While the songs face sorrows, they don’t capitulate to them. They place sadness alongside love and perseverance, the experiences of a long adult life; they savor consolations.

Millennials could use a band that can play instruments in real time, that exults in musical possibilities, that wants to make both a ruckus and a difference. On its debut album, Greta Van Fleet isn’t that band.

The result is a tangled portrait of anxieties, one that adheres to its own standards of beauty, taking no particular tradition for granted.

YSIV--the conclusion of his Young Sinatra series of mixtapes--is his most confident and accomplished release to date, shaking off some of the awkwardness that has long peppered his music.

What’s most notable is how relatively natural and at ease Bhad Bhabie, the nonprofessional of the pair, sounds as compared with Ms. Cyrus. ... On the entertaining if erratic 15, Bhad Bhabie raps like someone who is learning to rap in real time, which to be fair, she is. ... Even though she deviates from her trash-talk flow on a couple of occasions--the faux-Young Thug melodies of “Trust Me” and “No More Love”--Bhad Bhabie otherwise has a honed sense of self-presentation.

Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.

While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.

What she wants to say on Room 25 is complex: thoughts on community, sensuality, mortality and self-determination. ... Noname is a full-fledged maverick, but not an abrasive one. Phoelix’s production situates her in leisurely, atmospheric R&B, and there’s almost always the hint of a smile in her voice. But no one should mistake her soft, playful tone for submissiveness.

On this album, the naturalism of Swamp Dogg’s lifelong soul and funk all but disappears. But in its way, Love, Loss, and Auto-Tune is completely true to everyday 21st-century experience: ubiquitous and intrusive technology, splintered attention spans, mediated presences and onslaughts of random information. And yet, somewhere within all the digital commotion, there’s still a human being in search of love.

Each track is in constant flux: unstable within, permeable from all directions, buffeted and trying to cope. As are we all. Somehow, there’s comfort in that discomfort.

Ms. Grande backs up her statements with song-and-dance mastery. ... She’s her own choir, support group and posse. While a few guest vocalists (Mr. Williams, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott) provide a little grit for contrast, Ms. Grande sails above any fray, past or present. Her aplomb is her triumph.

Mitski’s songs about love are a tangle of mixed messages in precise, idiosyncratic packages. ... On this album, even more than she has before, Mitski makes the music her partner.

For Santigold’s music, I Don’t Want: the Gold Fire Sessions is more a consolidation--or a breather--than a leap forward. But that’s only because her previous albums have already encompassed so many idioms and ideas.

It revels in lushness, owning its smooth funk legacy and extending it to the present day.

Like YG’s songs, Buddy’s music is full of small homages to the Los Angeles sounds of yesteryear. But while YG is polishing one idea until it shines blindingly, Buddy is crossing generations, building new paths.

Hive Mind falls ever so slightly short of “Ego Death,” though it’s still superb. The songs are a little more generalized, less specific; the music feels just a little more deliberate, though it’s still full of surprises.

Lamp Lit Prose is his shiniest, airiest, even catchiest set of songs. The new record exchanges the jarring, glitchy electronic intrusions and arid trap percussion he used on “Dirty Projectors” for the springy guitar lines of older Dirty Projectors albums, bringing out their warmest tones.

For all the seriousness of the songs, Jupiter & Okwess make sure to keep the party going.

Scorpion is something safer and less ambitious, largely a reprocessing of old Drake ideas and moods. It is the first Drake album that’s not a definitive stylistic breakthrough, not a world-tour victory lap, not an embrace of new grievances. It is, largely, a reminder of Drakes past, and perhaps also an attempt at maintaining stability in the face of profound emotional disruption.

For this album, Mr. Albarn stays decisively in the foreground. His main collaborator here is the producer James Ford, from Simian Mobile Disco, and together they surround Mr. Albarn’s voice with subliminally nostalgic synthesizers: puffy, rounded, unaggressive tones that provide a cozy backdrop for Mr. Albarn’s morose reveries. ... In the mysterious chemistry of songwriting, the partnership with Mr. Hewlett’s visuals has been a reliable catalyst. Behind the cartoon mask, there’s freedom.

On Heaven and Earth there’s a balance between big-stroke conceptualism--the first CD, “Earth,” is meant to represent worldly preoccupations; the second, “Heaven,” explores utopian thought--and the workmanlike reality of collaboration. The two collections don’t vary significantly in terms of sound; instead, they’re a testament to the sturdy rapport of Mr. Washington’s ensemble.

With their new album as the Carters, Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Beyoncé are once again a united force, celebrating their success on every front: artistic, financial, marital, erotic, historic. ... This is more familiar, less vulnerable and less exploratory territory than the zones where Beyoncé and Jay-Z ventured on “Lemonade” and “4:44.”

Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion. ... The album’s seduction songs do their job. But its doleful ones leap out.

Mr. Matthews has decided he’s not going to be the grumpy old man he sings about in Come Tomorrow, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things either; each song notes the fears and sorrows it’s determined to overcome. The music does that, with consolation in its melodies and a life force in its rhythms.

While Mr. West’s previous releases have made musical leaps, Ye often comes across as a recap.

Daytona may stand alone in this moment--particularly in contrast to the woozy, blown-out rap albums dominating the charts because of the primacy of streaming--but it isn’t as effective as “My Name Is My Name,” Pusha-T’s 2013 full-length solo debut album. Daytona is terser, leaving only nits to pick; say, that the second and third verses of “Come Back Baby” lack the fire and wit of the rest of the album.

Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.

In her new songs, she sets aside her sly character studies and minutely observed details for direct declarations and confrontations. They’re underlined by music that expands on all of her guitar-band idioms: growing punkier, more psychedelic, dronier and noisier as the songs demand.

[Swae Lee's] “Swaecation” is the most liquid, the most soft-focus of the three. (The duo album is a close second.) At times verges on the quiet-storm R&B of the early 1980s, though he is far more flexible with tempos than Post Malone, and sometimes veers toward ecstatic 1980s synth-pop. By contrast, Slim Jxmmi’s solo album, “Jxmtro,” is a more conventional contemporary hip-hop album, buoyant and loose. Sr3mm is long, but listening to it in one sitting, on its own, from top to bottom, is not how it’s truly designed to be engaged with.

There are occasional intrusions of other ideas, like the agonized rock on “Over Now,” and when far more formalist artists like Nicki Minaj or G-Eazy arrive, they sound like teachers trying to enforce order in detention. But in total, Beerbongs & Bentleys is admirably committed to form, one long song of the decontextualized now.

This is an album that takes familiar hip-hop starting points and denatures them, resulting in a compelling collage that feels structurally untethered to hip-hop then or now. The results alternate between tragic and comic, but the ambition is steadily high throughout.

KOD, his fifth album, has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas--it has neither the grim purpose or intense emotional acuity of his 2016 LP “4 Your Eyez Only,” nor the cohesion of the prior one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” the record that set the terms for his new direction.

While at 71 his voice is gruffer and scratchier than ever, the album is unapologetic about it; vocals are recorded close-up over sparse arrangements, with melodies that relax into cozy countryish territory and sometimes stray toward speech. Mr. Prine’s songs, as they have since his 1971 debut album, can sound both carefully chiseled and playfully off-the-cuff.

“Tween,” a 2016 collection of eight outtakes recorded from 2011-14, revealed paths the band had rejected for “Shriek,” with songs that enfolded electronics in broad strokes of guitar. Now, with “The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs,” Wye Oak extends that approach to make it nimbler, more intricate and welcoming. There are joyful and sometimes rowdy sonic crosscurrents, even as the lyrics determinedly think things through.

What’s most promising about the exuberant and impressive Invasion of Privacy--an album full of thoughtful gestures, few of them wasteful--is that it’s a catalog of directions Cardi, 25, might go in, slots she might fill, or even invent. ... A hip-hop album that doesn’t sound like any of its temporal peers.

He finds magic in the absurd and the minute. It is a style almost impossible to emulate. That it sounds natural over Dan the Automator’s production is a real feat.

As Mr. Hutchings spreads his wings, he is presenting an opportunity for listeners to fall in love with a sound that’s got the timeless assets of jazz--rebellion, collectivity, emotive abstraction--but doesn’t feel weighed down by its own past.

They deliver their apprehensions as gently as they can, turning reckonings into reveries.

Time & Space is its outstanding second album, just over 25 minutes long, and an urgent, clear and bruising statement of purpose.

A coherent album that juggles multiple missions. ... Black Panther the Album is very nearly as densely packed--with ideas, allusions and ambitions--as one of Mr. Lamar’s official solo albums.

Sometimes convincing, sometimes limp.

Encore, his second major-label album, is an often lustrous revisiting of raucous Southern soul, rousingly delivered and pinpoint precise. He has a voice full of extremely careful scrape and crunch, but his howls never feel unhinged.

What Makes You Country is among his most temperate albums, alternately soothing and fatiguing.

Revival is probably the best of his recent albums, but like much of his post-peak output, it is a mix of the entrancing and the mystifying, full of impressive rapping that’s also disorienting.

It’s not an album that courts new fans by radically changing U2’s style; instead, it reaffirms the sound that has been filling arenas and stadiums for decades.

Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.

It is also Ms. Swift chasing that good feeling, pushing back against a decade of following her own instincts. And it works. Reputation is fundamentally unlike any of her other albums in that it takes into account — prioritizes, actually — the tempo and tone of her competition. Reputation is a public renegotiation, engaging pop music on its terms, not hers.

Throughout this album, there are melodies, chord changes, lyrical images and structural tricks that feel indebted to Ms. Swift’s first three albums. Even the way Ms. Ballerini lingers over certain vowels suggests the shadow of Ms. Swift. In order to fully come into her own, though, Ms. Ballerini needs to shake free of that as effectively as she brushes off country music’s simpleton men.

Pacific Daydream is both exuberant and plaintive; it’s full of songs about past joys and present loneliness, recalling friends and lovers who are no longer part of the singer’s life. ... But there’s a whole pop apparatus around him--a tambourine shaking, a firm beat, happy backup voices--to insist that Weezer’s kind of music is far from extinct.

Masseduction stays poised between passion and artifice, trusting listeners to decrypt its paradoxes.

The songs are intricately plotted to give the illusion of being impulsive and obsessive, buffeted by shifting emotions: by turns sensual and wary, vulnerable and guarded, leisurely and urgent.

Now, on its fourth album, the band is moving toward an idiom that’s more flexible and contrasty yet just as gripping: Protomartyr’s own post-post-punk.

Mr. Grohl and Foo Fighters wear their influences so openly--Pink Floyd in “Concrete and Gold,” Led Zeppelin in “Make It Right,” the Beatles all over the album--that they still come across as earnest, proficient journeymen, disciples rather than trailblazers.

The National’s 2013 album, “Trouble Will Find Me,” was a culmination of sorts: accomplished, polished, measured, mature. Sleep Well Beast is just as polished and even more intricate. But it also shakes things up.

The new self-titled Fifth Harmony album is potent and overflowing with sugary pleasures, full of military-grade pop production and laser-targeted singing.

The band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped.

While she can’t resist opening with “Bastards,” a sweetly sung kiss-off to those who have underestimated and manipulated her, Kesha devotes most of Rainbow to exploring a broad palette of emotions and unleashing the full range of her voice--a flexible instrument she didn’t always effectively showcase on the bratty pop of her earlier albums.

The [title] song finds a breezy balance between earnestness and exhilaration. Elsewhere, that balance falters, and Everything Now becomes a slighter album than its predecessors.

Playboi Carti’s self-titled major-label debut album, which was released in April, is erratic, sometimes transfixingly so.

Issa Album contains some of 21 Savage’s best and most fully realized songs to date--especially “Bank Account” and “Bad Business.”

Lust for Life is her most expansive album; it has 16 songs, stretching nearly 72 minutes. It also, in rare moments, hints at a wink behind Ms. Del Rey’s somber lullabies.

Mura Masa has a world of instruments and sounds to draw on, and a confident craftsman’s sense of what to include and what to leave out. His songs also understand that no system can contain or predict the vagaries of the human heart.

Broken Social Scene’s music rejoices in what clever teamwork can construct.

He’s evolved from dazzling taunts to ruminations that are sometimes snappy and sometimes lumpy. When snappy, though, they’re exhilarating.

Only one song quietly stands out from the album’s flow: “Hard to Say Goodbye.” ... Mister Mellow is by no means the aural tranquilizer that its lyrics and packaging pretend to call for. The songs, for all their pretty, prismatic intricacies, are remote and forlorn.

The remasters find some new glimmers of clarity and sparkle, particularly on guitar sounds, but aren’t startlingly different from past versions. ... After 20 years, it’s clear that “OK Computer” was the album on which Radiohead most strongly embraced and, simultaneously, confronted the legacy of the Beatles.

Writing about parties and untrue love, Lorde risks joining the pop pack instead of upending it the way she did with “Pure Heroine.” But she still has the immediacy of her voice, with its smokiness, melancholy and barely suppressed rage, and she refuses to let her lyrics resolve into standard pop postures.

She fully commands the foreground of her songs. Her voice is upfront, recorded to sound natural and unaffected, with all its grain and conversational quirks.

There isn’t a flicker of musical edge on this album, only a belief in the crowdsourcing of ideas. Where Halsey sets herself apart is in her subject matter and manner of delivery.

Sometimes great, sometimes foggy album, which is almost bold in its resistance to contemporary pop music aesthetics.

She’s still a strong singer, especially on “Told You So,” but some of her essential grit is lost to the machines.

With Mr. Hadreas’s aching, androgynous voice at their center, the songs deploy cinematic orchestral arrangements, spooky electronics and instruments that can sound vividly natural or treated and surreal.

Strength of a Woman, the new album from Mary J. Blige, moves like a forest fire: ruthless, wide-ranging, blunt. The heat emanating off it is palpable.

Tart and punchy.... Sometimes boisterous, sometimes swampy, rarely fanciful album--it’s Mr. Lamar’s version of the creeping paranoia that has become de rigueur for midcareer Drake. And yet this is likely Mr. Lamar’s most jubilant album, the one in which his rhymes are the least tangled.

Mr. Taggart is a capable but unexciting singer. And he has shockingly few lyrical ideas, less of a concern for performers more adept with melody. ... Two back-to-back songs, the impressive “Honest” and “Wake Up Alone,” parse the weight that fame exacts on emotional relationships--they’re among the most credible on the album.

The music stays cozy, supportive and unobtrusively inventive, placing luminous details behind Mr. Tillman’s sympathetic, ever melodic voice.

Mental Illness wallows in its troubles, and it’s an exquisite wallow.

There is sad music, which is to say music that deploys lyrical or musical motifs meant to connote misery. And then there is this album, which mostly exists in a space beyond those concerns. It is an album because a musician made it and it is broken up into songs, but it is also a diary, a balled-up tissue, found art.

Jubilant but spotty.

A nuanced collection of 22 new songs that recall various stages of Drake’s own development, as well as a tour of other styles and artists that he’s partial to. It is both craven and elegant.

Ms. Marling doesn’t cast herself as heroine or victim, angel or avenger. She does something trickier, and perhaps braver. Clear-eyed, calmly determined and invitingly tuneful, she captures each situation in all its ambiguity.

A batteries-fully-charged assault on the pop charts from a performer skilled in musical osmosis.

Dirty Projectors finds ways to be both straightforward and strange.

A csometimes fascinating collection of alternate-universe hip-hop and pop from a sui generis character.

The passing of time has altered Mr. Barnett’s songwriting for the better. What once arrived in raw splashes of energy has been thickened, complicated and smoothed.

The most striking moments on this refreshingly warm LP are the others, the ones where she conveys weakness, vulnerability and self-awareness.

This new album is the most successful of the lot--calmer but not remotely calm, more emotional but not at all tender.

It is spartan but sumptuous, emotionally acute but plain-spoken. There’s an extraordinary sense of calm pervading this album, one of the year’s most finely drawn.

Dylan going electric now seems quaint, these concerts are a big part of the reason: He proved he was right.

The electronic musician who calls himself Burial deals in blurry, melancholy, ominous implications. His first release since 2013 is a pair of tracks that are never far from dissolving into entropy.

It’s at once a homage and a parody, equally aware of that era’s excesses and its glories, of the way that the most memorable 1970s R&B merged sensuality, activism, humor, toughness, outlandishness, futurism, soul roots, wild eccentricity and utopian community spirit. That’s an extremely high bar, but at its best, “Awaken, My Love!” recalls many of those virtues.

With a producer and co-writer from outside the usual precincts of pop and hip-hop--the guitarist Blake Mills, who has worked with Alabama Shakes and Fiona Apple--Mr. Legend’s music turns less glossy: earthier and often spookier.

Some of the most exciting songs on Starboy are the least expected. ... But brevity is almost too central here: Some songs (“Love to Lay,” “Nothing Without You”) have barely any verses at all, largely relying on pre-choruses and choruses.

The new songs--is most diverse set to date, and mostly rigorously executed and fun--show Mr. Mars to be interested in different musical eras, different production approaches and different singing voices without veering into chaos. Mostly his songs are like cotton candy: sweet, sticky, structurally impressive but not especially deep.

On this excerpt of the suite’s overture, “New Orleans: The National Culture Park USA 1718,” you hear the deep focus in their [Anthony Davis and Smith's] rapport; it’s an accurate reflection of the mood sustained throughout the work.

When this album whispers, as it does on large swaths of the second half, it neuters Ms. Lambert’s gifts. Even with a voice as signature as hers, there’s little to elevate songs like “Good Ol’ Days” or “Dear Old Sun.”

Her return is lucid and uncluttered, placing all the expressiveness of her voice at its center.

His excellent full-length debut album, Big Baby D.R.A.M., is joyous, clever and moves in surprising directions.