The complexity of the music helps to make up for the comparatively placid lyrics, but Mackey’s writing is most interesting when she zooms in on domestic bliss.

“True Love,” “Up,” “Everybody’s Saying That,” and “Love Is Enough” bob to the same Chic formula: skanking guitar, twangy bass, canned strings. It’s a solid formula, but the textural sameness makes more idiosyncratic tracks like “Give Me Your Love” stand out.

Jim O’Rourke’s soundtrack is perfectly calibrated to this unforgiving space squashed between parched fields and blown-out sky. His palette—detuned piano, watery vibraphone, and a muted, amorphous shimmer that might be harmonium or synthesizer—matches the film’s dusty tones of beige and pewter and mobile-home brown.

Cosentino sounds strongest when she gives herself permission to veer from her influences and find her own voice.

Georgia’s willingness to experiment is promising, but it’s unfortunate that Euphoric takes such a predominantly safe journey. As on Seeking Thrills, some songs also succumb to vague lyrics that resemble placeholders.

It’s tempting to speculate that there are more versions like that out there, just waiting to be discovered. Blackbox Life Recorder, the EP, might seem relatively modest, but the black box that is Aphex Twin’s extended universe remains delightfully unfathomable.

The Loveliest Time is a solid counterpart to its sister album, trading quiet, introspective power for brassy, headlong joy.

Coltrane reaches at once into the future and the place where music began. He touches the primeval and follows along with the changes.

For some reason—fear of boring his fans, obedience to the preferences of the streaming services, a career focused on club bangers—Malone won’t let these songs breathe. The result is an album that’s overstuffed and undercooked.

Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all.

Mitchell’s voice is gorgeous and rich throughout, a piece of high-pile cotton velvet warmed in the daylight. She renders “Both Sides Now” with the wisdom of survival, the “up and down” having still somehow delivered her here. But too often, her patient approach is swallowed by the tide of well-intentioned boosters, associates who make Mitchell feel like little more than an honorary guest at her own party.

All he has to back himself up is the production. Yet even that is so safe. He waters down the cutting-edge sounds of the past and, in the process, flattens his Southerness to the point that he feels like he’s from nowhere.

The pirate-radio conceit simultaneously buoys and constrains an album bursting with ideas. Its themes help rapid-fire changes in direction cohere, but fully fleshed-out tracks sit awkwardly within a headlong spin across the radio dial.

None of these songs sound like demos or leftovers, but Flying High doesn’t reach for the stars, either. This is an exhibition bout for the MCs—the pairings are solid but unsurprising—and, like most Alchemist solo projects, it concludes with instrumental versions of each song.

It [Mike Dean's "The Lure"], too, deserved a better show, and sets the tone for the songs to come, all sexual synth tracks that deploy dramatic minor chords to hint at a seamy undertone.

It’s the textbook definition of a low-stakes mid-career rap album, a place for one of the genre’s icons to show he’s still in decent fighting shape.

A fresh sense of discovery also suffuses I Am Not There Anymore’s more straightforward songs.

It’s a remarkably assured statement of purpose.

Steeped in the careening energy of surf-rock and mid-’60s Jazzmaster tones but open to any stylistic fancy that crosses Falcon Bitch and Gumball’s radar, When Horses Would Run is an unusually raucous and idea-stuffed debut.

The result is some of the sharpest, most clear-eyed songwriting to date. Despite the Day-Glo exterior, Pure Music largely operates in a lyrical mode born out of the group’s time as a more conventional guitar-driven project.

True to form, the other Kens on the soundtrack contribute nothing—doze through Dominic Fike’s noodly, acoustic “Hey Blondie,” which exists halfway between “Your Body Is a Wonderland,” and “Hey Soul Sister,” and the Kid Laroi’s howling emo-trap ballad “Forever & Again.” But the girls often can’t prove they’re worthy of main character status either.

Albarn plays the part of heartbroken confessor, but these meticulously polished songs conjure something more real than anguish: the dulling of losses, the warm aura of midlife decline, and the fading belief, with advancing years, that crisis serves to raise the curtain on your next act.

They say you have to see egg punk live to really get it. But the goofy, revved-up glory of Super Snõõper comes pretty close.

At its best, i care so much that i dont care at all captures the ecstatic, uncomfortable intensity of the joy and turmoil of being young. And if it ever feels awkward or fumbling, well, that’s an essential part of being a teenager too.

Classic rock is a genre that’s endured through its mythology. With Western Cum, Cory Hanson gives us some new myths to believe in.

Eye on the Bat shows up unglamorously, and it’s this candor and humanity that proves most charming, a dispatch from love’s treacherous backroads.

Leray boasted about introducing the younger generation to artists like Busta Rhymes through her use of samples. That’s a nice idea—introducing people to other music through her samples—but that’s basically the only idea she brings to COI.

He delivers these lines like a seasoned storyteller, reminding himself of the timeless feelings that drive us to keep the music playing, whether it’s old or new.

Long-time collaborator JAE5 is absent from the writing credits, eschewing his usual anchor role, but the album still boasts a remarkably consistent sound, thanks to keen interplay from the likes of TSB, iO, and Levi Lennox.

Combining post-punk’s propulsive rhythms with progressive rock’s winding melodies, Lifeguard channel the verve and manic energy of making art with like-minded peers and the rush of sharing your bespoke musical world.

Rain Before Seven… is designed to feel hopeful and positive, reassuring rather than challenging: music for the world that should or could be, rather than the grim reality. But it’s ultimately a vision of a heaven where nothing much happens.

Dying’s sinewy strangeness may come at the expense of the immediacy that was once Harvey’s strong suit, but this is how PJ Harvey albums work now: You feel them without being able to explain them. Where her early records pummeled the gut, now she toys with the mind.

A handful of the beats skew generic—closing tracks “The Way,” with its sleepy Wreckx-N-Effect sample, and “Race,” in particular, play like car-commercial music—but To What End avoids defaulting to a rapper spitting with a backing band.

Throughout Speak Now (Taylor’s Version), Swift sometimes mutes the messy adolescent impulses that gave these songs their spark. But elsewhere, she divests from fantasy archetypes—the knight on a white horse, the helpless child—that once limited her. Think of the new Speak Now as a call and response between who she was and who she is.

Occasionally, Slugs of Love meanders off course. .... But the album rebounds on its celestial closing track, “Easy Falling,” a plush comedown that breezes by on gentle guitar and Nagano’s leisurely melodies. Like the album’s best songs, it offers a worthwhile escape with understated grace.

The Greater Wings is no funeral, and Byrne’s calm assurance renders her words irresistibly commanding.

At 26 tracks, Pink Tape is bloated and messy, with occasional flashes of excellence between grating screamo misfires and unremarkable songs that feel like retreads of Playboi Carti or Trippie Redd hits.

It’s post-protest music, made stronger for refusing to endorse personal solutions to systemic problems.

For all its cracked nerves, Good Living Is Coming for You is a record of triumph and gathering strength, of harnessing self-awareness to break out of toxic cycles.

Even as she’s lost some of her range, Williams’ voice remains sui generis. She’s never sounded more tender or unguarded as she does on “Where the Song Will Find Me,” leaning into her vibrato, letting the holes and pockmarks in her voice tell their own stories.

Thrown on at a barbecue, dinner party, or drab commute, Blowout is sure to enliven the mood. Yet Kirby’s work also rewards careful listening, sprinkled with moments that jolt you to attention as surely as they soothe.

The new compositions are highlights, tracing their central motifs to unexpected destinations. While some of Metheny’s best original work this century has spoken to his ambition as a composer (2005’s The Way Up), his aim here is for simple but immersive mood-setting.

Myuthafoo, however, dispenses with vocals entirely, and is better for it. The absence of singing brings Barbieri’s synths to the fore. Part of the wonderment of Myuthafoo isn’t just how she sequences; it’s what.

The initial, gut-level response to Systemic’s crust-punk take on doom metal is more than enough to hold it aloft. But in engaging with its themes, then contemplating them on repeat listens, Systemic gains a depth that’s rare for a largely instrumental record.

Sternberg’s deep compassion radiates across I’ve Got Me. By album’s end, they come to feel like a friend—one who’s trying their best not to repeat the same mistakes, but still texts you from their ex’s place in the middle of the night.

Nothing here is going to replace “Boys in the Better Land” in the alternative disco pantheon—but Chatten has made a bold claim here as a folk auteur, whose classical songwriting and tender, veracious touch resonates now and into the past.

Bain has crafted her share of evocative ballads, but the ones on In the End tend to zap the momentum. Bain is at her best when she’s embracing a sense of playfulness, winking as subtly as she cries, sashaying between humor and hurt.

Picture of Bunny Rabbit offers the chill of encountering more of a beloved artist’s classic work in the moment they made it. There’s something near-holy about overhearing Russell in this magic half-light again.

An expanded version of the Truckers’ The Dirty South that finally reveals the true breadth of their 2004 masterpiece.

Business Is Business, perhaps due to its nature as a cobbled-together collection from someone who can’t access a recording studio, even to comb through his vaults, frequently recalls Thug’s loosest, most apparently improvisatory work. It’s all the more compelling for it.

Life Under the Gun explodes out of the basement show without abandoning its energy and essence. The noise of their earlier EPs has become rich and lush, their rhythm section tight and crisp.

On Purge, Godflesh strike a balance between communal vulnerability and seething hostility that makes for the most inviting entry in their late career.

Some tracks are more compelling than others, but that’s to be expected when an artist writes by throwing ideas at the wall to see what sticks. The melodies on Hammond’s album are in ample supply; it’s the urge to self-edit that’s taken a breather.

Good emo music makes you feel their feelings; great emo music makes you see the world through their eyes. MacDonald’s lyrics render images like chewing on bread that’s turned to flesh, peeling a drunk driver off the asphalt like roadkill, feeding nickels and dimes to ducks in a pond.

Despite its razzle-dazzle, this is the rare King Gizzard release that actually sounds like it was composed as quickly as it was.

Michael is an origin story that works best when it examines how worshiping at the altars of sex, money, and Jesus created the man we know today. But when he petulantly doubles down on critiques of his public persona and status as a Black multi-millionaire, the album is harder to stomach.

While their influences are all over the map, it’s encouraging to hear Geese getting more comfortable sounding like themselves.

Although songs like “King of Hearts,” a pummeling Eurodance stomper, or “Castle in the Sky,” another pummeling Eurodance stomper, might allude to urgency in their lyrics and music, they still feel totally anemic and bereft of passion.

Sometimes the single versions here are superior to the album edits, 12-inch mixes, and other edits, but not always. It is also possible to imagine a more nuanced and inventively sequenced gloss of Pet Shop Boys’ career than this chronological survey. But there is particular value to this nerdy historicism.

Each song is a carefully constructed miniature, and the album itself is endearingly small-scale too—a record where life lessons aren’t preached, just lived.

The Omnichord Real Book is no less assertive, yet feels energized by grace and understanding.

The result is an album that is too vague to have much depth and too absorbed in real-life drama to have the feel-good vibes he wants to preserve.

While she has a reputation for making familiar songs sound utterly new, here she finds a way to make Bramblett’s songs tell her story, to let them speak for her. She rewrites his songs simply by singing them.

While exactingly played and produced, Speakers Corner Quartet’s songs don’t always push forward stylistically; a few tracks, like “Can We Do This?,” built around Sampha’s familiar coo, feel like songs you’ve heard many times before. But there are moments of breathtaking originality.

Here, Duffy is at their most instrumentally complex and collaboratively generous. The result of this free-for-all cooperation is Hand Habits’ most engrossing project yet.

On Guy, she takes time to steady herself to her inner metronome, finding her voice with her dad’s help.

With Work of Art, Asake understands that his winning formula needs no adjustments.

This is not an album of passages or movements or suites. It’s best understood and appreciated as a collection of songs, of which there are clear highlights.

The best songs on In Times New Roman… are hiding in the back half, resulting in an unusually lopsided experience.

Remotely self-recorded and produced across various Pittsburgh apartments, its 11 songs are oddball bursts of imagination, whimsy, and discord.

At its very best, Paranoïa, Angels, True Love captures this feverish lightning-in-a-bottle energy. But where Kushner’s many moving parts lock into place, spurring each other on toward a harrowing, rapturous climax, the songs of Chris’s album never quite cohere.

Even though many of the characters are heartbroken or wracked with anxiety, Williamson navigates modern life using timeless tropes that lend Time Ain’t Accidental an immense, gratifying confidence.

Joy’All has an amiable listlessness: It’s loveable, but I wish there was more to love.

Animals is a provocative proposition with flashes of inspired bricolage, by a likable veteran muso, but for something so fussed over, it’s a little half-baked.

The old anxiety and morbid fascination remain, but Powers has never sounded so confident, so at peace within himself.

Jarak Qaribak is a rich, fascinating case of music both carrying history and shaping the future, redrawing the limits of the possible in specific, limited, yet meaningful ways.

Though NV is credited with handling the majority of the album’s production (Deradoorian, in turn, is the record’s principal lyricist), she keeps a loose grip behind the boards, allowing some of Deradoorian’s psychedelic krautrock inclinations to slip through. The results are mixed. .... But Deradoorian shines as a lyricist.

Her themes of desire and fuckery are vivid and emotionally complex.

His songs have always felt close to home, charcoal-smeared with London dusk and the nocturnal cadence of London jazz. On Space Heavy, for the first time, the great London singer-songwriter’s ambitions feel accordingly local, too.

O Monolith raises bigger, more eternal questions about humanity’s relationship to nature, and Squid’s music becomes more open-ended while wrestling with them. This weaving quality means the music is unpredictable and often exhilarating, but the message is blurrier.

The Age of Pleasure isn’t as intricate as their sci-fi novellas or as electrifyingly innovative as The ArchAndroid. It’s a bacchanal in the haven Monáe constructed for themself, cobblestone by cobblestone, tree by tree.

Weathervanes’ unsettled moments wind up making the sun-bleached vibe of the rest of the album feel earned.

Zango is rooted in classic Zamrock, and it builds on the inherent malleability of the genre’s sound.

Revisiting Come on Feel the Lemonheads can be revelatory in spite of its unevenness. .... As with the reissues of Lovey and It’s a Shame About Ray, the deluxe version offers demos and outtakes that justify a physical reissue in 2023 and not much else.

Folkocracy is a fun listen.

Alex Leonard’s rumbling drums back Scott Davidson and Greg Ahee’s ominous simmer, but all the heft falls away for a few overwhelming melodic tones—bursts of light through the darkness. Casey doesn’t always sound particularly convinced, but Formal Growth feels like an earnest attempt to get there.

Despite their detailed imagery and alluring melodies, the songs on Roach are ultimately less complex than Folick’s earlier work.

It lacks the razor-sharp focus that made Just Cause Ya’ll Waited 2, a brutal and affecting listen. Durk’s presence is strong and his endurance is inspiring, but his intentions are as muddied as ever.

Muddy mixing can’t entirely sink her compositions—lead single “Days Move Slow” is among the best rock songs of the year—but several other tracks take on water. It’s heart-wrenching to imagine how much better these songs would be, how much more worthy of showcasing Bognanno’s maturation as an artist, had she presided solely over production.

The most impressive thing about the album is how death is gracefully absorbed into this long-running franchise to reinvigorate the band.

Bunny is not as uptempo and optimistic as the punk-adjacent guitar pop that put them on the map; instead it basks in its afterglow, as if spending the morning in bed after a long night out.

At 40 minutes, Walk Around the Moon is a brisk reverie—and their shortest album ever. That cutoff means their zesty solos are shorter and moments of all-in instrumentation are subtler. When they do go for it, Dave Matthews Band might be having too much fun.

Her storytelling is masterful, filled with earnest lyricism and a knack for arresting imagery.

Despite the vexations Rutili espouses here, these are some of the warmest and most welcoming songs in Califone’s lengthy catalog, postcards meant to lure new visitors to an old landmark.

The few deviations from the dreamy production are hit and miss.

Sus Dog is warm and immediately gratifying, offering the musician’s fragile falsetto as a graceful counterpoint to his intricate and sometimes breakneck production.

At its best, the music of Romantic Piano approaches the promise of that sentiment, speaking the feelings that words cannot.

If The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte reaffirms Sparks’ status as rock’s most reliable fabulists, the album’s grand finale brings forth an uncharacteristic introspection.