While The Highwomen may not quite live up to its individual members best work, the group and their various collaborators and guest stars all bring strong songs and enthusiasm to the project.
Technically proficient but emotionally shallow, Schlagenheim too often feels like feeding all mathcore and post-punk into a neural network and releasing the result.
Solange's abstract fourth album When I Get Home plays like a dream, but its logic is sound.
As an effort to create a world where Juicy Couture lockets are prized amulets and the Playboy mansion grotto is a historic mecca, Slayyyter is a highly successful, succinct debut.
In its compositional diversity and its thoughtful commentary on the troubles we face, Giants sounds like a perfect accompaniment to this troubled period in human history.
Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke's third solo album ANIMA offers relatively peppy music to accompany his unsurprisingly bleak lyrical worldview, but it all works rather wonderfully.
Yes, the album is impressive. But without much depth beyond its own self-absorption, it doesn't come on as strong as it thinks it does.
Blanck Mass' Animated Violence Mild drops unrelenting electro-industrial melodies, practicing excess to explore personal grief and the global devastation of consumerism.
With its personal perspectives on the effects of the current cultural zeitgeist, Cherry Glazerr's Stuffed & Ready is not simply a great rock record, but an important document in the early days of 2019.
Cate Le Bon's fifth album Reward offers treasures beyond the everyday realm.
Sleaford Mods' astonishing and deceptively subtle Eton Alive provides plenty of food for thought to counter the bread and circuses on offer during a time of political austerity.
Sampa the Great's The Return is both a willfully enigmatic and deeply revealing album. It serves as a dazzling celebration of her cultural and musical heritage that will resonate for years to come.
With Any Human Friend, British singer-songwriter Marika Hackman largely ditches her folk leanings and makes a sharp, emotionally resonant statement.
The most powerful tool at Mering's disposal is her voice, a rich, clear bell of a voice that pierces through the album's pianos and lethargic strings.
On All My Heroes Are Cornballs, experimental rapper and producer JPEGMAFIA broadens his visceral online image and sounds into a more vulnerable, humanizing, and melodic project.
The album includes a retro, vintage quality in its sonic range, sounding as though it was recorded decades ago and went unreleased to great loss ... It captures you immediately.
PROTO demonstrates that small data and machine learning can be used to evolve our practices of art, community, and tradition, using AI to enhance our most human practices.
The National's eighth album is not as easy to locate or to live with, as its title suggests, but it contains passages of sublime beauty and grace.
Keepsake contains nihilism and optimism at once. This tender, overwhelming pop music has a way of feeling like the soundtrack to the end of the world.
Lingua Ignota's second full-length CALIGULA continues her blend of opera, neoclassical darkwave, and death industrial. She transforms shattering lamentations into empowered declarations against misogyny, while also complicating the dominant narratives of women's trauma.
American Love Call takes Durand Jones and the Indications to new heights of musicianship, and it turns out that they are, indeed, much stronger the more they work together.