Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges.

Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique.

Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.

There’s palpable joy in the songs’ anthemic structures and Medford’s bright, confident delivery, even though there are reminders that this self-awareness was hard-won. Medford makes the crying and bleeding sound fortifying nonetheless.

The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years.

The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy.

Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts.

At their most effective, they speak loudest to our inner music geek: Come for what they remind you of, stay for what they’re learning to bring to the table for themselves.

While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission. Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends.

And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.

Despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place.

No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.

There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.

In a way, Jenny From Thebes is precisely about the struggle to find the right distance: from the past, from other people, from ourselves. Darnielle is a master of the perspective shot; he is often at his most vivid when writing in the second person.

It’s a solid study of a genius after he’d peaked creatively, but it doesn’t transcend that mission. There are some gems, yes, but we already knew about those. Too few are the diamonds in the rough.

Robed in Rareness is ultimately a less significant Shabazz Palaces release, but there’s something fitting about a casually adventurous album by a vet dropping in the year of hip-hop’s 50th birthday. As the doomsayers look backward, Butler turns his gaze everywhere.

It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.

If anything, if the record has a fault, it’s that sometimes the non-stop restlessness can distract from the subtler aspects of the songwriting, but generally, Sampha is able to deploy the intricacies of his production style to great effect.

Action Adventure captures broad feelings of nostalgia from a POV enriched by decades of hindsight and experience; it’s a testament to DJ Shadow’s production skill and human touch. But where his last album used pointed commentary to communicate a clear concept, the new album’s instrumental abstraction is more elusive.

It takes a special kind of force to get so many different voices in one place to coalesce. Maybe a common goal. Maybe a shared spirit. Sometimes, it’s as simple as having somebody at the center who’s willing and able to care for everyone—and who’s as magnetic as Sofia Kourtesis is here.

Spike Field is a lonely record, but it demands close listening for the moments when the light breaks through.

Romantic Music is at its best when its core sound inches into the ’90s and decks itself out in greyscale paisley, as if the Cure revisited their Faith-era gloom while trying to reckon with the melon-twisting rhythms of Madchester.

By the end of 17 tracks, they sound exhausted, as if worn down by their own charades.

But the album ultimately feels like a status update, never really probing or conveying why freedom is so important to Offset.

The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light is baggy and unfocused. If he wants to sell a promise of salvation, he needs a better story to tell.

On Selvutsletter, Hval slips into rabbit hole after rabbit hole, and all we can do is follow her down.

The Rest closes its fist around the ideas that Baker, Bridgers, and Dacus have been reaching toward—that values are more worth living than dying for, that our feelings of difference and dysfunction can be fonts of power.

Even as excess weighs down Jonny, the album still glimmers with beauty. Pierce’s depictions of raw, strange intimacy have long distinguished the band’s music, and Jonny’s core scrutiny of trauma and its aftermath plays to his strengths.