels thematically hollow, Utopia is still one of the most forward-thinking mainstream releases of the year. Scott is still pushing the boundaries of his psychedelic trap sound after ten years in the industry, and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon.

The album ends with “Weekend Love,” a delightful slice of slightly psychedelic indie-ish-club-pop co-written with Ethan Gruska, best known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers and Kimbra. The rest of The Loveliest Time finds Jepsen blasting off in different directions—the dubby soul of “Kollage,” the throbbing synth-rock of “Stadium Love,” for example—with varying degrees of success.

She makes daring moves on A New Reality Mind, but with a stronger push, the whole album could be a daring statement, too.

When Horses Would Run comes as close to that perfect commendation as a debut album can possibly get.

The album is also a testament to Rostam and Georgia’s connection: Their musical chemistry is so rich that, on Georgia’s first collaborative album, she sounds more like herself than ever before. As she stitches her own euphoria together, one thread stands out the strongest: other people.

The risk they took with their complete metamorphosis paid off, further solidifying them as a band with talent that transcends genres and states.

The songs on The Ballad of Darren are measured and contained. In fact, the calm gravitas which pervades the record occasionally plods. Perhaps it’s a meta-commentary on the album’s subject matter, or, perhaps, it’s just hard to make new music for 30 years straight. Yet, there is a relief that is interspersed amid the LP’s gloom that arrives on more high-spirited, familiar tracks that are reminiscent of the group at their spiky-haired zenith.

Soundtracks are often merely time capsules of their era, and Barbie The Album captures the bounce, bravado and occasional bad moods of 2023 in technicolor.