Lyrically, there no lack of muscular skill-flexing. ... Run the Jewels can still detonate rhymes like a Molotov cocktail lobbed into a CVS, but now they're strategizing for the long war ahead.

His album of Waits' penned-and-produced songs may be the masterwork of Hammond's long career, as well as further testament to Waits' unique genius.

The happiest-sounding album she's ever made.... it may also be the best. While her austere sonic signature remains, the vocals are discernibly more relaxed, the tunes welcoming and even expansive.

Dirty Pictures (Part 2), like its predecessor, is a stand-alone triumph of missionary zeal.

The country-tinged beauty of this album is a revelation after the grand, gloomy orchestration she summoned for 2019’s All Mirrors and stripped away for 2020’s Whole New Mess, and a rewarding payoff for fans who’ve always known she had a record like this in her.

The 15 songs range from entertaining throwaways to top-shelf Prince, making this basically a very good golden-era Prince album, with material recorded entirely between 1981-85 but for the ’91 version of “Love… Thy Will Be Done,” a hit that year for Martika.

What Now is another side of Brittany Howard that makes each of her previous departures feel like a baby step by comparison.

Pivoting away from the brighter, jammier aspects of 2019’s Father of the Bride with a decided bent toward experimentation and surprising, often harsh, new textures. The results showcase a band that, nearly two decades in, is willing to issue a challenge to its fans and produce a soundtrack for a reality that is teeming with noise and discord.

Her quizzically beautiful third LP, where she pivots artfully from folk eccentric to pop eccentric.

The sound’s kaleidoscopic.

Springsteen sounds at peace. Although the LP doesn’t sport the same youthful urgency as the recordings he cut in the Seventies and Eighties — there’s no “Badlands” or “Cover Me” here — you can hear how the anger and depression of his tougher times and his many split personalities delivered him to stability, and the most fascinating parts of Letter to You are when he comes out of the shadows to admit that he realizes it, too.

Unfortunately, Black Thought's skilled but stolid rapping adds nothing new to the idiom [of the morally ambiguous gangster tale]. Sonically, though, undun is a knockout.

Zeppelin, ultimately, were their own universe, and this is the sound of them willing into it glory, bit by bit.

Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana (or I Do Whatever I Want) convenes a family reunion of his favorite rappers and reggaetoneros to produce a genre-promiscuous work of reggaeton a la marquesina: a more street-savvy form of reggaeton once deemed so risqué that it was criminalized and relegated to garage parties across Puerto Rico throughout the Nineties.

There are treasures aplenty here, among them a rehearsal take on "Gonna Change My Way of Thinking" that seems to find the band jamming on the Rolling Stones' "Bitch" and two very different versions of "Caribbean Wind," an epic full of lust, divinity and a mystery that he never resolved. But there's also bitterness and stridency, as the restless spirit of "Like a Rolling Stone" stops dead on the Biblical literalism of "Solid Rock."

The best solo record of her career... Vespertine is the closest any pop-vocal album has come to the luxuriant Zen of the new minimalist techno, even beating Radiohead's nervy Kid A. Where Kid A sounded like a record of risk, the work of a band on unfamiliar ground, Bjork sings here as if she owns and knows every inch of space and shadow in these songs.

This is an album about the seductions of oblivion, and a few of the more densely arranged songs mimic the characters in the lyrics, stumbling around without quite connecting.

Japanese Breakfast’s latest LP Jubilee is the project’s most ecstatic-sounding album to date, although one glance at the lyrics will tell you that Zauner isn’t done excavating the thornier aspects of dependency, devotion, and longing.

All of it rocks; none of it sounds like any other band on earth; it delivers an emotional punch that proves all other rock stars owe us an apology.

Unlike the band’s recent Faith and Grace collection, which crams the Stax material onto a one-disc compilation, Come Go With Me offers the first-ever complete portrait of the group’s most dynamic, and in some ways, most turbulent, period.

Some of the best and heaviest music of its career. [2 Jun 2005, p.70]

With Kill the moonlight, Spoon complete their transformation from ragtag rockers into beat-driven post-punks.

It’s a total departure, her kaleidoscopic mix of decades’ worth of R&B, hip-hop, blues, and gospel, steeped in trippy laptop sonics and deeply personal political urgency. ... “I just want Georgia to notice me,” she sings, confronting oppression with faint hope. It’s a strikingly bold moment on a record that’s full of them.

An album that somehow exceeds the lofty expectations he and Madlib set with Piñata.

Across the album, Uchis is bolder and more forthright than on past releases. So often, she’s played the languid cool girl, but she breaks out of her shell again and again this time out. She dives deeper into new sounds, and she flourishes the entire way.

Art Angels has a sharper, sleeker sound that sneakily suggests she made the leap to working with big-name producers--when in fact, as always, she did everything herself. And impressively.

On his fifth album, Dawn FM, the Weeknd focuses those interstellar ambitions to anoint us with the most enchanting music to the portal through purgatory.

The extras on the deluxe box set show how Corgan's mid-Nineties creative peak couldn't even be contained by two CDs.