The album also nudges Eilish beyond the trip-hop and trap sounds that dominated her past work, resulting in a more sonically diverse set that allows the singer—whose downbeat vocals have often been compared to Lorde’s—to explore the more textured, melodic aspects of her voice.

Some of her most nuanced, delightfully disparate songs to date.

Wwhile Jaar and Harrington assemble a worthy array of mesmerizing sounds on Spiral, a larger, more compelling vision eludes them.

While their jazzy arrangements channel the pleasant air of ‘70s AM folk, Sling’s 12 tracks tend to fuse into an unassuming whole that veers perilously close to easy-listening ennui.

Vince Staples is another microcosmic release from the rapper, his leisurely approach suggesting a newfound confidence.

The production is generally crisper and louder here than on the Go! Team’s earlier work, but it preserves their music’s signature noisy exuberance.

A Color of the Sky is an enchanting cache of guitar pop with echoes of Talk Talk, Cocteau Twins, A Winged Victory for the Sullen, and Emmylou Harris.

In many ways a critique of the legacy of slavery and colonialism, Haram possesses a manic, catastrophic atmosphere.

Squid’s transformation into post-punk disruptors is indicative of a band that relentlessly bucks against their limits. To hear them ply their craft on Bright Green Field, the album represents a crystallization of that impulse.

With the liveliest songs bookending the album, though, the middle stretch of Planet Her gets swallowed in a celestial soup of midtempo R&B and trap trends like the pitched-down vocals on the narcotic “Been Like This.”

While The Golden Casket doesn’t match the heights attained by some of Modest Mouse’s earlier work, it’s their first album since 2000’s triumphant The Moon & Antarctica that doesn’t feel like it could benefit from some editing.

Ultimately, it’s less the nuances of Dacus’s writing than her willingness to expose herself and her past so freely—even the most difficult parts—that make the strongest impression on Home Video.

In all the excess, one is nonetheless left wanting more—better fleshed-out personas or a glint of a new stylistic direction rather than a doubling down on committee-tested beats and a formulaic approach. The end result is more diminishing returns for Migos’s Culture series.

Informed by years of experience, growth, and collaboration, Kings of Convenience extend a comforting hand through the warm calm of their music.

The album’s early singles “High in the Grass” and “Worry with You” both play off of Sleater-Kinney’s strengths, the former showing off the ever-expanding reach of Tucker’s voice and the latter sporting one of the band’s sneakily catchy hooks. On the other hand, songs like the dour “Tomorrow’s Grave” sound a little too familiar and fail to push the group beyond their previously established template.

No Gods No Masters suffers from a few too many ideas and stylistic excursions, but in a business where stasis means certain death, its eclectic approach is a testament to Garbage’s refusal to simply mine the same sonic ground over and over for an easy profit.

For her part, Phair still has a knack for sharp melodies and bite-sized lyrical gems (“I tried to stay sober, but the bar is so inviting,” she quips on the album’s title track), and the technical simplicity of her voice is often its best feature.

While the emotions Zauner is sifting through across Jubilee’s 10 tracks are at once recognizable and powerfully vulnerable, they aren’t always easy to pin down. Zauner frequently crafts metaphors and imagines situations that are at times compellingly contradictory or unclear. ... The ambiguity gives the music a tantalizing quality, insistently throwing us off her trail.

While Batmanglij has reduced the vast variety of sounds and distortion of his debut, the warmth of his vision remains.

It’s an atmosphere-focused album that attempts to express the nastier side of being alive. The result is evocative but not necessarily satisfying.

Like Eilish and Lorde before her, Rodrigo possesses both a knack for stealthy pop hooks and a vocal control beyond her years. And even if Sour doesn’t quite transcend its myriad influences, it might at least inspire her fans to Google the Piano Man.

Picking up largely neglected threads from their early work, the album solidifies the Akron duo as one of the most vital and credible blues-rock bands active today.

An impeccably produced album that deeply honors her arty influences and leaves room for complex and difficult lyrical themes that should please poptimists and indie kids alike.

While Birdy meets the warmth of the album’s production with vocal skill and sensitivity, the overall effect is a very beautiful album littered with clichés that muddle its emotional impact. Still, there are seeds of great ideas here.

That lack of lyrical substance isn’t a problem just because we expect more from a songwriter with as compelling a discography as Monroe’s, but because the album’s production—crisp and bright but mostly two dimensional—isn’t interesting enough to carry the songs.

When the band dabbles in more disruptive sounds that deviate from A Black Mile to the Surface, the effect is fresh and exciting. ... The remainder of the album, however, is composed mostly of midtempo songs that all similarly build to predictable climaxes.

Nurture is at its best when it revels in Robinson’s dexterous instrumental tinkering. The album is occasionally too precious by half, as on the mawkish classical-guitar-based ballad “Blossom,” but bolstered by Robinson’s infectious sense of discovery and ear for experimentation, it boasts a prevailing spirit of optimism that’s hard to resist.

If Teenage Fanclub’s songs are stylistically derivative, the melodies consistently stand up to those of the band’s progenitors.

The sprightly, exuberant Sweep It Into Space doesn’t just provide an especially good opportunity to look back on how far these three guys from Amherst have come since the early ‘90s, it also finds them making their most life-affirming music to date, exploring new tones and textures without betraying their monolithic, thundering signature sound.

Their third album, Californian Soil, is so “current,” filled with so many of-the-moment trends, that it winds up feeling anonymous.

While Swift did an admirable job of re-recording Fearless, tweaking the production in subtle ways that give the album a slightly different texture (note how much more prominently the banjo figures in the mix of “Love Story”), the songs themselves are largely unchanged. ... The album’s bonus tracks—all written during the original Fearless sessions—don’t move the needle much in terms of the project’s overall quality. They all showcase Swift’s preternatural gifts for song structure and melody, but again, the lyrics are a mixed bag

On Deacon, Wise continues to prove how insightful he is at weaving his romantic obsessions with painfully honest, emotional expressions of his personal fuck-ups. Only this time his songs are more earthbound, grounded in the secular rather than the celestial.

At times, the album’s lack of intensity allows the songs to sink into the background a little too easily. Sonically, they all have the same placid air about them, with few distinctive peaks or valleys. But even if the songs slide by effortlessly, this approach allows the Antlers to color in a moment without demanding too much attention. If and when you stop to really take these sweeping, solemn songs in, it’s clear that the Antlers are still capable of conjuring beauty.

Working again in close collaboration with composer and producer Jack Antonoff, the album is gorgeously, if a bit too tastefully, arranged, prizing pared-back piano and light-handed acoustic guitar.

The rest of The Moon and Stars is a similarly ambitious, dizzying jumble of genres and tones, and June manages to hold everything together on the power of her beguiling voice and charisma.

With the band’s musicianship in peak form, it’s Caleb’s songwriting that limits the album’s impact. Marriage and fatherhood have expanded his inner monologue beyond fratboy misogyny and rock-star posturing. But he still doesn’t have much of interest to say.

The intensity of Cloud Nothings’s sonics—all of the wailing noises a guitar can produce as well as hard-hitting, double-time drumming—provide a cathartic outlet with which to confront the pains of self-definition and personal growth in an ever-amorphous world.

She successfully translates her confessional tone and subject matter into melodically and atmospherically engaging songs, resulting in an album that represents a significant step for one of contemporary music’s most eloquent artists.

The band’s ability to get to the heart of this change and create compelling songs from familiar scenes helps make Open Door Policy the best Hold Steady album in over a decade.

The lyrics are endearing in their quirky honesty (he quips of Sean Parker, an ex’s ex: “I think he started Spotify”). But backed by yet another sumptuous sonic tapestry—including finger-picked guitar and spacey sound effects—they sound like nothing less than Tasjan finally figuring out exactly who he is.

When You Found Me is what happens when a talented songwriter and a skilled band shoots for the hills and misfires.

The Future Bites is neither a huge stylistic departure nor the betrayal that many Wilson diehards have claimed it to be. Conceptually, the album revolves around a post-apocalyptic vision of an overly materialist society, and while the electro-pop trappings are almost never “happy,” they serve as a slick backdrop to the dystopian landscape Wilson envisions.

The stories she tells are about how her narrators’ choices impact others, often in ways that cause irreparable harm. That makes the songwriting a bit riskier than on Folklore, and not all of those risks pay off. If that means Evermore isn’t quite as strong as that album, she nonetheless managed to release two of the finest albums of her career in the span of just a few months.

These songs are more akin to paintings: Samples comprise skeletal underpaintings to which mind-bending Moog passages and the human voice give shape, texture, and weight. This time around, things are more akin to Tame Impala’s Currents, than the Beastie Boys’s Paul’s Boutique, though “Take Care in Your Dreaming,” one of the album’s few hip-hop-inflected cuts, is especially mesmerizing.

The album suggests that self-adulation can be just as therapeutic as unleashing rage, showing off Rico’s artistic range in the process.

The singer’s m.o. has long been to cram each project with every creative idea he has—an approach that, though effective during the Pumpkins’s heyday, now largely results in diminishing returns. It would be time better spent fleshing out songs that are too often merely shadows of ideas.

Cyrus’s habit of enlisting high-profile artists from the upper echelon of a given genre continues here with appearances by Jett, Billy Idol, and Stevie Nicks, who all adequately do their thing. As usual, though, Cyrus is most indelible when her own voice takes center stage and the music mingles with and amplifies her messages of self-empowerment and emotional culpability. If nothing else, Plastic Hearts gives her license to unapologetically rock out.

For better or worse, Be’s sights are trained on BTS fans, meaning the album is too insular for broader appeal.

While Megan is still figuring herself out stylistically, she’s undeniably in touch with herself. Throughout Good News, Megan doesn’t spend all that much time referencing her beloved alter egos: the pimp persona of Tina Snow, the lustful Hot Girl, and the relatable Suga. Rather, she coalesces qualities of each in her lyricism and delivery, suggesting that the mask is off and she’s being wholly, 100% herself.

Taken together, the EPs function as a grab bag of Dirty Projectors’s collaborative strengths and interests, affirming their indie bona fides in a new form.

The album balances these syrupy moments with a batch of harder-edged tracks that showcase Stapleton’s biting electric guitar riffing but don’t do much to elevate his lyrics. Predictably, he just shifts his focus from love and tenderness to mild hedonism.

While the album might be a purely derivative work, its period arrangements—all sweeping disco strings, Nile Rodgers-esque guitar licks, and indiscriminately deployed cowbell—are executed with aplomb.

Given the dearth of uptempo tracks on Grande’s last album, the microhouse “Motive,” featuring Doja Cat, and the breathless, disco-inflected “Love Language” are a welcome change of pace. Too many of the songs on Positions, however, rely on the same midtempo trap-pop that populated Grande’s previous two efforts, particularly Thank U, Next. What once seemed refreshing in its minimalism is quickly starting to feel insubstantial.

Featuring Ty Dolla $ign has the air of a haphazard playlist. Griffin is still a formidable center of gravity for a small army of eager collaborators, but the final product wants for some necessary fine-tuning.

Their work manages to feel simultaneously overproduced and under-thought.

At just under 30 minutes long, the Portland-based singer-songwriter’s 11th album is more concise than it is confessional, but Veirs imbues her lyrics with vivid imagery and gentle humor that trade misery for escapism.

The songs on Fake It Flowers are far from superfluous. Rather, it’s evident that Kristi revives the sound—which was predominantly represented by straight white men—in order to infuse it with her own life and experience as a Catholic school dropout and daughter of immigrants.

Springsteen deserves credit for resisting the crowd-pleasing tug of this kind of album for so long that it feels like a warm homecoming rather than a retread. It’s only when Springsteen leans on the nostalgia with explicitly backward-facing lyrics that the album gets a bit too self-aware. ... The E Street Band proves that when they’re in their element—as they are on this album—they can elevate the Boss to his best.

Annie broke out in the mid aughts with cheeky, indelible dance-pop like “Chewing Gum” and “Heartbeat,” but Dark Hearts luxuriates in an unapologetically moodier palette.

While Serpentine Prison may invoke familiar accusations of dullness, it’s refreshing to hear Berninger’s disaffected songwriting style take on a more grown-up perspective.

It’s Metro, though, who elevates 21’s stories to something approaching greatness. ... This sequel is a ratification of the “bigger and better,” an example of steady improvement through impeccable craft.

Crammed chockfull of crowd-pleasing EDM pyrotechnics and cheeky one-liners, The Album is undeniably a product of a well-oiled, state-of-the-art pop machine, but it feels stuck looking back to tried and true trends in both K-pop and Western pop music.

“Here We Go Around Again,” an unreleased song from Mariah’s demo tape, and “Can You Hear Me,” a Whitney-esque piano ballad from the Emotions sessions, find her in fine voice but offer little insight into Mariah the burgeoning artist. By contrast, a live rendition of the jazz standard “Lullaby of Birdland,” recorded during her 2014 tour, allows Mariah to fully exploit the imperfections of her voice, lending the performance a lived-in authenticity often missing from the earlier tracks.

Stylistically, Shamir is a hodgepodge of the different approaches the artist has employed in the past, synthesized into a mostly satisfying pop-rock sound.

While Stevens often reaches great heights on The Ascension, he almost as often seems to get lost in his big ideas.

Alicia is at once her most accessible and forward-minded album in years.

Producer Shane Stoneback resumes his role as the unofficial third member of the group, ensuring that Host, in spite of its dabbling in live instrumentation, springs from the same atmospheric vein as previous Cults albums.

Orca may be enjoyable in the moment, but it doesn’t have staying power.

What the rapper lacks in flow experimentation and dexterous rhyme-craft, he makes up for with his knack for sincere storytelling.

Though the current incarnation of the Flaming Lips has been together since 2014, and thus responsible for these various digressions, the band has undertaken a sonic overhaul here that matches the emotional, sentimental tenor of Coyne and Steven Drozd’s new compositions.

Burton was a classical music aficionado, and was said to have introduced elements like harmony and sophistication into Metallica’s early no-frills thrash. S&M2 puts that influence on full display.

Not all of Mirrored Aztec is as great as “Thank You Jane” or any of the previously mentioned highlights.

Though Club Future Nostalgia lacks the joyous, adrenaline-fueled arc of the best DJ sets, it honors both Future Nostalgia’s original spirit and that album’s unintentional service as a gateway to a virtual dance floor.

Energy demands your attention with inviting, joyous beats and its vocalists’ direct appeals.

Rather than build on any of the sounds she experimented with in the past, Perry seems content to stay in her lane when, at this point, she has nothing to lose.

The result is an album that appears caught between modes, playfully riding cascading synths even as it lyrically subsumes itself in dourness.

“Confessional Boxing” offers mostly surface-level hints at the dark times of the past, as the song growls but doesn’t ever bite. Miller fares better when he’s in pure storytelling mode on the after-hours waltz “Belmont Hotel,” on which the titular hotel becomes a metaphor for romantic renewal.

The songs on Down in the Weeds reprises the sheen and clarity of Bright Eyes’s later records, like Cassadaga and The People’s Key, and mostly eschews the rawer qualities of their early recordings. But the band also continues to pick up influences and incorporate new sounds into their foundation.

Three tracks, including the opener and closer, are short instrumentals that might have been elongated for further immersive and exploratory effect. Otherwise, the album is an off-kilter musical gift born of Osborne’s sacrifice of conventionality for weirder, wider possibilities.

In melding traditional hip-hop form with just the right amount of modern trap verve, Limbo makes the case for Aminé, if not as the next great rapper, then as a pop-rap workhorse. The album proves that he can keep pace with his contemporaries while drawing on the history of the genre in ways many of today’s innovators are unconcerned with engaging.

Dreamland’s best moments are propelled by slick drum machines and Bayley’s confidence as a frontman. His turn inward isn’t without humor and insight, but writing about other people on past albums provided a more enveloping experience, fleshing out imagined places and people with an intrigue that’s missing here.

What makes Folklore such a compelling album, then, are the countless ways in which Swift, the savviest and most acutely self-conscious artist of her generation, anticipates questions surrounding her genre bona fides and leans into each apparent contradiction.

For the most part, she doesn’t have the chops or soul of contemporaries like Florence Welch, who sings of similar subject matter with a real torch, and who shares a collaborator in Joseph Kearns, who produced almost every song on Brightest Blue. At Kearns’s behest, the album takes a relatively new tack for Goulding, trading the garish for the palatable, but it’s no less grating as a result.

The album is almost too neat, given Protomartyr’s newfound use of saxophone, self-conscious touches like the chirping crickets at the beginning and end of a few tracks, and the seamless sequencing of songs. But the restless punk spirit and flippant, downtrodden ethos that prevail over the project render Protomartyr’s painstaking intellectualizations as fuel for a visceral winding up and release of discontent.

The album instantly feels more purposeful than its predecessor: Where Blood can feel labored over, perhaps too hungry for hits, Lianne La Havas isn’t seemingly beholden to such expectations.

By incorporating country signifiers into what is otherwise a terrific, of-the-moment pop album, Antonoff and the Chicks could have come up with a style that’s even more progressive, akin to the production on Kacey Musgraves’s Golden Hour. If nothing else, that highlights how the Chicks still have room to grow, either with or without Antonoff, as they move into this new phase of their career. Gaslighter may not have been the album that country music needed, but it’s clearly the one that the Chicks needed to make.

Healing Is a Miracle can sometimes be so delicate as to be weightless, and the music’s accumulation of details and small shifts in tone makes it more interesting in theory than practice. Even still, the album overcomes its slightness thanks to its willingness to dabble in different textures.

On the whole, in broadening his music’s scope, those responsible for piecing together Shoot for the Stars Aim for the Moon have lost sight of the local specificity, quirky charisma, and energy that made a name for Pop Smoke in the first place.

Songs like “Dying to Believe” and “Out of Sight” keep this energy going, with drummer Tristan Deck and bassist Benjamin Sinclair maintaining a brisk rhythm section as Stokes and Jonathan Pearce’s guitars shimmer, groove, and ignite in equal measure. But the Beths are, perhaps, at their best when they’re at their breeziest.

By far the bounciest, most ecstatic song cycle of Arca’s career, the album is a celebration of actualization, whether that’s spurned by finding harmony internally or in communion with another.

What’s Your Pleasure? is an album that, just a few months ago, might have felt like a nostalgia trip or a guilty pleasure, but now feels like manna for the soul.

Mordechai finds Khruangbin coming into their own, thanks to the band’s lyrical development and the honing of their fusion of intercontinental influences. As the adage goes, there’s nothing new under the sun, but Mordechai makes a case that maybe there just might be.

As with his best work, Rough and Rowdy Ways encompasses the infinite potential for grace and disaster that can be clearly discerned but rarely summarized in the most turbulent of ages.

Demonstrating their versatility throughout the album, Braids locate something of a sweet spot, embracing a restrained plainspokenness without completely veering from the outré flourishes and melancholic, midtempo jams that are their specialty.

While it’s culled from a mélange of styles and influences, Planet’s Mad manages to stand on its own for its sonic depth and detail. And even if the album’s themes aren’t fully articulated, Baauer’s use of bass, constantly elongating and amplifying, succeeds to evoking a sense of doom.

The album turns out to be missing link in Young’s catalog as much for Shakey’s emotional life as it is for his stylistic choices.

These songs simmer beautifully and quietly, eventually boiling over in intermittent moments of sonic boisterousness, and the results are often stunning.

Structurally inventive, lyrically deft, passionate and heartbroken, RTJ4 positions Run the Jewels as the laureates of our collapsing era.