At a lean 28 minutes, it’s their shortest and most instantly rewardable—no instrumentals and none of the longform post-rock indulgences of 1998’s Terraform or 2007’s Excellent Italian Greyhound.

With their fluting vocals and bird chirps, her songs could fit on the soundtrack of Michaela Coel’s sitcom Chewing Gum, about a 24-year-old British-Ghanaian woman trying to lose her virginity. Through humor, pop hooks, and scenes of emotional intimacy, both works juxtapose the vibrancy of life with the drab realities of public housing.

HMHAS is just another good record from Billie and Finneas—certainly tasteful, and arresting sometimes, but all the session musicians in the world can’t make it a masterpiece.

Hex Dealer is as frenzied as it is hilarious.

If Crumb’s first two full-lengths squeezed worlds into safety-sized containers, this record is as authoritative as they’ve ever sounded. It sprawls in the vein of psych-pop genre-benders King Krule and Toro y Moi, but also manages to feel singular, a standalone statement of their ever-evolving identity.

Musically, though, it is strangely hollow, full of tracks that are technically well-executed but emotionally unmoving. In spite of its high tempos, rave clichés (police sirens, canned spinbacks, a Shephard tone), and rowdy hints of donk and hard house, it only occasionally achieves liftoff.

Leftfield choices underscore the courageous and subtly unusual nature of Gibbons’ album, which hides its eccentricity behind her deathless voice and sympathetic lyrical insight.

There are moments on Mayday that feel essential, plucked out of the ether as if they’ve always existed. These chimeras of the past and present illustrate what Gendron does best—digging up timeless sounds only to disrupt them, reenvisioning what’s timeless for this precise moment.

Forsyth’s lyrics have never been sharper, or stranger.

Masterful sequencing and economical writing (most songs are under three minutes) allow Bey to be as nimble as ever.

Listening to these songs still feels like you’re eavesdropping on Moffat’s intimate exchanges and innermost thoughts, but now, more than ever, his narratives are firmly plugged into our unsettled collective consciousness.

For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.

The ideas on Death Jokes, his self-produced sixth album, are clearer. He is blunter and more forceful with specific meaning on this album than ever.

The result is worthwhile: Poetry still pulses like summer, but Dehd sounds more cohesive than ever.

Not unlike Cowboy Carter hitching herself to the Wild West imaginary, Britpop opens a practical portal between Cook’s old universe—hard, bright, aggressively contemporary—and a seductively oppositional dimension of folklore, fantasy, fuzz rock, and magic.

Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.

On Funeral for Justice, it’s impossible to miss—from the blood dripping off of the crows on its album cover to the screeching guitars that open its first song, it’s the proud sound of rebellion, transposed from Tamasheq into a language that refuses to be misinterpreted.

Twice the span that Inches documented has elapsed since Root for Ruin, yet OUI, LSF plays more like a continuation than a new chapter.

Spell Blanket is an expansive sonic feast, swiftly—but intentionally—oscillating from minute-long loop fragments and textural studies to more fleshed-out, properly arranged songs. There’s a noticeable flow in energy, which gives the collection more of a proper album feel than a mixtape or thrown-together compilation.

Fearless Movement’s first half is filled with guest vocalists delivering songs that attempt awkwardly to be soundtracks for both revelry and deep contemplation. The album gets better when it dispenses with its noncommittal relationship to party music, freeing Washington to pursue the heroic high drama that’s still his strong suit.

Their latest is their most consistent yet, and it stands among their best.

Considering the pedigree of its personnel, Radical Optimism is oddly incoherent. The absence of Future Nostalgia’s many topline writers is notable both in the lack of ironclad melodies and unfamiliarity with how to handle Lipa’s vocal weaponry.

If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.

Temporal displacement and imagistic writing make Here in the Pitch feel vaporous at first, but it soon becomes its own transfixing language, a magnet that makes your internal compass go haywire.

Fu##in’ Up makes a convincing case for Ragged Glory as the definitive Crazy Horse album, showcasing the group in their purest, crudest state, without any of the counter-balancing pop singles or acoustic reprieves that colored more hallowed classics like Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and Zuma.

Dennis is an album of floor-fillers, especially in its first half, that plays out like a bad hangover, one song shifting into the next like Dante passing through the circles of Hell.

You still never know from one song what might appear on the next, or even where the song you’re listening to might go, and it keeps the music fresh even when it’s retreading hallowed ground.

Martin and Taylor don’t think in opuses, in grand gestures and proclamations, in magic or illusion. Hovvdy simply slows down time just long enough to capture the beauty in the moments that always threaten to float away if they’re not captured immediately and cherished.