The push and pull of passiveness and assertiveness on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels organic at every turn. Sometimes the music can be a little too loose, careening like an out-of-control car (especially on the discordant “Go Ahead”), but the slackness is worth the freedom of hearing Anohni’s voice fly like the bird she became years ago.

Is it too much? Reader, it’s way too much. But it’s hard to say it doesn’t work when “too much” was clearly the point. It’s less “a swing and a miss” than “a swing that rips open a hole in the time-space continuum.”

It ["I Can See You"] and "When Emma Falls In Love," a glittery ballad about an alluring older-sister figure, are perhaps the best summations of the Taylor's Version project, bridging the years between Swift's youth and her present with the sort of tenderness that comes from paging through dog-eared scrapbooks and dusty photo albums.

Many of the songs, which she recorded with longtime collaborators John Parish and producer Flood, recall the downtempo energies of Let England Shake and her quiet 2007 album, White Chalk, and like those albums, the music here excels in its otherworldliness.

Stories From a Rock N Roll Heart is an example of strength and conviction—as well as friendship.

Such moments excepted ["Oh U Went" and "Wit the Racks"], the content of Business Is Business feels bland, especially for an expectations-thwarting artist like Thug.

Clarkson is at her strongest when she’s sticking to grunge guitars and power-pop anthems. Luckily, Chemistry is full of them and shows Clarkson — raw, unfiltered, and exorcizing her demons — is an artist at the top of her game.

Of course, even the weaker songs have their dance-floor potential. Petras is, above all else, a pure fan of pop music and the feeling it exudes. But in chasing her new status as the type of pop star who has Top 40 potential, she abandoned the freakishly forward-thinking personality that built her a base to begin with. Here, the beast has been tamed.

With 3D Country, Geese have not only avoided a sophomore slump, they’ve also delivered one of the better New York rock albums of the past few years, taking hand-me-down sounds and twisting them in ways only they could imagine.

A Gift and a Curse manages to expand on the high-end sound Gunna is known for, a vibe that has set him apart from Young Thug’s grittier, spacier music.

Life Under the Gun may frequently taste like candy, but, in the end, it’s a lollipop whittled into a shiv.

With Work of Art, he solidifies his status as a street-pop superstar.

May well be the strongest QOTSA album since 2005’s Lullabyes to Paralyze.

Despite the sometimes-overwrought musical backdrop, Killer Mike remains an incisive and compelling lyricist who confidently takes Michael into unexpected places.

The album is a full statement and requires a time commitment to appreciate it. The people who are willing to give themselves (and their precious time) over to Chris’ beatification are the only ones who will begin to understand its divine mysteries. And then they’ll hit play on it again.

Its 31-ish minutes are exquisitely wrought, as smoothly mixed as a top-tier set from a DJ with an infinite collection that includes Fifties doo-wop sides and cutting-edge cuts from the African diaspora.

On The Show, it sounds like Niall Horan knows exactly where he’s going.

Joy’All is the sound of a woman who has accepted herself — her past and her present — and now just wants to cut loose. Her broken heart still bears bruises, but it has healed enough to keep her moving. When life hands Lewis lemons now, she makes Lynchburg lemonade.

Brutally beautiful. .... It’s Isbell’s strongest album to date.

Its refusal to take the easy route around grief makes its drum fills (played by Grohl in his first return behind the kit on a Foos album since 2005) land with more intensity and its guitar slashes, some of which recall Nineties left-of-the-dial darlings, hit harder. Even the more subdued tracks like the swirling “Show Me How,” which is leavened by Grohl’s daughter Violet’s lilt, have an urgency to them that makes But Here We Are an immersive listen.

This barebones performance absolutely sparkles — a “Tombstone Blues” that’s much quieter than the original, but so spry that it’s irresistible. It stands totally on its own, and so does the album it’s on.

Ideally, Durk would have cut five or so songs and tightened Almost Healed into a clearer portrait of his struggle to leave his pistol-scarred past behind. Instead, he offers his fans a buffet of listening options, some better than others.

At its worst, the music on Everyone’s Crushed sounds like etudes – studies in experimentalism, finger exercises for tyros in the avant-garde. But when Water From Your Eyes find transcendence – especially on the record’s final two tracks, “14” and the extra winky “Buy My Product” – it can be quite stunning.

Parks has a skill for inviting listeners not only into her mind, but into her immediate environment, and the effects bring her racing emotions right to the forefront.

What makes this music connect is Simon’s ability to make a spiritual setting feel down-to-earth, what you might expect from one of American pop music’s greatest conversational songwriters.

13 scorched-earth tracks that present an artist pulling herself back up from the brink of madness. The most striking element of Kesha's latest is the sound. ... She has found a psychedelic middle ground between the sleazy synths of her 20212 breakthrough, Warrior, and the rootsy and Southern rock of her past two. [May 2023, p.73]

Aside from that awkward reach across the aisle ["Americana"], The Album’s other attempts to dig into weightier matters have better results.

The fruits of their shared labor aren’t perfect—one can pinpoint obvious echoes of Overgrown era James Blake on the album, and the prominent use of murky effects often feels like a crutch to distract from undercooked songwriting. But Secret Life is ultimately a strong outlier in each artist’s handful of recent releases.