Ms. Grande backs up her statements with song-and-dance mastery. ... She’s her own choir, support group and posse. While a few guest vocalists (Mr. Williams, Nicki Minaj, Missy Elliott) provide a little grit for contrast, Ms. Grande sails above any fray, past or present. Her aplomb is her triumph.

Mitski’s songs about love are a tangle of mixed messages in precise, idiosyncratic packages. ... On this album, even more than she has before, Mitski makes the music her partner.

For Santigold’s music, I Don’t Want: the Gold Fire Sessions is more a consolidation--or a breather--than a leap forward. But that’s only because her previous albums have already encompassed so many idioms and ideas.

It revels in lushness, owning its smooth funk legacy and extending it to the present day.

Like YG’s songs, Buddy’s music is full of small homages to the Los Angeles sounds of yesteryear. But while YG is polishing one idea until it shines blindingly, Buddy is crossing generations, building new paths.

Hive Mind falls ever so slightly short of “Ego Death,” though it’s still superb. The songs are a little more generalized, less specific; the music feels just a little more deliberate, though it’s still full of surprises.

Lamp Lit Prose is his shiniest, airiest, even catchiest set of songs. The new record exchanges the jarring, glitchy electronic intrusions and arid trap percussion he used on “Dirty Projectors” for the springy guitar lines of older Dirty Projectors albums, bringing out their warmest tones.

For all the seriousness of the songs, Jupiter & Okwess make sure to keep the party going.

Scorpion is something safer and less ambitious, largely a reprocessing of old Drake ideas and moods. It is the first Drake album that’s not a definitive stylistic breakthrough, not a world-tour victory lap, not an embrace of new grievances. It is, largely, a reminder of Drakes past, and perhaps also an attempt at maintaining stability in the face of profound emotional disruption.

For this album, Mr. Albarn stays decisively in the foreground. His main collaborator here is the producer James Ford, from Simian Mobile Disco, and together they surround Mr. Albarn’s voice with subliminally nostalgic synthesizers: puffy, rounded, unaggressive tones that provide a cozy backdrop for Mr. Albarn’s morose reveries. ... In the mysterious chemistry of songwriting, the partnership with Mr. Hewlett’s visuals has been a reliable catalyst. Behind the cartoon mask, there’s freedom.

On Heaven and Earth there’s a balance between big-stroke conceptualism--the first CD, “Earth,” is meant to represent worldly preoccupations; the second, “Heaven,” explores utopian thought--and the workmanlike reality of collaboration. The two collections don’t vary significantly in terms of sound; instead, they’re a testament to the sturdy rapport of Mr. Washington’s ensemble.

With their new album as the Carters, Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Beyoncé are once again a united force, celebrating their success on every front: artistic, financial, marital, erotic, historic. ... This is more familiar, less vulnerable and less exploratory territory than the zones where Beyoncé and Jay-Z ventured on “Lemonade” and “4:44.”

Her extravagant vocal flourishes connect with sweeping emotion. ... The album’s seduction songs do their job. But its doleful ones leap out.

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.

Shawn Mendes is appealing if not wholly engaging, full of pleasantly anonymous songs that systematically obscure Mr. Mendes’s talents.

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.

KOD, his fifth album, has the feel of a casual placeholder between bigger ideas--it has neither the grim purpose or intense emotional acuity of his 2016 LP “4 Your Eyez Only,” nor the cohesion of the prior one, “2014 Forest Hills Drive,” the record that set the terms for his new direction.

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.