This album may not replace fans’ favorites at the top of the Vampire Weekend rankings, but it shows this band has much more to offer as it approaches its third decade of existence.

One’s appreciation of Look to the East, Look to the West depends mostly on their appreciation of Campbell’s voice and artistry. Times have changed, but some things remain the same.

Tacking back and forth in this way, Time is Glass builds momentum as it advances. There is a subtle Dantesque feel to the album’s sequencing, with the tracks seemingly occupying a space of increasing darkness followed by light.

Even by Mdou Moctar’s high standards, Funeral for Justice is extraordinary. It is searing in music and lyrics, with messages that are essential in a world on fire and whose sounds can carry those messages far and wide. More than any previous Mdou Moctar album, it feels alive.

It features some of their most vital work since their first decade as a group. .... Unfortunately, it also includes their tendency to jump to different styles with odd timing and to frontload the hits, which makes it just another above-average mid to late-career album.

Hyperdrama, while possibly their best effort since, doesn’t quite capture that same energy, though it does come close. Whereas Cross felt like the essential festival season soundtrack, Hyperdrama is more akin to a messy night out on the tiles with an old friend who’s picked up some new party tricks.

This is not the perfect record with a lot of unevenness, but they found the right approach which means that to master it and finally reach a perfect match, they need to do another one with the same settings.

The Black Keys, get in, rock you, and get out. If song quality seems to falter toward the end, it is only by the slightest of degrees, making Ohio Players one of those records that can be enjoyed in one satisfying sitting.

Despite their garage rock machismo, Neil Young and Crazy Horse are ultimately old-school romantics. They deliver hard-won life lessons amidst their squalling guitars and Molina’s insistent drumbeat.

In this most recent work, she continues cultivating an expansive and complex sense of roots and relative self. It’s a joy to witness.

There will always be a welcome space for groups who take a signature sound and continue to perfect it, and when it all comes together as effortlessly as it does on Final Summer, it is worth calling attention.

Hey Panda is a bold update of the group’s sound—layered, complex, day-glow-colored with decidedly modern R&B and hip-hop influences. Here is a band that’s not done evolving.

The record is more acoustic than any of Rogers’ previous work in a way that feels welcome and refreshing rather than an erasure of her first two albums as inauthentic. Rogers’ vocal and performance abilities may recall musicians of decades past, but she is still very much a product of her time.

The result is a series of songs that have the expansiveness of improvisational music, disciplined into the taut power of rock.

It is clear that Exotic Birds of Prey is in part about transformation through music and eluding the oppressive modern impulse to profile and categorize, racially and otherwise. These themes speak to a broader ethos of Shabazz Palaces across their catalog. Yet, it is also apparent that this tactic of resistance and subversion can equally elude the understanding of listeners.

This has been a particularly strong year for heavy, guitar-forward music, and Up on Gravity Hill is sure to turn up again on some end-of-the-year lists.

The singer doesn’t stray too far from the soft indie-folk sounds that made her a cult-favorite indie darling in the first place, but her attempts at infusing her lyrics with the sonic properties also heard on a mid-aughts Tegan and Sara ballad remind us that McAlpine is the most darling when she’s just being herself.

Rather than relying on flashy gimmicks and studio trickery, Lenker lets good old-fashioned song craftsmanship carry the album through its 12 tunes.

The title track does a better job of establishing focus; it is easy country blues supporting Parr’s meditations.

Phosphorescent’s Revelator is less melodically charged than Muchacho and C’est La Vie (or even parts of Here’s to Taking It Easy). Also, Houck’s vocals sometimes flounder in woozy, loungey, soft-pillow mixes. That said, Revelator is a transitional album for Houck, as he turns his attention more unwaveringly to interior dynamics, less preoccupied with the vagaries of the external world.

She is constantly connected, consciously or not, with more rooted folk forms, from Ghanaian Ewe drumming and dance to Haitian funereal brass bands. Her results sound like none of that, but somewhere, underneath the layers of beats and snippets of melody, she tosses off like corn husks, dwells fossils, and bones with stories to tell us.

For all of Weaver’s experimental spirit, there isn’t a vast distance between some of the new songs and the soulful pop of, say, Sade or Dido. Weaver has always been keen on strong melodies and layered harmony vocals, so when “Perfect Storm” delivers its New Wave analogue groove or “Romantic Worlds” evokes chilled-out dancefloors, the music sits in a dynamic middle ground between alternative and mainstream.

Overall, the album is a mixed bag, but it’s worth persisting with for its moments of beauty and always fun energy.

The Collective is hard to pin down, but that is part of what makes it so compelling.

Across its ten tracks and 47-minute runtime, Moran collaborates with herself, instead, using a Disklavier – a modified Synclavier similar to an updated player piano – to create poignant, evocative, soul-searching post-minimalist piano sketches.

Overall, Interplay is a record for fans of Ride—recommended on that basis. Newcomers to the group may want to dip their feet earlier in Ride’s catalogue, at least for starters.

Grande has produced some of her best work to date.

They’re solid songs with winning grace notes—”My Kind” opens on a 20-second orchestra-tuning cacophony before finally kicking into power chords, and “Hopeless” bursts into a furious if regrettably brief guitar solo before the final chorus. But they primarily work to show just how much better—both tighter and weirder—the rest of the album is.