While it may not be his most immediately affecting album (that remains “Yesterday You Said Tomorrow,” from 2010), it offers the kind of slow-burning immersion that most of his recent records have only gestured at.

The best songs on “Hero” were disarmingly detailed, and sometimes funny. “Girl,” however, tips away from those strengths in favor of self-help bromides broad enough to exclude no one.

Although the album is punctuated by spoken-word interludes--bits of poetry, self-help, comedy and tribute--it is designed to flow as a whole, gradually infusing a room like incense or the smells of home cooking. ... And Solange’s voice is sure-footed and playful, confident that the music will follow her every whim. ... Outside a few prominent guest raps, Solange and her musicians slip the collaborators into the background. This is her space, her sanctuary.

Gunna has a penchant for rapping over beats that include guitar, like on “Richard Millie Plain,” but he doesn’t use them for rock scabrousness. Instead, they’re caressing, soft-edged beds, elegant accompaniment for a rapper who makes his points with textures more than words. That said, there is a tenderness that peeks through here, not just in the gentleness of the sing-rapping, but also in some of the lyrics.

On This Land, his third major-label studio album, his songwriting has caught up with his playing. ... It has something to do with the power of contrariness: that is, Clark’s determination to deliver the raw, analog, spontaneous opposite of crisply quantized digital content. And it has a lot to do with America in 2019, where division, frustration and seething anger can use an outlet with the historical resonance and emotional depth of the blues.

Thank U, Next has some hiccups but is still her most musically flexible and au courant release to date. ... The [Max] Martin songs are crisp, as always ... [But] It’s in the other songs [not produced by Martin], however, that Grande takes her most intriguing leaps, largely because of the new fluidity she brings to her singing.

[Clementine Creevy] sounds less guarded and more direct than ever, owning up to confusion and insecurity even as her guitar riffs counterattack. ... Creevy’s voice is high and thin but determined, and bolstered by the studio; her melodies take unexpected, angular leaps, while her guitar parts underline her solitude or blast it away.

Listening to the album as a whole, there are diminishing returns from the certainty that a new gimmick is coming every eight bars. Pop songs live by their hooks; it’s no wonder that Merton’s debut album piles them on, eager to please. But for the follow-up, suspense and spontaneity--even if it’s an illusion--would go a long way.

Like the rest of Blake’s albums, Assume Form opens into haunted, rewarding depths. All that’s missing is one luminous, fully focused pop chorus, like “Retrograde” on Blake’s 2013 “Overgrown” or “My Willing Heart” on his 2016 “The Colour in Anything.”

The music is rich with low end, serving as ballast for ethereal, sometimes claustrophobic synths. There’s little breathing room on these songs--both Bad Bunny and his music seep into all the available space.

Refreshingly, Christmas Is Here! is the least antic of its holiday albums, with a patient “Where Are You Christmas?” and non-asphyxiating moments of expanding the holiday canon, including a cover of the Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather.” ... It’s jolting when more lustrous, nuanced singers arrive for duets--Maren Morris on “When You Believe” and, most strikingly, Kelly Clarkson, warm and robust on “Grown-Up Christmas List.” But they are a temporary dam: The Casio-preset vocals are an unstoppable torrent, and these eerie, plastic songs may well make Pentatonix the Mannheim Steamroller of the 2030s, the 2050s, maybe even the 2110s.

Could we not? Signed, the Grinch.

Skins barely leaves a mark. The ideas aren’t original. The record is short--clocking it in at just 20 minutes--but feels extremely threadbare. ... The songs on Skins are shards, sketches. Even calling them demos feels generous.

The beginning of Hey! Merry Christmas!--the first holiday album by the country music interrogators the Mavericks--strolls along at a friendly pace, their original songs touching on Western swing, 1950s rock, traditional country and more. But midway through comes a bawdy new cabaret-esque number, “Santa Wants to Take You for a Ride,” that feels less like an apostate take on holiday good will and more like a lost Blowfly original.

JD McPherson is a vivid reinterpreter of the strutting rock ’n’ roll of the 1950s. His holiday album, Socks, is a collection of original songs with startlingly original conceits.

Moments of surprise pepper John Legend’s austere first holiday album, A Legendary Christmas. There are the savvy song choices, including rarities like Marvin Gaye’s pulpy “Purple Snowflakes.”

Rodney Crowell’s Christmas Everywhere is good-natured and wry, an album about how adults struggle to process a holiday oriented toward children. ... Throughout most of this album, Crowell is having fun--singing with arched eyebrow and tongue firmly in cheek.

This set of modestly scaled blues remakings of classics finds dignity in the downtrodden.

Energetic but scattered.

Cara offers up her own candid gawkiness in tidily constructed pop, and even her near-misses are endearing.

While the songs face sorrows, they don’t capitulate to them. They place sadness alongside love and perseverance, the experiences of a long adult life; they savor consolations.

Millennials could use a band that can play instruments in real time, that exults in musical possibilities, that wants to make both a ruckus and a difference. On its debut album, Greta Van Fleet isn’t that band.

The result is a tangled portrait of anxieties, one that adheres to its own standards of beauty, taking no particular tradition for granted.

YSIV--the conclusion of his Young Sinatra series of mixtapes--is his most confident and accomplished release to date, shaking off some of the awkwardness that has long peppered his music.

What’s most notable is how relatively natural and at ease Bhad Bhabie, the nonprofessional of the pair, sounds as compared with Ms. Cyrus. ... On the entertaining if erratic 15, Bhad Bhabie raps like someone who is learning to rap in real time, which to be fair, she is. ... Even though she deviates from her trash-talk flow on a couple of occasions--the faux-Young Thug melodies of “Trust Me” and “No More Love”--Bhad Bhabie otherwise has a honed sense of self-presentation.

Excess was always a part of his proposition, but this album drags and seeps, with long stretches of shrug in between moments of invention.

While the session is informal--he sniffles now and then, and at times something rattles in the piano--the performance is not sloppy for a moment. The one-take, real-time vocals are exquisite. .. He shifts musical styles and vocal personae at whim--melancholy, playful, devout, flirtatious--yet it’s all Prince. ... It’s a glimpse of a notoriously private artist doing his mysterious work.

What she wants to say on Room 25 is complex: thoughts on community, sensuality, mortality and self-determination. ... Noname is a full-fledged maverick, but not an abrasive one. Phoelix’s production situates her in leisurely, atmospheric R&B, and there’s almost always the hint of a smile in her voice. But no one should mistake her soft, playful tone for submissiveness.