A case can be made that the 1978 world tour is the genesis of Dylan’s latter-day incarnation as a restless and mercurial road warrior. That knowledge doesn’t change that, as an album, The Complete Budokan 1978 isn’t just a drag, it’s often dorky, too.

The music is spare, laser focused on those incandescent gospel melodies that feel like a Mzansi jazz birthright, and on ways to minimally ornament them for a broader, internationalist (Anthem and otherwise) audience. Such embellishment doesn’t obscure Ntuli’s expansiveness. It shows her power in a different light.

It’s hard to tell if Moon Beach is meant as a continuation of Vile’s past work or the start of something new, but that uncertainty is also what makes it feel so exciting.

What Abstract does bring to the table, though, is an ear for sticky, misshapen melodies and a rap producer’s sense of pacing, which keeps Blanket moving so briskly that its periodic clumsiness doesn’t bog it down much.

New Blue Sun is the most emotionally direct music André has ever made. The methods might be oblique, the instrumentation often unclear, the man himself occasionally missing in action or off on his own pursuits, but the sense of intermixed sadness, loss, and peace that permeates this music is impossible to miss.

As welcome as it is, the Party of Five disc winds up emphasizing the curious nature of Up, as the point where interpersonal tensions collided with broader cultural shifts.

On the more diaristic songs, the narratives aren’t as vivid, the rapping isn’t as nimble, and the songs lack momentum.

Rather than in volume and intensity, Sings Dylan finds subversion in its very form, as a covers album that celebrates and estranges its source material at once.

What Spiritual Cramp might lack in blood, it makes up for with zippy efficiency. The band pulls the focus away from its propensity for carnage and toward their instinctive sense of melody, trading disorder for a methodicalness that galvanizes rather than placates.

Hadsel is a new beginning for Beirut that sounds like old times, a record born of despair and solitude that still feels full of life.

Ragana have spoken about consciously balancing their individual styles on their records—Coley’s more elaborate odysseys next to Maria’s quieter and more minimal compositions—and that melding of aesthetics keeps Desolation’s Flower riveting.

She and longtime producer King Ed are clearly drawn to shiny, uncynical pop, and out of the dozens of songs Latham recorded for Quarter Life Crisis, that’s largely what made the cut.

In a world where artists have been reduced to brands and data points, Aesop Rock asserts his multiplicity. The record boasts some of his most fully realized songs.

Rather than sounding as if they’ve been optimized by a digital studio, his beats tend to impart the illusion of different objects crashing to the ground at varying distances. They’re loose, anxious assemblages that leave plenty of space for the ear to play in.

Even broken down for parts, Ellery’s vocals are still a guiding force, maintaining a lightness that balances <3UQTINVU’s harsher edges.

Even as she extends herself as a songwriter, and as she grows more comfortable in the spotlight, she hasn’t found a way to build on the full extent of her mystique.

Return to Archive is the motley, riotous result, a suitably retrofuturistic collage incorporating over two dozen records ranging from Sounds of Animals to Sounds of Medicine, International Morse Code to End the Cigarette Habit Through Self Hypnosis.

There’s palpable joy in the songs’ anthemic structures and Medford’s bright, confident delivery, even though there are reminders that this self-awareness was hard-won. Medford makes the crying and bleeding sound fortifying nonetheless.

The Silver Cord won’t convince every listener to join King Gizzard’s Phish-like fandom, but it stands out as one of their most playful records in recent years.

The Comeback Kid blasts by in under half an hour, and Stern’s impulses to chase her weirdest muses serve her well throughout. She lands her adventurous leaps with breathless energy.

Cunningham is capable of crafting lean full-length statements; R.I.P. and AZD are sleek and streamlined. But he’s too wily and restless to want to do that all the time, so we end up with albums like this, where he expands the canvas to make room for private jokes and stray thoughts.

At their most effective, they speak loudest to our inner music geek: Come for what they remind you of, stay for what they’re learning to bring to the table for themselves.

While the textures of shoegaze are everywhere, the closest thing to a shoegaze song is “Rose With Smoke,” a spare, guitar-only instrumental that acts as an intermission. Everywhere else, the band sounds locked in and linked together—if you want to catch the sense of play, just focus on Zimmerman’s giddy basslines—and the result is the kind of slow-release euphoria you get from an afternoon catching up with old friends.

And Then You Pray for Me is not an extension of its predecessor but an explosion: a broad, loud, and messy exploration of Gunn’s vision for rap and art.

Despite a few stumbles—”WASP” and closing track “Walking On Air” are the album’s most generic offerings—her frenetic fire-and-ice routine is impressive. She’s grown up without losing her freshness, refining the skill and intensity that got her here in the first place.

No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.

There’s something curiously touching about these twitching, disembodied songs; you almost want to pick them up and try to put them back together again.

In a way, Jenny From Thebes is precisely about the struggle to find the right distance: from the past, from other people, from ourselves. Darnielle is a master of the perspective shot; he is often at his most vivid when writing in the second person.