It might also be his most broadly emotional set ever; certainly it's his most sharply focused record since the game-changing tag team Swordfishtrombones and Rain Dogs decades ago.

As always, it's Yorke's voice that holds the emotional center, and it's never been more affecting. Credit both his delivery and the production clarity, a statement in and of itself.

This album, a partnership with top pop whisperer Jack Antonoff, is a masterpiece of confrontational intimacy, and Clark lays herself bare as only a woman who has seen her life suddenly become tabloid fodder can.

There’s a new richness to Crutchfield’s voice that smooths out the emotional extremities.

Dear Science is a brilliant balancing act between pop aspiration and music-geek aesthetics.

The three-CD set surveys their story so far, offers fascinating glimpses of roads not taken, and contains must-hear new music.

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.

Might be the most oddly beautiful, psychedelic and ambitious [album] of the year. [21 Sep 2006, p.84]

The rapper’s signature self-awareness has matured into some of the more compelling rap music being made today, and as such Call Me If You Get Lost proves to be Tyler’s best effort to date.

The tunes are tight and sticky; the guitars hit with real sizzle and bite, accented by flourishes like the garage-rock organ in "Debbie Downer" or the cowbell swing of "Aqua Profunda!"

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.

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.

The Orpheus disc is quieter, and Blues is slightly more lewd, but taken together this may be the scariest album about panties, gorillas and bloody gods ever recorded.

Even in duets with [Wainwright and Boy George], Antony is the dominant voice of solitude and agonized waiting. [10 Feb 2005, p.84]

Ghostface's emotionally charged stream-of-consciousness flow is as off-the-wall and amazing as it's ever been.

But if Life On Earth still felt intent on defining itself in part by what it was not, The Past is Still Alive achieves something even braver: Segarra has honed their craft into a cohesive, astonishingly realized singer-songwriter record.

This breathtaking EP telescopes the mysticism of 2007's Untrue into two 11-minute suites and a seven minute palate cleanser.

Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe In You can feel redundant at points, and might be a little much to wade through unless you already roll waist-deep with the Big Thief experience. Yet the cumulative sense of the open-ended, accidental, communal, and casual is worth any slowish spots along the way. This is a band that deserves the time you lend it.

Weird, playful, unclassifiable, sexy, brilliantly addictive.

The Hardest Part is the result of her stepping away and figuring out who she is — and the songs she wrote during that time sound appealing even as they’re digging into knotty, complex emotions.

There are also moments of tenderness (“No Moon at Night”) and vulnerability (“Misunderstanding,” “In My Own Particular Way”) that make it one of her most compelling albums to date.

Ellison makes the boldest, most fully engaged fusion of the hip-hop-laptop era.

Basement Jaxx refine their broad influences into a creative energy you can feel: The art of their noise supples as much dance motivation as their beats.

This is an album that proves something beautiful and enduring can come from even the most dire circumstances.

This double-disc set includes the first official release of Pacific’s follow-up Bambu, a harder-rocking but weaker set that Wilson never finished. Yet the reissue’s heart lies in tracks like “River Song” and the rollicking “What’s Wrong” — two raw, emotional highlights that are as moody as anything Brian ever composed.

The push and pull of passiveness and assertiveness on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels organic at every turn. Sometimes the music can be a little too loose, careening like an out-of-control car (especially on the discordant “Go Ahead”), but the slackness is worth the freedom of hearing Anohni’s voice fly like the bird she became years ago.

Indigo is an adventurous sonic portrait of RM’s inner world, the work of an artist who finds his voice by bringing together the influences that resonate with his soul.

Part of why Blue Lips is compelling is that it seduces the listener enough to accept Schoolboy Q on his own terms.

All the world's indeed a stage on this enchanting fifth LP.

A lower-dosage Animal Collective, the Foxes stuff their free-form songs with rich, swirling melodies; billowing clouds of organs, tom-toms, bells and assorted stringed instruments cloak group vocals whose secular-gospel, suede-fringed precision owes plenty to Crosby, Stills and Nash.

In its own way, its as artful, ambitious, determined, joyous and inspiring, as Lemonade or To Pimp a Buttery. It's a sexy MF-ing masterpiece.

A marvelous, hazy trip full of Beach Boys-inspired psychedelia.

His ace in the hole is his signature cozy sound -- dusty soul samples, gospel hymns, drums that pop as if hit for the very first time.

Blackstar is a ricochet of textural eccentricity and pictorial-shrapnel writing.

This time around, he trades in that album's personal tales of crisis and redemption for a more nuanced, wide-angled form of storytelling, packed to bursting with evocative specifics.

Despite the skull-crushing power, MBV is music that rewards close listening, music that takes its time to give up its secrets.

Mostly you can hear the transcendence of Big Thief as they grapple with characters who come and go, not knowing if they will ever be back, bravely embracing death, and revealing a vulnerability that becomes their biggest strength. Though they travel through the darkness spellbound by life’s biggest mysteries, they manage to emerge more at peace than ever.

It could just as easily be a message to any hard-working performer with a family at home as it could be Carlile’s urgent reminder to herself to leave the rockstar bullshit out on the road. Either way, it’s the kind of vulnerable, complicated statement that has made her such a relatable artist.

His intimate vocals are bolstered by the addition of celestial choral harmonies, and his production is immense, yet every layered instrument and rackety beat feels meticulously deliberate.

The record is most striking for its gentleness.

All told, these are soulful, uplifting songs by Afrobeats’ top artist. He’s all about dropping heat, even as he continues to evolve. More Love, Less Ego gives you more life.

This LP is a testament to her place as one of Latin music’s true originals.

In every skewed guitar note and crackling drum beat, every cello stroke and modulation of MacKaye's malleable voice, there's a passion for rigor - intellectual, political and musical.

The best new-school Southern rock you can buy.

These are Rascal's most accessible beats to date. [30 Sep 2004, p.186]

The music is sparer than it was on Channel Orange--more mature, jammed less feverishly with ideas--but adventurous nonetheless.

It's not every goth-punk fiend who can celebrate his fiftieth birthday with an album as loud, filthy and brilliant as Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!!

Bright Future’s recording style mirrors the listener’s experience: as time goes on, these songs and the emotions associated with them will inevitably deepen, transmute, and attach themselves to the memory of different people.

Here, he mostly dials back the volume to plumb heavy emotions.

Living up to the title of the whole series, those concert tapes often sound like bootlegs; here and there, you can hear people in the audience commenting as the songs start up and end.

It is not overkill. It is the necessary account of a brilliant, wayward pop life still best known for tawdry and misleading reasons.

The enhanced instrumentation and dreamy songwriting make this the singer’s strongest album yet.

You Won’t Get What You Want is a slow build rather than a shrieking onslaught, but it still has an inherent sense of danger.

Feel Flows lets everyone else hear what their fellow musicians have known for decades: When nobody was looking, the Beach Boys made extraordinary music, complex sounds all their own that made for California albums up there with Love’s Forever Changes, the Doors’ L.A. Woman and X’s Los Angeles. This stuff was made for these times, whatever those times might be.

Hop Along know how to make these tiny moments feel huge.

This 25th-anniversary reissue features an accelerated and raging '89 live rendering of the album that adds a few Hüsker classics--acoustic and disarmingly tender.

His ambitions are even greater on his third album, which demands attention in a way his quietly heartbreaking music hasn't in the past.

Los Lobos' best album since 1996's Colossal Head.

The way the screams and music dance across these 17 songs--recorded during three nights in 1964 and 1965 and spliced into a seamless rush of manic love--is what makes Live at the Hollywood Bowl such a thrill.

Musically, it's as superb as anything she's ever done.... But underneath the sublime sounds, something crucial is missing.

A beautifully wrought pop record that grapples with the disquiet hanging over the globe.

Born in the New York post-punk squalor that mothered pals Sonic Youth, Swans make their grandest statement yet for their 30th birthday.

On No Thank You, the follow-up to her excellent 2021 breakthrough Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, Simz gives us 10 choice cuts (showcasing her brilliance and breadth) that convey the whole emoji board of riveting emotions.

Purple Mountains is the sound of that guy starting to come to terms with his reality, and maybe building a new emotional architecture in the wreckage. In any case, keep ’em coming. The journey is worth it.

As bawdy and unpredictable as anyone is in their first puberty, Puberty 2 shows Miyawaki indulging her whims with a devil-may-care attitude--the result is an incendiary self-portrait.

Although gems are scattered throughout The Early Years, its last two discs — a homemade demo followed by two 1967 sets at the Ann Arbor club the Canterbury House–are the keepers.

It adds up to a hard-hitting 20-track portrait of life and love in a mad city.

Let's Stay Friends is the first album of new songs in six years from indie-rock madcaps Les Savy Fav, yet it sounds like a band that's just hitting a peak.

Whatever informed it, this may be the most heart-rending music she's ever made.

For once, the inevitable U.K.-press hype is justified: Franz Ferdinand's debut draws from beloved Brit pop and post-punk bands without the usual plagiarism.

CSNY 1974 may be the closest we'll come to hearing a mid-Seventies reunion album from this band.

God Level is a record so massive that it should be impenetrable, a tome. Instead it’s a nearly definitive statement from a gifted writer and one of his era’s most interesting synthesists.

Africa Speaks is not the sort of record to listen to on headphones; you have to hear the way it springs forth from speakers, like a live performance, to fully appreciate it. There aren’t any Billboard-targeting hits here — there’s no “Smooth” or even an “Oye Como Va,” though “Breaking Down the Door” comes close — and that’s part of the appeal. Woodstock was 50 years ago; this is Santana now. The spirit is the same, yet somehow it’s even freer.