Forensic analysis aside, the album is still great, ranging from sweetness and playfulness to dark menace, from vintage soul to dark experimentalism. The title track has fuzzed-out ‘70s synths, a tight rhythm and a clean vocal from Glover. .... The ballads are fire too: Grande turns in a soaring performance on the gospel-inflected “Time,” and “Sweet Thang” is a harmony-loaded slow jam with a heaping medley of voices and a woozy guitar solo that could have been an outtake from Prince’s classic “Sign O’ the Times.”

“Optimism” is pummeling, concerted and arranged exactly how it should be, a pop record meant to wash over you like a breeze rolling off of the surf.

“All Born Screaming” is focused and of a piece and all over the place at the same time. It’s a tribute to St. Vincent’s vision and skill that an album bursting with so many ideas is such a coherent whole.

“The Tortured Poets Department” feels like it comes the closest of any of her 11 original albums to just drilling a tube directly into her brain and letting listeners mainline what comes out. If you value this confessional quality most of all, she’s still peaking: As a culmination of her particular genius for marrying cleverness with catharsis, “Tortured” kind of feels like the Taylor Swift-est Taylor Swift record ever.

Throughout, the music has a sort of cloudy yet optimistic feel to it that the artist has described as “happy melancholia” – reminiscent of Fred Again’s masterful “Real Life” albums without necessarily sounding like them – and an innate musicality.

If the sound had a home base, it would probably be the Northern English industrial city of Leeds, which not coincidentally is also home to several major universities and spawned such major acts in the genre as Gang of Four, the Mekons, Delta 5 and more. On “Angeltape,” the quartet Drahla has revived that sound with a striking level of authenticity.

There’s no shortage of the unmistakable sound that brought the group so many fans in the first place. All three are excellent musicians, but Spear is a marvel, playing with a fluid style that incorporates multiple influences, from rock to African to blues to funk to Duane Eddy twang, with an innate sense of melody that carries the entire band. Yet he never overplays.

No apology necessary: “Only God Was Above Us” is an essential chapter in the band’s still-evolving sound and career.

“Act II” feels a lot like a 27-course meal, difficult to describe in whole, but endlessly easy to digest, serving by serving. .... As a whole, “Cowboy Carter” is a masterpiece of sophisticated vocal arranging, laid out on top of mostly fairly stark band tracks.

For the most part, Metro makes more of the duo’s first volume than Future does. Then again, there are stunningly soulful and richly melodic tracks such as “Running Outta Time” (co-produced with Zaytoven and Chris XZ) where the rapper sounds clear as a bell, passionate and hungry, with the backing of simple hammering piano and a slow, grinding organ.

Tyla never abandons her sound in her debut. Instead, she makes her boldest stylistic choices as subtle as possible, cementing her growing status as a pop star.

Minor deviations aside, “Tigers Blood” functions as a seamless extension and advancement of the aesthetic Crutchfield perfected on “Saint Cloud,” her Americana masterpiece that stands as one of the few artifacts worth revisiting from March 2020.

Her mastery in hitmaking is on full display. .... “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” is the updated testament to her successful track record. She rejoices in the experimentation and liberation of the new school she helped build.

It isn’t the most groundbreaking album in his discography, but it’s the clearest vision that he’s presented in years. Its songs are mercurial yet intentional, each its own bizarre sector of a larger blueprint, and the 16-song set is often musically great, from the Brazilian funk sample on “Paperwork” to the bellowing horns of “Problematic.” .... Lyrically, however, those hoping for West to seriously reconcile with his public controversies will come up short on “Vultures 1,” where in characteristically antagonist form, he leans into them.

Timberlake doesn’t reconcile with remorse across the suitable yet uneven “Everything I Thought It Was”; rather, he quickly gestures towards it on opener “Memphis” and moves on.

For listeners up for an adventure — for an album that reveals itself gradually, continues to surprise after several listens and takes you places you didn’t necessarily know you wanted to go — there are many rewards in store.

The topical shifts can be as jarring as the sonic variance, but through her conviction, adaptability, and deft vibes control, Whack makes it all cohesive while sustaining the energy of her best releases. .... With the release of the stellar “World Wide Whack,” all theoretical outcomes can recede into the glory of the real thing.

Are the songs treasures? By and large, yes — although I’m not nearly enough of an inveterate audiophile or compulsive A/B tester to really want to compare two or three versions of each of them.

Nearly every one of the 16 tracks begins with delicate finger-picking, and then stays there, flying proudly in the face of “there needs to be a banger” convention and staying committed to the acoustic bit. It’s uncompromising in that way, and all the lovelier for its confidence that you’ll turn up the volume, so she doesn’t have to.

If there’s a more innovative and exciting rock album coming in 2024, we can’t wait to hear it.

Ultimately, with “Loss of Life,” the group seems to feel more comfortable than ever in its own skin, unshackled to trends or preconceived notions about how some may feel they should sound.

There’s no question whose album this is, and like so many female superstars, Grande is tragically underrated as a musician. She’s not only a virtuoso singer but a skilled vocal arranger and producer whose multitracked backing voices are like songs on their own, embellishing and responding to her lead like a troupe of attuned dancers.

“New Blue Sun” is ecstatic and dreamy, even when, at the times, its sounds are ferocious and fearful. If André 3000 wasn’t going to release a chattering, rap-filled hip-hop album this time out, “New Blue Sun” may count as that theoretical project’s intriguing instrumental equal.

There’s a whiff of wistful nostalgia in seeing PinkPantheress veer away from micropop, but artists need to evolve and she’s exploring rather than conforming. “Heaven Knows” is a big chapter in what is hopefully a long story.

The song’s beginning will be breathtaking for fans: It opens with a familiar Beatles count-in, following by classic Lennonesque piano chords and a strummed acoustic guitar, and then — that voice, pristine, singing “I know it’s true, it’s all because of you,” and following an unmistakably Lennon melody. .... In the end, “Now and Then” is not a lost Beatles classic. But to paraphrase McCartney’s famous quote regarding criticism of the “White Album,” “It’s a bloody new Beatles song, shut up!”

Some of the most interesting material is the pile of stray tracks toward the end of the studio segment, which the producers have done a masterful job of presenting. The songs are stylistically diverse and offer an expanded view of what this band and this musician were capable of. .... But we saved the best for last: The live set consists mostly of songs from the “Diamonds and Pearls” album, but it finds the band in peak form and stretching out as they roar through a 90-minute set.

After delivering a record of such unrestrained joy and fun, my only quibble is with “Tension’s” title, though maybe what she’s referring to is not just that great second single but the challenge she issues for the rest of the industry keep up with what continues to be an impeccable run.

If not nearly as cocky and confident as the seasoned soul who wrote an album as lyrically clever as “Midnights.” You still get a good dose of her seminal earnestness in these tracks, but there’s a lot more of the woman who knew somebody was trouble when he walked in, and went for it anyway.

Any time “Dogs” finds itself, a lull is just around the corner, in large part because of its ungainly length.

Listening to this gargantuan boxed set, it’s hard not to get the sense that if Lambert had been healthy, he might have been able to focus Townshend’s brilliant, beautiful, exciting songs into a concept as coherent as “Tommy.” “Who’s Next/ Life House” shows how tantalizingly close they came.

The oddly beautiful instrumental title track, which is a gentle, simple melody played on a keyboard that sounds like a combination of a computerized church organ and a ghostly merry-go-round — and perfectly evokes the digital spirituality of its title, and the contrasts of where James Blake the artist is at this point in his always-explorative musical career.

There’s a lot of Erykah Badu and a lot of early ‘70s Stevie Wonder in her singing and grooves, and while it generally moves in a in an unhurried, low-key pace, Sol shows she can open up and (almost) belt when she’s so inclined.

He’s at his most realized and forthcoming: a pop singer with something to say, one who does so frankly with a self-assurance that only comes with age.

If there’s a better way to end the Rolling Stones’ 60-plus-year recording career, it’s hard to imagine what it could be.

The new mix is just part of the reason to pick up the four-CD “Let It Bleed” edition, if probably the most crucial one. .... And the disc of alternate versions and outtakes, most previously unreleased, makes for a great listen by itself, as well as satisfying some historical curiosity about things like how some early Alex Chilton-produced demos compare with the finished album.

The album is loaded with singles, but it’s a real album, with most of the other songs branching out her sound and showing off her killer flow. With 17 tracks spanning almost an hour, it sags in a couple of spots, but “Scarlet” sets a new bar on multiple levels, and not just for female rappers.

As clever as the album consistently is, it still maintains the aura she’s established of transmitting real-talk teen vérité right into the grooves. Wherever her 20s take her from here, may it turn out to be just as affectionate, cheeky and brash.

Its arrival is a comfort, offering sounds that will ring familiar to longtime fans — and to everyone else serve as an atmospheric Rorschach test, alternately primitive and futuristic, beautiful and menacing, propulsive and ethereal.

The common thread is that she sounds like she’s having fun, skipping through these eras and genres. It’s all still fit for a pledge drive, but Giddens is pledging her fealty to the spirit that made all these forms of music a kick in the pants in their heyday.

“Newport” is a record you might put on for a personal triumph-of-the-human-spirit lift as much as the musicality. Fortunately, the musicality is really something, too.

It sounds like sobering stuff on paper. But on record, a lot of these songs play out as breezily as Styles’ “As It Was.” It’s a record that’s in constant conflict with itself, using candor and humor as a self-conscious form of denial, maybe; the easygoing infectiousness of the music always is reassuring us that there’s nothing to worry about amid all this conspicuous consumption.

A soundtrack that stands as a far more rewarding and cohesive document than its televised counterpart.

Where “Astroworld” brought spectacle, “Utopia” brings subtlety and innovation.

The duet with Williams, “Castles Crumbling,” is particularly pungent, as a lament that just about could have been an outtake from the more recent “Folklore” or “Evermore” instead of an album that came out a full decade before those. As for the FOB-aided track, it’s the farthest thing from a Swift classic. But — having been written, like the rest of these tracks, when the artist was 18 or 19 — the number does hark back to an era when girls (and Fall Out Boys) could just wanna have fun.

Some artists play by the rules, others revel in breaking them — and with “Fountain Baby,” Amaraae leaves no question to which category is hers, all while demonstrating how wide the umbrella of African pop can be.

Like the group’s best work, its amorphous and vaguely defined nature makes it something you can explore again and again and still find something you hadn’t noticed.

“Seven Psalms” is unlike any other Simon album in almost too many ways to list.

One of the strong points of “Subtract” is how little sugar-coating Sheeran tries to put on his rough 2022, even as he provides a few leavening songs, like “Colourblind,” that speak more generally to his love for his wife, and not just the prospect of her loss. Otherwise, it’s “Life Goes On,” as a seventh-stage-of-grief song title, and “Right now I feel I’m running from the light,” as an overriding sentiment.

Like all of the group’s recordings, the songs transcend the sound, and “Fuse” finds this veteran group as vital as ever.

It’s like summer arrived three months early. And like one of the best albums of 2023 arrived right on time.

Sometimes the stars who are brought in sound like they’re about to get lost in Glimmer Twins glossolalia, but sometimes it sounds like they just stopped by for some Stones karaoke. ... Highlights abound, though, especially when you get singers with a strong Southern soul leaning to their voice, filling in some of the melodic licks that Jagger always kind of slurred his way through. ... You exit “Stone Cold Country” wanting to hear [Marcus] King cut a whole album of Stones covers.

This album is a rich feast. Even if, to get the full gist of things, it does call for research and multitasking. ... As for the writing itself, there’s not an unfascinating moment on the album, whether she’s making characteristically quotable, glaringly bold declarations or leading attentive superfans into obscure rabbit holes.

100 Gecs pack more ideas into 23 minutes than most artists who release 70+-minute-long albums. With “10,000 Gecs,” the duo has reached a “South Park” level of brilliant absurdity.

Upon first listen, “Norm” is a gorgeously produced collection of short folk-fiction. When given closer attention, the album unfurls into an anthology of dark, interconnected tales of loss, unrequited love and casual brushes with the divine.

Cyrus was and presumably still is a weed girl — and “Endless Summer Vacation” mixes the kind of peaceful, easy feeling you associate with that sensibility with some very pure pop instincts. It’s not the kind of album you want to oversell; more definitive statements or craftier strings of singles may lie in her future. For now, though, it’s nice to see her succeeding more by sweating less.

It’s a lush, lavish, luscious hot tub of an album, conjuring visions of plush feather beds, fluffy pillows and bubble baths, although the lyrics will occasionally jolt the listener out of their chill.

You get the feeling that Hayley Williams and the rest of Paramore are still looking more outwardly than inwardly — that the wisdom of age has left them wanting for more, and questioning all. And that’s a great look for Paramore.

“Desire” is clearly her vision all the way, a forceful and determined effort that vaults her to the front of adventurous pop music.

Nearly 40 years into their career as a band, with “This Stupid World,” Yo La Tengo have reached another peak. Without overstating the case, that’s something not many artists who aren’t named Neil or Bob can say.

With songs that are both sacred and profane, with R&B and pop and disco and chorales, “Gloria” is all of that and more.

Lizzy are in explosive form on each of the gigs presented here, bringing a vibrancy and fluidity that was sometimes missing from the studio versions of these songs. The band’s all-time best lineup is in top form. ... Yes, seven concerts by anyone is a lot, and not surprisingly for shows recorded across just 18 months, there’s a lot of repetition. But this is the best kind of boxed set: one you can keep coming back to. Nearly 50 years later, Lizzy has never sounded better.

Her strongest effort to date with the new mixtape, “Bubblegum.” Her distinctively wispy voice and sinewy grooves have created a trademark sound — somewhere between Charli XCX and Pink Pantheress — that’s pop without being cheesy and dance-based without sacrificing melody or shunning melancholy.

“Cheap Trick Live at the Whisky 1977” actually is one of those astonishing releases.

“Every Loser” is just Iggy Pop to the max — lewder, cruder and louder than love, but filled with his usual lust for life.

Although there are hummable potential singles that stick out, such as “Shirt,” and singularly contagious tracks such as “Conceited,” “SOS” is a record meant to be heard in its entirety. It would have been entrancing, surely, at double the length.

Her writing registers with crisp clarity, cutting to the bone of the themes she is excavating. What might be cheap and exhausting in the hands of a lesser artist feels frequently cathartic, an exorcism that is honest about its central challenges but hopeful about our ability to transcend them.

Ultimately, Springsteen’s new soul covers album goes at least a little way toward being a handsome declaration of a life’s inspiration and intention. But it should have been so much more than merely “covering” — and beyond mere survival.

It’s a remarkable time that is documented in superfan-satisfying detail in the 4-CD collection “A Divine Symmetry,” the latest in the long and beautifully compiled series of reissues from the Bowie estate (the vinyl will be available in February).

Obviously, this isn’t a standard Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers concert — see above for plenty of those — but for people who love the sound of a band stretching, showing off, challenging each other and having fun, it’s hard to think of many better albums. ... The album captures what is arguably the best lineup of the band since its original one, with stellar backing vocals from bassist Howie Epstein and auxiliary Heartbreaker Scott Thurston.

And what a vision it is. “softCORE” is a jarring blast of melody and chaos that adds up to one of the year’s best and most exciting albums.

Though not without its missteps, “Her Loss” leaves the unshakable impression that Drake, in 2022, is doing what inspires him rather than pandering. One year removed from “Certified Lover Boy,” that represents a surprising and encouraging evolution.

A quarter century after the French quartet Phoenix formed, it hardly seems likely that they’d make the most fresh-sounding album since the one that lit up the alt-rock charts in 2009, “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” — but they’ve done it with “Alpha Zulu.” ... They’ve optimized and maximized their template in a way that seems effortless.

It all adds up to one of the best and most memorable albums of the year.

The set employs a “Get Back”-style approach to several of the songs, where listeners can hear the evolution of “Yellow Submarine” from a depressing lament to the familiar jaunty children’s anthem, that “And Your Bird Can Sing” once had a flagrant Byrds reference, and “Tomorrow Never Knows” was originally much slower — and even trippier. ... What’s really special here are the aforementioned book and especially the outtakes, many of which have eluded bootleggers over the half-century-plus since illicit Beatles releases began hitting the market.

The biggest stars here are indisputably Sara and Sean, winsome singers and master musicians on guitar and violin, respectively, and curators to beat the band. After 20 years bringing folks into their extended family, maybe these former kid prodigies have earned the right to be called mom and dad.

Bathed in brighter production values and upped tempos than on his usual amniotic-bath tones, the expanse of “Legend” allows the vocalist to do something he rarely does: play around and have a laugh.

“Midnights” doesn’t venture as far into other fields as some of her more openly ambitious albums have. This seems like a feature, not a flaw, even if “Folklore” and “Evermore” still feel like her masterpieces to date. The new album benefits from its relative modesty, length-wise and streamlining-wise. ... She’s able to maintain a tighter focus on alternately dark and light nights of the soul, in matters of love, redemption and minor vengeance.

The vast majority of tracks come in under three minutes, yet it’d be wrong to give credit to Baby for not overstaying his welcome on these songs when the record, aside from a predictable variation of keys or strings that introduce each new track, practically blurs into one indistinguishable song.

Healy has smartly introduced a measure of restraint, but it wouldn’t be a 1975 album without his idiosyncratic discursions; these songs, sturdy melodic creations at their core, are all the better for it.

It continues the group’s evolution with a powerful, more seasoned take on their earlier sounds.

The Royal Albert Hall show captures the band at the absolute peak of its powers. ... 52 years after the fact you can see, more than ever, what all the fuss was about.

To be clear, these are not professional recordings; they’re loose versions of the songs sung into a cheap recorder, and consist of Reed on lead vocals, acoustic guitar and harmonica while Cale sings harmony (lead on one song) and occasionally bangs on things; there are bum notes, laughter and mistakes. But in the Velvets canon, their historical significance is vast.

Noah doesn’t belt, and shows a sensitivity and vulnerability on these songs that belies her age. With 10 songs over just 33 minutes, it’s a wide-ranging, emotional ride that leaves the listener wanting more.

“Holy Fvck” is a good surprise and an even better record — maybe the best we’ve heard from Lovato to date.

For those of us who love both power pop and musical theater, though, and haven’t been as much enamored of their previous emo, this is Panic!’s best album. The paradox is that this may be one-man-band Urie’s hardest-rocking collection, as well as his most stagy.

She’s made a forward stride with a story of indignation and despondence like little else we’ve heard in hip-hop.

As a whole, is Dawes, on the album where all the members finally get to let their freak-flag fly a little more, or as much on record as they have live. And an album that’s kinda about dystopianism kinda becomes a nice 46-minute tonic for it.

Even in the album’s most vulnerable moments, maybe especially in those moments, Shires is proving what a tough character she really is, exploring territory that singer-songwriters a little less sure of themselves would fear to tread. ... If there’s any danger in letting both power and unguardedness fill her sails, well, she can take that like a catamaran.

“Renaissance” (volume one of three) is sticky, sweaty, hedonistic art — flanked by a pastiche of genres that never lingers on long enough for the listener to get too comfortable. It’s what makes the collection its own kind of masterpiece: beauty in the chaos.

Even within a semi-unplugged framework, White contains multitudes, packing in plenty of styles under one faintly folksy umbrella. One thing that immediately stands out is White’s wholly underrated knack for making great piano-based roots-rock recordings. ... The rub is gentler, but there’s no less reason to feel tickled.

It’s hard to imagine this isn’t immediately locked in as one of the leading album of the year candidates. On another day, maybe we’ll think that the lack of ballad showcases keeps this from being the career peak-to-date it feels like in the moment. Whether in years to follow the record will hold up as Ms. Right may be anyone’s guess, but it is definitely Ms. Right Now.

On occasion, such symmetry and solace is overbearing and a little too perfect. ... Missteps such as these — especially on an album with nearly 20 songs — mean little when its main man has made yet another vocally and lyrically poignant, to say nothing of sonically immersive, step into the future of Afro-Fusion with “Love, Damini.”

As a standalone Drake album, it’s deeply refreshing, and a dose of vibrant pop likely to reverberate through the remainder of the summer.

“Cruel Country” captures a band wholly secure in its status; it does a handful of things very well, and does those things repeatedly, with few deviations.

“Twelve Carat Toothache” finally feels like a transitional album for one of pop’s biggest stars. (And we do mean pop, not hip-hop) ... But with no small help from Bell, who’s the best kind of musical enabler, Malone’s turns of melodic phrase and aptitude for true confessions are making him a far more interesting artist than we could have guessed even a couple of albums ago.

“Harry’s House” is a bit more intimate and less stadium-sized than its predecessor. Lyrically, it’s heavier and more serious in places. ... He’s built himself an enviable solo career that “Harry’s House” goes a long way toward furthering.

It’s the sound of one of America’s foremost poets offering an all-access visit to the darker corners of his mind, unconcerned with whether anyone would choose to take that trip again. “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” may not be a masterpiece, and it may not always be pleasant, but it’s clearly the work of a genius, accountable to no one but himself, intent on showing you all the scars that he acquired on his way to becoming the defining rapper of his generation, and plenty that came after that, too.

All of this is captured in pristine sound quality — that’s Richards’ guitar in the right channel and Wood in the left — even the weak, historic-interest-only songs from night one that are tacked onto the end. ... The concert captured here was the first day of the rest of the Stones’ lives — and 45 years later, you’re in that sweaty club with them.