Mr. Matthews has decided he’s not going to be the grumpy old man he sings about in Come Tomorrow, but he doesn’t sugarcoat things either; each song notes the fears and sorrows it’s determined to overcome. The music does that, with consolation in its melodies and a life force in its rhythms.

While Mr. West’s previous releases have made musical leaps, Ye often comes across as a recap.

Daytona may stand alone in this moment--particularly in contrast to the woozy, blown-out rap albums dominating the charts because of the primacy of streaming--but it isn’t as effective as “My Name Is My Name,” Pusha-T’s 2013 full-length solo debut album. Daytona is terser, leaving only nits to pick; say, that the second and third verses of “Come Back Baby” lack the fire and wit of the rest of the album.

In her new songs, she sets aside her sly character studies and minutely observed details for direct declarations and confrontations. They’re underlined by music that expands on all of her guitar-band idioms: growing punkier, more psychedelic, dronier and noisier as the songs demand.

[Swae Lee's] “Swaecation” is the most liquid, the most soft-focus of the three. (The duo album is a close second.) At times verges on the quiet-storm R&B of the early 1980s, though he is far more flexible with tempos than Post Malone, and sometimes veers toward ecstatic 1980s synth-pop. By contrast, Slim Jxmmi’s solo album, “Jxmtro,” is a more conventional contemporary hip-hop album, buoyant and loose. Sr3mm is long, but listening to it in one sitting, on its own, from top to bottom, is not how it’s truly designed to be engaged with.

There are occasional intrusions of other ideas, like the agonized rock on “Over Now,” and when far more formalist artists like Nicki Minaj or G-Eazy arrive, they sound like teachers trying to enforce order in detention. But in total, Beerbongs & Bentleys is admirably committed to form, one long song of the decontextualized now.

This is an album that takes familiar hip-hop starting points and denatures them, resulting in a compelling collage that feels structurally untethered to hip-hop then or now. The results alternate between tragic and comic, but the ambition is steadily high throughout.

While at 71 his voice is gruffer and scratchier than ever, the album is unapologetic about it; vocals are recorded close-up over sparse arrangements, with melodies that relax into cozy countryish territory and sometimes stray toward speech. Mr. Prine’s songs, as they have since his 1971 debut album, can sound both carefully chiseled and playfully off-the-cuff.

“Tween,” a 2016 collection of eight outtakes recorded from 2011-14, revealed paths the band had rejected for “Shriek,” with songs that enfolded electronics in broad strokes of guitar. Now, with “The Louder I Call, the Faster It Runs,” Wye Oak extends that approach to make it nimbler, more intricate and welcoming. There are joyful and sometimes rowdy sonic crosscurrents, even as the lyrics determinedly think things through.

What’s most promising about the exuberant and impressive Invasion of Privacy--an album full of thoughtful gestures, few of them wasteful--is that it’s a catalog of directions Cardi, 25, might go in, slots she might fill, or even invent. ... A hip-hop album that doesn’t sound like any of its temporal peers.

He finds magic in the absurd and the minute. It is a style almost impossible to emulate. That it sounds natural over Dan the Automator’s production is a real feat.

As Mr. Hutchings spreads his wings, he is presenting an opportunity for listeners to fall in love with a sound that’s got the timeless assets of jazz--rebellion, collectivity, emotive abstraction--but doesn’t feel weighed down by its own past.

They deliver their apprehensions as gently as they can, turning reckonings into reveries.

Time & Space is its outstanding second album, just over 25 minutes long, and an urgent, clear and bruising statement of purpose.

A coherent album that juggles multiple missions. ... Black Panther the Album is very nearly as densely packed--with ideas, allusions and ambitions--as one of Mr. Lamar’s official solo albums.

Encore, his second major-label album, is an often lustrous revisiting of raucous Southern soul, rousingly delivered and pinpoint precise. He has a voice full of extremely careful scrape and crunch, but his howls never feel unhinged.

It’s not an album that courts new fans by radically changing U2’s style; instead, it reaffirms the sound that has been filling arenas and stadiums for decades.

Soul of a Woman is a final set of genre-perfect old-school soul: brisk rumba-soul in “Sail On,” hand-clapping neo-Motown in “Rumors,” a girl-group slow dance topped with hovering strings in “When I Saw Your Face.” The band sounds as if it’s playing live in the studio.

It is also Ms. Swift chasing that good feeling, pushing back against a decade of following her own instincts. And it works. Reputation is fundamentally unlike any of her other albums in that it takes into account — prioritizes, actually — the tempo and tone of her competition. Reputation is a public renegotiation, engaging pop music on its terms, not hers.

Throughout this album, there are melodies, chord changes, lyrical images and structural tricks that feel indebted to Ms. Swift’s first three albums. Even the way Ms. Ballerini lingers over certain vowels suggests the shadow of Ms. Swift. In order to fully come into her own, though, Ms. Ballerini needs to shake free of that as effectively as she brushes off country music’s simpleton men.

Pacific Daydream is both exuberant and plaintive; it’s full of songs about past joys and present loneliness, recalling friends and lovers who are no longer part of the singer’s life. ... But there’s a whole pop apparatus around him--a tambourine shaking, a firm beat, happy backup voices--to insist that Weezer’s kind of music is far from extinct.

Masseduction stays poised between passion and artifice, trusting listeners to decrypt its paradoxes.

The songs are intricately plotted to give the illusion of being impulsive and obsessive, buffeted by shifting emotions: by turns sensual and wary, vulnerable and guarded, leisurely and urgent.

Now, on its fourth album, the band is moving toward an idiom that’s more flexible and contrasty yet just as gripping: Protomartyr’s own post-post-punk.

Mr. Grohl and Foo Fighters wear their influences so openly--Pink Floyd in “Concrete and Gold,” Led Zeppelin in “Make It Right,” the Beatles all over the album--that they still come across as earnest, proficient journeymen, disciples rather than trailblazers.

The National’s 2013 album, “Trouble Will Find Me,” was a culmination of sorts: accomplished, polished, measured, mature. Sleep Well Beast is just as polished and even more intricate. But it also shakes things up.

The new self-titled Fifth Harmony album is potent and overflowing with sugary pleasures, full of military-grade pop production and laser-targeted singing.

The band pushes its music further both inward and outward, toward the cryptic and toward the voluptuous. Its secrets and misgivings are gorgeously wrapped.