On “Lives Outgrown,” Gibbons has matured without becoming complacent.

It’s an album of nonstop ear candy.

It’s the odder, genre-fluid songs that give the album its depth. .... Beyoncé has been a stalwart of the full-length album, sequencing and juxtaposing songs in synergistic ways. But “Cowboy Carter” is a bumpier ride than “Renaissance,” “Lemonade” or “Beyoncé.” It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere.

“Deeper Well” is committed to understatement. It rarely flaunts its 21st-century sonic resources, and when it does, it stays humble about them. .... But the track’s [“Sway”] last 30 seconds flaunt technology with multiple a cappella Musgraves vocals: low, high, reverberating, sustained, wordless or intoning “I’ll sway.” It sounds reverent and meditative, computerized yet still human, revealing — only by contrast — how carefully restrained the album is.

Unsurprisingly, this is one of Grande’s most meticulously crafted and texturally consistent releases — it sounds as expensive as the gleaming treasures she sang about on “7 Rings” — though it lacks the whispered asides, rough edges and irreverent humor that made those last two albums so fun. Still, “Eternal Sunshine” is awash in lavish atmosphere, adventurous melodies and an emotional weight that brings a new sophistication to Grande’s songcraft.

An album that sums up and expands what Usher does best. .... Throughout the album, Usher cruises through the musical and dramatic challenges that he has set for himself.

With its new LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It’s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations. .... They’re not about hooks or choruses. Melodies recur while arrangements change radically around them; songs suddenly leap into entirely new territory. .... Throughout the album, the Smile’s music feels molten and improvisatory, though it’s clearly premeditated.

“Saviors,” Green Day’s new album, is a decisive, even overdetermined return to form.

It’s an album of breezy confidence and sly ingenuity, easily moving among futuristic electronics, 1990s nostalgia and Latin roots. .... Lavishly layered vocals nestle among glimmering electronic sounds and programmed beats, and on “Orquídeas,” her voice sounds completely untethered by gravity.

The finished track simplifies Lennon’s emotional give-and-take; it edits out his misgivings about himself. .... As in many Beatles songs, “Now and Then” has an unexpected closing flourish: a decisive, syncopated string phrase. And low in the mix, after a final shake of a tambourine, a voice says, “Good one!” Like the other posthumous Beatles tracks, “Now and Then” leans into nostalgia. Its existence matters more than its quality.

In the new songs, he works his way through familiar topics: wealth, parties, sex, fame, autonomy. And even in well-trodden sonic territory, he can create arresting songs. .... But as the album ticks and hums along, the songs that linger are the ones that break away from standard Latin trap.

With a voice that often sounds like it’s on the verge of tears, she brings flickers of vibrato, jazzy curlicues, grainy inflections and subtle pauses and accelerations to her phrasing. It’s not modesty at all — it’s precision, and it has been ever more sharply honed.

Cheeky, idiosyncratic and sometimes great.

“Black Rainbows” is one songwriter’s leap into artistic freedom, unconcerned with genre expectations or radio formats. It’s also one more sign that songwriters are strongest when they heed instincts rather than expectations.

Poignantly fraught, spiritually and sonically agitated. .... Her self-doubt is a powerful animating force. Throughout this album, she kiln-fires her anxieties into lyrics that cut deep. .... Here [on "Teenage Dream"], and in the most potent moments on “Guts,” Rodrigo’s music pulses with the verve of someone who’s been buttoned tight beginning to come loose. Unraveling is messy business, but it is also freedom.

It is just as electrifying as the group’s first two LPs, but with a wider sonic horizon and more parts in motion. And there’s a triumphant streak running through it that only heightens the pain of Branch’s demise.

It reaffirms what she’s been doing right; it also claims new possibilities.

“But Here We Are” has a back-to-basics immediacy and intensity that was missing from the last few Foo Fighters albums.

The band’s founding rhythm section — Carter Beauford on drums and Stefan Lessard on bass — still keeps the songs nimble, no matter how burdened Matthews’s thoughts can become.

“Seven Psalms” stays true to Simon’s own instincts: observant, elliptical, perpetually questioning and quietly encompassing. ... It has places of lingering contemplation and it has sudden, startling changes; its informality is exactingly planned.

They’re sturdy songs, even as Sheeran sings about fragile emotions. ... Obviously, Sheeran doesn’t worry about verbal clichés — though in these songs, the sorrowful tone makes them sound more unguarded than banal.

“Multitudes” is Feist’s sixth studio album, and it embraces both delicacy and impact. It’s at once her most intimate-sounding and her most ambitious set of songs.

The years between boygenius recordings have made all three songwriters more confident and more levelheaded.

Del Rey, at her best, has a finger not just on the pulse, but somewhere beneath the flesh. And she is occasionally at her best here. “Ocean Blvd” is Del Rey’s strongest and most daring album since “Rockwell,” though it’s also marked by uneven pacing and occasional overindulgence.

Throughout the album, Algiers lashes out at injustice, exults in its sonic mastery and insists on the life forces of solidarity and physical impact. But it refuses to promise any consolation.

With 23 songs, “SOS” arrives as a long, nuanced argument SZA is having with her companions and with herself. ... The songs leap from personal beefs to universal quandaries, while SZA challenges herself as both musician and persona.

Every so often, this imperative to speak big-tent truths can become strained and make her lyrics frustratingly vague, as on “Children of the Empire” (“we tend to live long, that’s why so many things go wrong”), but that song’s gorgeous vocal melody and Mering’s impassioned performance lift it beyond its limitations.

With a few takes of each song, the session tracks hint at how intuitively the Beatles worked. ... The new mixes on the expanded “Revolver,” made with current technology and 21st-century ears, are a pleasure; they have more transparency and a more three-dimensional sense of space than the 1966 mixes. ... The new set insists that the clearer it’s heard, the odder it is. “Revolver” still holds surprises.

A mournful, contemplative album. ... Eno sings slow, chantlike phrases, and his lyrics favor open vowels rather than crisp consonants. His productions — with the guitarist Leo Abrahams often credited as “post-producer” — open up vast perceived spaces in every track, as if he’s already staring into the void.

“Fossora” doesn’t aim to be a crowd-pleaser. It’s hard to imagine these studio phantasms onstage (though Björk may well find a way). But Björk’s interior worlds are vast.

“Hold the Girl” continues to mine deep material — “Imagining” addresses a mental health crisis; the opener, “Minor Feelings,” takes its title from a Cathy Park Hong essay collection — but the protruding eccentricities that once made Sawayama’s music so distinct often sound sanded down. ... There is, however, a bold and satisfyingly angry stretch across the middle of the album with some of its strongest material.

For all the fun Sylvan Esso was clearly having in the studio, the music also reflects just how unstable the 2020s feel. All the whizzing, zinging, twinkling, morphing sounds promise there are ways to cope with what’s coming at us.

Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. ... Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable.

Humanity isn’t exactly humane in the songs on “Hellfire,” the caustic, exhilarating third album — a masterpiece — by the English band black midi. Each song on “Hellfire” is a whirlwind of virtuosity and structure, an idiom-hopping decathlon of meter shifts, barbed harmonies and arrangements that can veer anywhere at any moment.

The music draws pleasure from every strategic detail: from the weave of sampled and echoing backup vocals in “Different Size,” from the percussive syllables that break up the title and refrain of “Kilometre,” from reversed guitar tones and distant reggae horns in “Jagele,” from the saxophone curlicues that answer his voice in “Common Person.”

Throughout the album, Soccer Mommy staves off despair with musical craftsmanship.

A small marvel of bodily exuberance — appealingly weightless, escapist and zealously free. An album of entrancing club music, it’s a pointed evolution toward a new era for one of music’s most influential stars. It is also a Drake album made up almost wholly of the parts of Drake albums that send hip-hop purists into conniptions.

Nothing goes unmixed in Strange’s songs. His productions metamorphose as they unfold, restlessly shifting among idioms; his lyrics refuse easy comforts.

Astute and piercing.

Some of Post Malone’s brightest sounds to date: “Wrapped Around Your Finger” has 1950s sweetness and 1980s syntheticness, and “I Cannot Be (a Sadder Song)” has a bubbly undertow that recalls some of the squeakiest K-pop. “One Right Now,” with the Weeknd, is more zippy dyspepsia. But even the chirpy moments don’t detract from the album’s tonal consistency.

Superb. ... “Big Time” (which she recorded in Topanga, Calif., with the producer Jonathan Wilson) is charged with a continuous current of weighty, transformative and bracingly cleareyed emotion.

On “Cruel Country” Wilco offers no grand lesson or master plan, only observations, feelings and enigmas. Many of the album’s best moments are wordless ones.

“Blue Water Road” instead radiates delicate warmth. In a creamy, full-throated voice, Kehlani exudes a tenderness not felt since their 2017 studio album, “SweetSexySavage.” ... But it’s Kehlani’s candid ruminations on queer desire and estrangement that resonate the deepest here.

[“Livin’ for the Ones”] draws a life force from mourning, countering petty impulses toward lethargy or self-pity with the blunt recognition of so many lives lost. ... Another kind of solace after death arrives in the quietly poignant title track of “Just Like That…”. ... The rest of the album features Raitt’s more typical fare: songs about love lost and found, about getting together or drifting apart.

“Warm Chris” is an offbeat, infectious and ultimately liberating invitation to stop making sense.

The new album presents Hval at her most approachable, with upbeat tunes and consonant sounds, both acoustic and electronic.

Throughout “Ants From Up Here,” and through the course of every song, Black Country, New Road tests and reinvents itself, creating music that sounds both intricately plotted and precarious.

She’s constantly observing and interrogating herself. Her melodies are long-breathed and deliberate, sung with calm determination, while the arrangements, largely constructed by Mitski and her longtime producer Patrick Hyland, veer between austere, exposed meditations and perky, danceable propulsion.

Another collection of all originals, it is just as unrelenting as “Omega.”

While the lyrics are convoluted, the music simply charges ahead. Like so many pandemic albums, “The Boy Named If” was pieced together remotely. ... Yet the Imposters sound gleefully, brutally unified, every bit as bristling as the Attractions on “This Year’s Model” or the Imposters on “When I Was Cruel” in 2002.

“Dawn FM,” his fifth major-label album, is sleek and vigorous and also, again, a light reimagining of what big-tent music might sound like now, in an era when most global stars have abandoned the concept.

The “Unlocked” songs sound like public performances, neat and armored and solidly 4/4, more locked than unlocked. The “Originals” hint at freer, messier, closer, unresolved feelings, daringly unguarded — and thoroughly, openly human.

Even as she sings about desperation and uncertainty, on “30” Adele’s voice is more supple and purposeful than ever, articulating every consonant and constantly ornamenting her melodies without distracting from them. Details are fastidious.

[Mars and Paak] flaunt skill, effort and scholarship, like teacher’s pets winning a science-fair prize; they also sound like they’re having a great time. Silk Sonic comes across as a continuation for Mars and a playfully affectionate tangent for Paak.

“Valentine,” her remarkable second album as Snail Mail, is alive with such crackling and revelatory emotion.

This layered approach makes PinkPantheress’s debut album, the warmly ecstatic and cheekily gloomy “To Hell With It,” so striking. It’s short, controlled and lived-in. ... On some new songs, though, like “Reason” and “All My Friends Know,” the balance is slightly off: She sounds more firmly embedded in the music, not quite riding atop it.

“In These Silent Days” consolidates Carlile’s strengths: musical, writerly, maternal, political.

The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through the contours of trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but even prohibitive genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.

Lil Nas X has little interest in deconstructing the conventional structures of a pop song or the traditional narrative arc of an album: He clearly wants these songs of queer yearning to be legible to the mainstream. Working mostly with the production duo Take A Daytrip — who favor melodic hooks and bright, flashy sounds — “Montero” funnels the more fluid and outré aesthetics of SoundCloud rap into familiar pop-musical shapes.

She never appears to be singing to convince you — her voice, which is modest in scale but deadly precise, connotes the power of malaise and exhaustion. It is regret embodied.

Even when Halsey returns to first-person through most of the album, their lyrics are less confessional, more general, as if they have stepped back from immediate conflicts.

Every song on “Solar Power” pulls from a similar and finely curated aesthetic — early 2000s “CW”-theme-song pop; sun-drenched ’70s folk; just a pinch of Kabbalah-era Madonna — and rarely draws outside those lines, let alone picks up differently hued crayons. ... “Solar Power” stops just short of offering a full, varied range of expressions.

During its slower stretches, “Happier Than Ever” languishes. ... The risks start to pay off, though, on the album’s strong closing stretch, beginning as the warping “NDA” segues into the brash posturing of “Therefore I Am,” one of several lukewarm singles that benefits from the surrounding context of the album. ... Eilish remains an inveterate rebel. “Happier Than Ever,” though, exposes both the strengths and the limitations of her preferred mode of subversion.

“Welcome 2 America” balances hard insights with visceral joys.

Gold-Diggers Sound” — named after the Los Angeles studio where the album was made — is more confidently single-minded [than his previous albums].

At times, “Sling” sounds like Steely Dan’s “Pretzel Logic” had it been released on the D.I.Y. label K Records. ... “Sling” makes the case that her most direct vocal precursor is either Elliott Smith or Phil Elverum. ... There was always more depth to Clairo’s sadness and songcraft than could be conveyed by the three-minute synth-pop ditty that made her famous. It also demonstrates that her music is at its most lucid and effective when an extended hand — or paw — is drawing her back up to the surface.

A tauntingly good hip-hop album, or a rewiring of pop DNA: “Call Me if You Get Lost” has it both ways. ... Intersections of cocksureness and anxiety are this album at its best. (Fittingly, the title “Call Me if You Get Lost” reads either as a statement of generosity or a plea, depending on your lens.) Songs like the less emotionally ambiguous “Sweet / I Thought You Wanted to Dance” are generally less impactful — Tyler thrives on discord.

On Bachelor’s album, “Doomin’ Sun,” Kempner and Duterte brought out the best in each other. ... There’s nostalgic comfort in the ways Bachelor looks back to 1990s rock, and Duterte and Kempner project a heartwarming unity.

Nuanced and often exceptional debut album. ... Songwriting flourish is emblematic of what Rodrigo has learned from Taylor Swift on this album (which, in shorthand, is Swift’s debut refracted through “Red”): nailing the precise language for an imprecise, complex emotional situation; and working through private stories in public fashion.

On the robust and vividly plain-spoken “Blood Bunny,” Moriondo, now 18, is a pop-punk whiz, deftly hopping between musical approaches from spare to lushly produced, and emphasizing intimate, cut-to-the-bone lyrics.

Ulven’s vocals are rendered dreamily, almost inspirationally, over guitars that slash and throb in the manner of loud 1990s indie rock. Her boldness and defiance is taking on new shades.

Not until the latter half of the album does the orchestra fully come alive, with a rich and immersive passage on Track 6 — sometimes regal, sometimes bluesy — that almost eclipses the motif, but not quite. And then there is Sanders’s tenor saxophone, a glistening and peaceful sound, deployed mindfully throughout the album. He shows little of the throttling power that used to come bursting so naturally from his horn, but every note seems carefully selected.

At best, Del Rey’s hyper-referential music convincingly recreates the particular feeling of encountering art in a postmodern age, when the past is so cluttered with worthwhile cultural artifacts that everything new reminds one, at least a little bit, of something old. But as she dances on that fine line between evoking and signifying, Del Rey sometimes risks outsourcing her profundity to things other artists have said more vividly before. Such is the gamble of ending an album with a Joni Mitchell cover — though here that’s a risk Del Rey pulls off.

Magnificent. ... Although she played all the instruments on “Little Oblivions” herself, she built out most of its arrangements so they could be performed with a full band onstage. This choice brings a new, sweeping dynamism to Baker’s music, and keeps “Little Oblivions” from feeling sonically repetitive.

“Flowers for Vases/Descansos” has a narrower, quieter palette, though Williams easily handles guitars, keyboards and drums on her own... The songs on “Flowers for Vases/Descansos” are finely polished: every vocal phrase, guitar tone, piano note and studio effect has been thought through by Williams and her engineer and producer, Daniel James.

As on Parks’s EPs, the music on her album is restrained but far from austere. She coos the melodies over low-slung hip-hop beats and guitars that can tangle like indie-rock or syncopate like funk. ... Meanwhile, her vocals arrive in layers of unison and harmony and from all directions in the mix, conjuring both solidarity and spaciousness. Her music inhabits a private sphere, but not an isolated one.

“Palberta5000,” the first album it recorded with the producer Matt Labozza, has a newfound lucidity and oomph without sounding over-rehearsed, likely because the band recorded it in just four days and never attempted more than three takes for each song.

Amid the dozens of songs on “Dangerous,” there’s ample room for variety. Wallen offers fingerpicking and soft-rock country with “Somebody’s Problem” and “7 Summers,” intricately layered Eagles-style country-rock with “More Surprised Than Me” and “Your Bartender,” a Southern-rock stomp with “Beer Don’t.” ... A stretch of songs during the album’s second half, with titles like “Rednecks, Red Letters, Red Dirt,” “Somethin’ Country” and “Whatcha Think of Country Now,” grow heavy-handed. But every so often, he allows for other possibilities.

Spoken-word “tales” from six women — confessions and hard-earned observations — are followed by songs that flesh them out as character studies. (Although the spoken-word tracks get some accompaniment from electronic beats and gospel organ, the songs alone stand up far better to repeated listening.)

The sonic details of “Evermore” are radiant and meticulous; the songwriting is poised and careful. It’s an album to respect. But with all its constructions and conceits, it also keeps a certain emotional distance.

“Plastic Hearts” is not a trendy rebranding of Cyrus so much as a convincing argument that she’s always been something of an old soul.

“Good News” proves Megan’s prodigious talent, but it also suggests that, with a bit more digging, this gem could emit an even more prismatic shine.

“Positions” isn’t quite the reinvention that “Thank U Next” was, but it continues Grande’s effort to make the mainstream pop album a looser, weirder and more conversational space. ... Many pop stars attempt to take their sound to the next level by making increasingly grand and bombastic big-tent statements. Grande has succeeded largely by doing just the opposite.

A thorough but imposing six hours of material, this collection is less about any specific unearthed gem than the larger transformation it charts.

The sound of “Love Goes” is sweeping and luxurious: intimacy blown up to cinematic scale. Each song feels elaborately hewed.

One of the geeky joys of “Wildflowers and All the Rest” is observing Petty at the absolute peak of his songwriting powers, making small, intelligent tweaks to these songs in progress. Sometimes it’s a single world, a few letters. ... The deep despair is there, too, in the rich soil of these songs. But what makes it bearable, and makes the record so timelessly listenable, is everything else that’s mixed in: humor, wisdom, a little randiness and a palpable sense of hope.

Many of the songs are strong, but they largely bolster the story Carey has long been telling. The more revealing document, however, might be the second disc of the release: “Live at the Tokyo Dome,” her first concert in Japan, recorded in 1996. This is Carey at the peak — one of the peaks, at least — of her vocal authority and pop fame.

“The Ascension” is single-minded, but far from simplistic. Most of Stevens’s new tracks are thickets of counterpoint, dissonance and noises that can be comic or ominous. And he never reduces his messages to preaching or polemic.

Some of the Vault tracks are early or alternate versions of familiar songs, but dozens are newly revealed. Prince’s original choices for the album hold up. But it’s a delight to hear so much more.

Keys reclaims most of her usual composure on “Alicia,” but it’s often tinged with ambivalence, even in love songs. The music often hollows itself out around her, opening deep bass chasms or surrounding sparse instrumentation with echoey voids.

Found sounds and out-of-context conversations are the band’s signatures. ... Sometimes it works (the sudden intrusion of bagpipes on “Persona Non Grata”); sometimes it’s all a bit too much and the songs feel excessively crowded. But many of the most powerful moments on this record are uncharacteristically straightforward.

If “RoundAgain” has anything notably in common with “MoodSwing,” it is the feeling of musicians with a scary level of talent playing into the moment, with full faith that they belong within a lineage.

The songs illuminate passion, impulsiveness, ambivalence and uncertainty, yet the structures La Havas created are lucid and poised. While matters of the heart may be out of control, her fingers and voice are impeccable.

[Tony] Allen’s drumming propels five of the album’s nine tracks, spattering syncopated accents, quick little snare-drum rolls and hissing cymbals all around the central beat — and constantly striking sparks. ... Coldcut’s presence is ubiquitous; it was the duo that put all the scattered pieces of Keleketla! together. But the thoroughly hybridized music makes clear that in Africa, Coldcut was ready to listen above all.

This newfound looseness and fluidity suits them. Best believe that Haim still has chops and a bar band’s encyclopedic knowledge of rock riffs, but on its third album it’s finally learned how to carry those things lightly enough to move with its own particular stride.

Strange and exquisitely moving. ... Bridgers’s lyrical talent was evident on her 2017 debut, “Stranger in the Alps,” which had a few perfect songs but as a whole sometimes felt muted, languid and downcast. “Punisher,” though, moves along fluidly with its eyes to the vast sky. Bridgers’s arpeggiated guitar work remains quietly deft.

Latter-day Bob Dylan is for die-hards. ... His music is adamantly old-fashioned, and he’s not aiming to ingratiate himself with anyone. But for those who have stuck with him this far, his new album, “Rough and Rowdy Ways,” is at once a summing-up and a taunt, equal parts death-haunted and cantankerous.

The arrangements on “MTV Unplugged” are occasionally overstuffed with stately “Eleanor Rigby” strings, but I prefer them to much of the studio material, since they’re airy enough to allow the unvarnished snarl of Gallagher’s voice to come through loud and clear. ... The crowd, and the record, comes alive most when Gallagher indulges in some old Oasis classics.