For all its audible stitched-togetherness, there’s value in hearing the entrails of Sonic Youth’s anarcho-apparatus spark into place, one by one.

Coming Home is full of delectable singles that prove Usher is still the king of pop-R&B—he’s simply reminding his fans what he can do, how many ways he can do it, and how nastily, too, if you’ll allow him.

Every song here, even the slow stuff, feels giant and propulsive—a grand celestial tour of rock and R&B, guided by one of the few singers and multi-instrumentalists with the range and intuition to pull it off.

Diaz’s voice is resonant and emotionally rich—sometimes pleading, sometimes dejected, sometimes a gentle whisper and occasionally a powerful belt—and her ear for melody is exquisite, filling her songs with crisp, memorable hooks. This combination helps make even her broadest gestures, like the waltzing breakup ballad “Don’t Do Me Good,” a duet with Kacey Musgraves, feel lived-in but not overworked.

There may be a lot of theory, artistic experimentation, and new forms of inquiry on this album, but typical of Lange’s work, it’s carried by pure beauty, the sort of diaphanous songwriting that makes the noise of everyday life fall away.

The clarity of her voice is most appropriate for this album, which encourages trusting yourself enough to surrender to uncertainty.

[The “Underdubbed” version is] not a finished product but a working mix, one that nevertheless captures how Wings interacted as a band. .... Paul McCartney is surely the driving spirit behind Band on the Run—it distills his gifts as well as any album could—but the peculiarly warm, loving camaraderie of Wings is the reason it’s endured over the decades.

You crave a little more wreckage in their wake—a more wanton relinquishing of control, perhaps—but their abundant debut more or less lets them have their cake and eat it.

Spiel is heavy but nimble, more direct in its arrangements and sentiments, but also moodier, more melancholy; it sounds like shoulders shrugged against a cold wind.

An unbowed creative spirit ran through Perry’s gloriously multifarious career; on King Perry he sounds frustratingly submissive, a passing supplicant in someone else’s court rather than a king on his throne.

Blue Raspberry proves that Kirby is particularly dialed in on these vicissitudes of intimacy. With a little fine-tuning, she could transcend.

The real difficulty lies in the fact that even if this is the most catastrophic heartbreak that’s ever happened to Herring, the band is content to write essentially some version of the same songs they’ve been writing for the past decade. They are good songs, but it’s almost impossible to draw any deeper meaning from Herring’s writing while it seems like the sequel of a sequel of a sequel.

I could say that the twisty guitar and vibraphone lines that envelop “Ultramarine” are like vines growing unpredictably over the song’s rigid scaffolding, or try a more literal approach, examining the way their increasingly dense chromaticism inflects and complicates the otherwise simple underlying harmonic structure. The poetic license of the first risks obscuring the music’s hard reality; the clinical distance of the second risks reducing it to bare formula. The truth, as ever with this beguiling album, is somewhere in between.

Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.

Mascis has written so many songs about the same needs and frustrations—his failures to communicate, to be understood, and ultimately accepted—that they can’t help but bleed together. Still, the album’s light touch and content disposition make it a very easy listen, especially when Mascis leans into tenderness.

Continuing from Thirstier, Scott has traded the cynicism of her earlier work for sincerity, but that doesn’t mean she’s losing her edge.

It’s an ambitious, uncanny, joyously unpredictable album that invites you to get lost within its house-of-mirrors design.

After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home.

An unshowily eclectic record warmed by the glow of new love, is the group’s third and strongest album since signing to Fire Talk in 2021.

Stripped of the urge to reinvent themselves, Green Day hope to ride into the sunset as America’s most affable punks. Even the album’s one sincere stab at acting the band’s age, a reflection on parenthood called “Father to a Son,” seems to give up halfway through, content to repeat its title rather than dig deeper.

He’s never sounded more checked out. Even Cudi doesn’t seem to believe his own hype anymore. To its credit, INSANO is trying to do something different—that different thing, however, is just having DJ Drama provide thin narrative window dressing to a spate of uninspired Kid Cudi songs.

Tucker’s titanic vibrato and ferocious conviction are the anchors of Little Rope. She has audibly risen to the occasion, in every note, to support her friend.

His third solo album attempts to balance reveling in his newfound elevated celebrity and retaining the tortured persona that relishes in recounting the gruesome details of his journey. This produces some missteps, but the 31 year old cuts through the glossy excess with clarity and lyrical self-assuredness, producing enough sterling moments to show that he’s still a star worthy of fanfare.

Letter to Self is a bracing, frantic record designed for both thrashing mosh pits and solo meltdowns, best heard with the volume turned up loud.

Big Sigh is at its best when Hackman resists these broad-stroke urges, and carves out more precise imagery—whether with a pen or an ice pick.

Uchis’ vocal performance across the record represents a leap forward too: 12 years ago, she possessed the more limited—but still soulful—range of a lounge singer; now she stretches her voice to a fluttering whistle register on “¿Cómo Así?” When she dives into Latin American idioms, Uchis is unstoppable.

The songs on Welcome 2 Collegrove too often resemble the tenth pass on ideas no one loved in the first place, tweaked and rearranged until they’re perfectly fine.

THINK LATER is full of homogeneous trap-pop ballads devoted to one-dimensional introspection.