Even the best artists tend to sacrifice quality — or, at the very least, lose the mystique that comes with scarcity — when they dramatically accelerate their output. MIKE, on the other hand, seems to draw from a bottomlessly fascinating well of inspiration when he creates, taking his art to surprising places with each new release. At 24 tracks — 22 of them self-produced and none phoned in — Burning Desire is a multileveled maze, but its warmth transcends the inscrutability often implied by such density. The record’s hand-crafted ethos is most evident on songs like “plz don’t cut my wings,” a cut so purely MIKE that Earl Sweatshirt feels more like an extension of his host than his own entity on his guest verse, and “THEY DON’T STOP IN THE RAIN,” which he kicks off with a memory of forging on through storm clouds to finish a set at his Young World III festival this past summer. To take in the whole album in one sitting is to reckon with the full force of MIKE’s immeasurable skill — a gentle, quiet power that expands with every passing minute. — Raphael Helfand

Inside jokes riddle Samia’s sticky-sweet mess of a second album, ultra-personal anecdotes exploding into at-times-painfully relatable lyrical narratives. “Your mom keeps threatening suicide on holidays,” she sings on “Pink Balloon,” before expanding into the vagaries of friendship: “And whether it’s a fallacy / You sing of love persistently / Sometimes when you sing to me / I still believe I know you.” It’s the same on the title track, where Samia sings about wanting to be a mermaid as a way of saying she’s “not scared to be naked / I’m not scared of anything.” Samia’s specificity invites listeners to superimpose themselves into her world and identify the universal behind the personal. Honey’s sonic universe is as unusual as it is pleasing — a combination of waifish vocals, gritty garage-pop beat loops, dreamy synth pads catalyzed by Samia’s girl-next-door charm — and it’s always as raw as the album’s most screamable lyric: “I hope you marry the girl from your hometown / And I’ll fucking kill her, and I’ll fucking freak out.” Honey is Samia’s ultimate love letter to the awkward, a clashing embrace of optimism and reality, and, above all, a testament to the pleasure she takes in turning existential crises into really catchy music. — Lila Dubois

bar italia were reduced to a mosaic of references as they emerged from the London underground in 2023, compared lazily to almost every band from the Velvet Underground to Slowdive to Pulp, as if the whole project was some kind of ironic pastiche. But Tracey Denim, the first of two albums they released on the massive indie Matador this year, isn’t delivered from some icy remove; these are brooding, immediate, supple rock songs about disconnection and disappointment. Even on the first half of the record, where the mixes are more minimal and the melodies cooler, there’s a breadth to the songwriting, tracks like “punkt” bristling with post-punk anxiety before exhaling into the somnolent bliss of “my kiss era.” And on the back half, they really open up: “Friends” is a grin-inducing, fuzzed-out two-minute alt-rock song, while closer “maddington” is breathy, cinematic, and sweetly imperfect. Way more fun than a conversation about their forebears. — ARR

It takes conviction and clarity of vision to create a debut album as fully formed as Kara Jackson’s. For the singer-songwriter and former National Youth Poet Laureate from Chicago, adamance is her resting state, whether she’s swerving fuccbois, grieving the loss of a loved one, or protecting the safety of fans at her concerts. Why Does the Earth Give Us People to Love? is a record that practices and preaches without ever feeling practiced or preachy. Couched within its slyly sprawling compositions are perfect little jewels of metaphor. On “no fun/party,” Jackson wishes for a love “as tough as elephant tusk,” and on “pawnshop,” she laments a lover who left her feeling “permanent as a party balloon.” There’s not much joy to be found within Jackson’s forlorn blues, but she offers us the same gift as Fiona Apple famously did with her “This world is bullshit” speech. Everybody knows the pain of love and loss, of being had and not held, but few of us have the strength to turn those emotions into great art. By dipping her pen in her own blood, Jackson saves us the labor of doing the same. — Walden Green

Jim Legxacy understands that the resonant part of a genre is not the way something sounds but, rather, how the music makes you feel. Yes, HNPM incorporates elements of drill, Afrobeats, and Midwest emo, but it isn’t simply an eclectic playlist set to shuffle. The same yearning and vulnerability that is present on “candy reign (!),” an Afrobeats song complete with a gospel choir, is there on “old place,” where the story of Legxacy reuniting with an ex finds space between mathy guitars and Jersey club drums. “block hug,” meanwhile, undercuts the hard-boiled street narratives of drill by starting off with twinkly acoustics that would have you swearing he left Fleet Foxes running in the studio. The streaming era has ushered in a glut of genre-agnostic albums built to be dispersed into the playlist ecosystem. HNPM bucks the trend by presenting its wide-ranging sonic ambition as a whole, while remaining a consistent and revealing portrait of its creator. — David Renshaw

Gia Margaret’s career was forced off course almost as soon as it started. Having lost her voice touring her softly folky 2018 debut, There’s Always Glimmer, the Chicago singer-songwriter and classically trained pianist turned to her synthesizer as a form of therapy on her exploratory and almost entirely instrumental 2020 follow-up, Mia Gargaret. She keeps following that path on her third album, stripping her sound back even further, nodding to composer-pianists like the pre-minimalist Erik Satie and the uniquely virtuosic Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou. She goes further than the playfully plain album title suggests, drifting constantly between textures and tones, from the sedative “Hinoki Wood” through the throbbing drone that serves as a canvas on “Ways of Seeing” and the muffled heartbeat on the trip-hop-pop song “La langue de l’amitié.” The world Margaret builds with so few elements is so remarkably vivid that it makes the one moment when her voice does interject, on the perfectly restrained centerpiece “City Song,” all the more powerful. Romantic Piano is proof that, for great composers, the medium is not the message. — ARR

Asake’s Work Of Art is a polychromatic ode to his upward mobility and a new lease on life. Many would take a breather after a stunning debut like 2022’s Mr. Money with the Vibe, but on his quickfire 2023 sophomore album, the singer picks up where he left things and drastically ups the scales while attempting to situate his music in the same rarified air as high art. Much like MMWTV, Work Of Art plays frenetically, propelled by super-producer Magicsticks’s deft fusion of amapiano, rock, Fújì, and hip-hop. Taking inspiration from the work and life of Jean-Michel Basquiat, Work Of Art colorfully details Asake’s successes and the breakthroughs he has experienced in rich strokes. He explores his syncretic spiritual leanings on “Olorun'' and “Awodi,” and cathartically pulls back the layers on isolation as a consequence of fame on tracks like “Lonely At The Top” and “Yoga.” Still, Work Of Art is an album primarily crafted to get people in the spirit of a good time, and it still serves that purpose with a roll call of hits like “2:30,” “Basquiat,” and the Grammy Award-nominated “Amapiano.” By dexterously blending his deep spiritual reflections with party music, Asake reveals himself as the rare popstar keenly aware of every step in his journey and what it takes to reach his destination. — Wale Oloworekende

Nourished By Time is the moniker of Baltimore-born Marcus Brown, an artist adept at extracting elements from music’s past and creating something uniquely individual. Brown, a former Berklee College of Music student, pinpoints early-’90s R&B as a touchstone — a hinterland between new jack swing and neo soul, where the trail of one decade faded into the start of another. This interest in hybrid times informs Erotic Probiotic 2, an album that blends these sounds with deep house, soul, Baltimore club, and multiple forms of outsider guitar music into something you can always dance to. The groove is God here, and Brown sits between the beats, sometimes using their rich baritone simply to keep the vibe going (“Soap Party”) and others to rail against the establishment. “Once or twice I prayed to Jesus / Never heard a word back in plain English / More like signs or advertisements / Telling me to keep consumerizing,” Brown sings on “The Fields,” a track that feels like the midpoint between Jam & Lewis and the anarcho-futurist critic Mark Fisher. It’s to Brown’s credit that this melange of influences doesn’t get lost in reverence, instead shining as a passion project made from equal parts heart and craft. — DR

Despite how often Kelela sings the phrase “far away” across its 15 tracks, Raven is a deeply intimate album that suggests the nearest dance floor is a perfect space for catharsis. Over drum and bass, UKG, and dancehall, Kelela pushes you to move through your deepest desires, with collaborators like Kaytranada, BAMBII, and Junglepussy alongside her. Kelela’s dexterous, honey-filled voice pours into every corner of the album’s sometimes gritty production: “On the Run” sees her layered harmonies trickle over a bouncy dancehall riddim, while “Fooley” pairs her breathy echoes with chopped-up samples of her own voice. For all of Raven’s levity, Kelela is intentional about holding space for Black queer womanhood. “They tried to break her, there’s nothing here to mourn / Took all my labor, don’t tell me that I’m strong,” she sings on the album’s title track. After grappling with writer’s block in the six years since 2017’s Take Me Apart, Kelela made Raven worth the wait. — Sajae Elder

The fluid, diaphanous compositions on Atlas unfurl like a scroll of incense wisping toward a colder atmosphere. Laurel Halo’s fifth studio album undulates through ambient fieldscapes as orchestras both digital and analog hover overhead, fluttering in and out of earshot like birdsong. A record store would likely file the vinyl under classical or electronic, but Halo’s hypnagogic fantasia might slot best in the soundtrack section. Atlas turns minutes into minor eternities, like touching the bottom of the pool or falling asleep in the grass. Halo’s first solo album since 2018’s Raw Silk Uncut Wood was borne out of a period of stillness following several years of heavy touring; when interviewed about the album’s creation, she’s described reacquainting herself with the piano at an artists’ residency cut short by the pandemic and blending together the improvisatory techniques of jazz with those of medieval and Renaissance-era music. Vocal stacks and acousmatic flourishes alike are gently nestled between harmonic progressions and liminal fuzz. At times, the pain-staking beauty of Atlas approximates the surreptitious thrill of watching a pianist rehearse while they think they’re alone — the self-contained intimacy of a pleasurable secret. — Vivian Medithi

On this joint project, New York producer Anysia Kym and London MC Jadasea wanted to bridge the gap between Black British and American culture in the ‘90s. The resulting album does that and more: It’s a disorientating and dazzling tour through hazed-out footwork, noxious ambient rap, and glamorous hip-house, the pair settling on a palette that sounds like 10 different radio transmissions locking into perfect harmony. This is deeply internal club music, powered by scintillating breakbeats and abrasive samples, Jadasea’s rough-hewn voice always finding its way through Kym’s left-field, widely influenced production. More often than not, it sounds as if Kym’s drums are attempting to smother Jadasea: fractured boom-bap pushing him beneath a rising tide on “Darling,” elastic sub-bass drowning him out like reverberations from the construction site next door on “Nothing Comes to a Sleeper But a Dream.” The effect is that of a rap record first heard in a dream: a slippery, ephemeral moment that you’re always trying to claw back. — Shaad D’Souza

The jonatan leandoer96 side project initially felt like more of a hobby for Yung Lean, an outlet to escape the baggage of perception that he’s struggled to overcome as a rapper, blowing off steam with deliberately sparse compositions. But on Sugar World, he transforms from a lo-fi noodler in the mode of Dean Blunt to a full-fledged art-pop star, reintroducing himself as a schmaltzy crooner. Frederik Valentin’s production is glittering and lush, positioning Lean as an almost Jarvis Cocker-like talent constructing a loving pastiche of pop music’s past. Though he’s often been dismissed as a novelty artist, there’s a real sincerity to Lean’s songwriting, and the sweeping wall of sound on Sugar World highlights that heartfelt sentimentality. — Nadine Smith

Notorious Dump Legends Vol. 2 isn’t one of Mach-Hommy’s landmark mythmaking releases in the lineage of HBO or Pray For Haiti, conceptual albums that examined identity and family. Instead, it’s 27 minutes of dumping — a tape of noodly raps for listeners passionate about the intricacies of language. Mach and his partner in crime Tha God Fahim are a fire-and-ice combo: Mach engages in slippery flows with double and triple meanings, often switching from Creole to English on a dime. Fahim, meanwhile, keeps things grounded, hammering home no-nonsense similes like a ‘97 Wu affiliate’s fever dream. Production-wise, SadhuGold, Nicholas Craven, Fortes, and Denmark Vassey offer everything from easy-listening soul to musty cassette chops, balancing luxury and griminess in equal measure while leaving plenty of empty space for Mach’s wisdom and Fahim’s off-kilter comparisons. At this point, it would have been easy for Mach to leave this kind of tape behind to focus solely on brand-building exercises, so it’s a blessing to hear him and Fahim continue to innovate and experiment with rap’s form and structure, finding new ways to shit talk while dropping jewels for listeners on the hunt for deeper meaning. — Son Raw

jaimie branch’s third Fly or Die album throbs with life. These nine tracks are jaimie’s last songs, recorded in the months before her tragic 2022 passing at the age of 39, and they transport us back to the world she occupied: a world where the good fight raged on at ground level, but also one where there was always room for torrential love and thunderous joy. The project rests on the pillars of its reinforced bookends: the tentative groove of “borealis dancing” paired with the more confident strut of “bolinko bass,” and the defiant fight song “burning gray” mirroring the righteous war chant “take over the world,” bounded by the album’s budding opener “aurora rising” and its doomsaying closer, “world war ((reprise)).” Each of these tracks shows a different element of branch’s life force — brash and resilient but also introspective and prone to dark ruminations on the cruelty of our world — while “baba louie,” the record’s sprawling centerpiece, feels delivered from beyond the grave. Here, Branch stands on the roof of the towering structure she’s built, surveying the void below with a reassuring grin. — RH

In UK singer-songwriter mark william lewis’s only music video, a blurry figure runs down an empty street carrying a duffle bag. From what? Toward whom? Mysteries abound, but the clip feels urgent. Given that lewis exists in the orbit of Dean Blunt’s World Music label, alongside collaborators like Nina Cristante of bar italia, it's unsurprising that little is known about him. The anonymity feels fitting when you consider the eight tracks on his debut LP, Living. Elliptical and opaque yet deceptively intimate, these songs reveal their emotional truths gradually. The loping pace of “Enough” mirrors the existential heaviness that he sings of — he traces the contours of a downcast headspace as distant guitar plods and sputters. In the haze, it’s easy to see yourself reflected, the outline of a soul in struggle peering back in a fogged mirror. — Colin Joyce

Hailing from the Dominican Republic, producer Diego Raposo’s experimental debut is a genrefuck pastiche that carves out exciting new paths for Latin alternative. He plays with high BPMs tinged with goth flow (“EL UNDERGROUND,” where fellow Dominican vocalist mediopicky seduces a lover like a vampire), distorted vocals wrapped in pop punk guitar riffs (“A&R”), mélanges of jungle, hyperpop and rock (groundbreaking “AL CONTRARIO” with Chilean trapera AKRIILA), and so much more. YO NO ERA ASÍ PERO DE AHORA EN ADELANTE, SÍ runs the gamut of Latin music’s new vanguard, from Venezuelan Miami producer MJ Nebreda on sparse “EN LA DISCO” to Mexico’s queer alt heartthrob Blue Rojo, whose heavily Auto-Tuned voice opens the album on emotive “19.322239, - 68.540659,” coordinates that point to a spot northeast of Raposo’s native Quisqueya. The idea of “Latin music” is often a general stand-in for anything that sounds a little like reggaeton, but this album makes strides toward a wider-spanning definition, one that celebrates and honors all of South America and the Caribbean's cultural movements and sounds. It's an exciting potential future, and Diego Raposo holds the key to unlocking it. — E.R. Pulgar

Noname’s music has always been a Trojan Horse. Her beats are built around Gospel choirs and sparse jazz samples, her flows knotty but conversational, the tone always apparently laid back. But her message is revolution, as personal as it is political. On Sundial, her first album in five years, she aims a sharp look at, among others, an audience less interested in her art than her suffering (“Casual white fans, who invented the voyeur? / Fascinated with mourning, they hope the trauma destroy her”), Barack Obama (“first Black president, and he the one who bombed us”), and hypocrites (“All that eat the rich, tax the rich, y'all ain't really about that shit”). But, crucially, she doesn’t fake perfection. Her messiness is there in the fabric of the record itself (however exhausting the discourse around the Jay Electronica feature on “balloons” might have been, for Noname if nobody else, it wasn’t empty shock). But it’s in Noname’s head too, not least when she raps about Kendrick Lamar and Rihanna soundtracking the “war machine” by playing the Super Bowl, on “namesake,” and Noname’s own subsequent decision to play at Coachella anyway, as if that’s not got its own litany of problems: “Somehow I still fell in line, fuck.” Lesser revolutionaries might pitch themselves as flawless, but Noname knows better. — ARR

Nat Ćmiel’s work as yeule across their previous albums, Serotonin II and Glitch Princess, explored the limitations of the body as a physical space, embracing the boundaryless freedom of being a cyborg entity. On softscars, they continue to embrace the liberating autonomy of the digital form, but their emotional affectations are felt with an unsettling amount of sheer physicality — grisly, guttural, tear-stained, and soaked in blood. “Don't you feel so pure when you don't have a body anymore?” they ask on “bloodbunny,” but even after transcending into a digital form that is shapeless, softscars breathes with mortality and human tactility: black holes, rotten daisies, porcelain skin, bloody mess, bloody hands, tasting like candy. Perhaps there is nothing more human than re-connecting with the art that made you realize you were capable of feeling; the production of softscars is inspired by the soundtracks yeule grew up with, from Smashing Pumpkins to Avril Lavigne, shoegaze to nu-metal and MySpace emo. Lyrically, nothing is taboo: yeule has demons that are both flesh and disembodied, artificial and emotional. But cyborgs bleed, too, and to have scars is to understand that you are truly alive, digital or not. — Cady Siregar

Despite being one of footwork’s most criminally underrated producers, Jlin’s been able to garner the recognition she deserves within the world of contemporary classical music, where her percussive, club-informed minimalism is a much-needed breath of fresh air. This remains true on her awe-inspiring mini-album Perspective, where she transforms her Pulitzer Prize-nominated compositions with Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion into six dizzying, dazzling recorded tracks that are propulsive experiments in texture, timbre, and timing. Take “Paradigm,” an opener that immediately confronts listeners with an onslaught of mutating polyrhythms and phrentic frequencies. Or the moment in “Obscure” when a classic juke sample starts to destabilize before erupting into an eye-widening cascade of competing sounds that seem to catch themselves mid-air. Jlin has always been an expert at maintaining that delicate balance between man and machine, and Perspective takes it to another level by using orchestral source material as a blueprint for bodily sub-bass beats. — Sandra Song

John Francis Flynn makes tradition sound like innovation. The Irish folk singer’s second album, Look Over the Wall, See the Sky, taps into an ancient understanding of music and national myth. With his throaty, bran-like voice an echo of his chanting forefathers, and dronescapes like a moaning wind through the lonely countryside, Flynn recreates the law of the Irish land through song, while naturally applying his own modern context and arrangements. Across the album’s eight tracks, Flynn spins 19th-century ballads, early-20th-century American protest songs, and Irish trad ditties into explorations of gray space and sound, refreshing the ancient while seeking out new limits to cross. Fortunately, Flynn’s experimentalism never scans as overly heady. Each song on Look Over the Wall, See the Sky holds a pre-apocalyptic sense of melancholy that rings with an almost unbearable beauty. It’s a new classic. — EM

The spacious songs of Spike Field tremble with portent and pain, creating music baptized in a mixture of phantasmagorical blood and the sap of a dead tree. The elemental Oakland artist Maria BC’s talent for rendering the everyday into omens, displayed on their 2022 debut Hyaline, is wielded with surgical precision on this follow-up. Glitchy ambience becomes the new connective tissue for the album’s minimalist network of folk, post-rock, and drone; the fraying electronics serve to underscore the music’s aching gothic mood. There’s a literary quality to the music, even when BC’s voice — a shredded and stained wedding veil — sends their lyrics to a space between texture and narrative. Moments of intense horror, love, and grief appear from the fragments, each small detail containing outsized importance. Taken together, the songs of Spike Field have an emotional resonance that feels impossible in execution, like lightning across a clear blue sky. — Jordan Darville

Before High School Football, Brevin Kim’s music was restless and unpredictable. The first two albums by the Massachusetts-born, Los Angeles-based duo of brothers — 2020’s no less than three and 2022’s PAIN MUSEUM — built songs from gnarled 808s and glitchy synths. Their sound veered from distorted emo rap to maximalist trap-pop to vulnerable guitar ballads, each new experiment expressed with despaired sincerity. Their stylistic elasticity and affinity for Auto-Tune earned them shine in the hyperpop ecosystem, but they bristled against classification: their pop ambitions were grander than placement within any single scene or genre. On High School Football, Bren and Cal Paulhus temper their wily sonic appetites and zero in on a cohesive, classic aesthetic: intensely emotional guitar-led music that chews on the anxieties of early adulthood. “WALK ON BY” and “I’ll Be Damned” ruminate on what it means to “be someone” after surviving so much failure, while “ShoulderBlades” and “Architect” grapple with giving too much of yourself to a relationship that’s not giving you much back. To spend time with High School Football is to be energized, moved, crushed, and ruined — sometimes all at once. — Brady Brickner-Wood

ANOHNI has perfected the art of hiding sharp objects in soft packaging. For her first full-length album in seven years, she brought back her band, The Johnsons, shifting from the heavy electronic production of her last record, HOPELESSNESS, to the classic soul sound of her earlier work. She shifted thematically too, replacing the blatant political statements in songs like “Drone Bomb Me” and “4 Degrees'' with tales of ground-level, interpersonal tragedy. Of course, for a fervent, lifelong activist like ANOHNI — and for everyone, in the end — the personal is also political. Embedded in the lover’s plea “It Must Change” (and beyond the not-so-subtle social declaration of its title), there’s a nuanced message about the false binaries that comprise our most fundamental understanding of the world. And “It’s My Fault,” a contemplative mid-album cut, holds a subtle critique of traditionally conceived motherhood. Still, the record occasionally lapses into moments of unchecked beauty, as on “Sliver of Ice,” where ANOHNI recounts a dying Lou Reed experiencing the joy of cold water, as if for the first time. — RH

It’s a minor miracle that Mitski’s latest studio effort, The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, exists at all. The album arrived after Mitski revealed her intention to take a long creative hiatus following the release of 2022’s Laurel Hell, and it paints a naked, bare portrait of Mitski: she is making this music, for the simple fact that she just wants to. The Land Is Hospitable… is classic Mitski with its intimate lyricism (On “I’m Your Man”: “I'm sorry I'm the one you love / No one will ever love me like you again / So, when you leave me, I should die / I deserve it, don't I?”). But it’s one of Mitski’s most subdued albums, foregoing full-band instrumentation and instead relying on acoustic guitars, vocals, and lyricism. Much has been made of Mitski as a sort of prophet of the sad girl, her songs a hymn for the eternally somber, and on The Land Is Hospitable…, she neither tries to accept or deny this title. She writes unapologetically for herself, on both the highs and lows of life as she knows it: “Stride through the house naked / Don't even care that the curtains are open / Let the darkness see me.” — CS

The idea of a second album from 100 gecs is, in some sense, ridiculous. Dylan Brady and Laura Les could have opted to shift gears and showcase a more serious side, like their many Discord acolytes who’ve left the hyperpop genre tag behind like a bad smell. Instead, what 10,000 gecs does is present the band with the brightness turned up and Subway Surfers videos flanking them on either side. It’s antagonistic, playful, and designed to alienate as well as illuminate. How else can you explain a song like “Frog On The Floor,” a tinny ska-punk bop about accepting differences in others complete with ribbit sound effects? Or “I Got My Tooth Removed,” which begins as a grunge ballad before those same ska trumpets come back and the skanking resumes? It’s not just Less Than Jake revivalism — 10,000 gecs takes metal riffs, slap bass, and Fred Durst flows and shakes them back to life, removed from their prisons of condescension. Album closer “mememe” may attempt to present gecs as unknowable misfits, but this is the project where they put it all out there. These anti-prestige maestros shun earnestness and lean into audacity. “Can you believe we're doing this?” they ask. “And that it sounds this good?” — DR

Much like her fellow Scorpio Joni Mitchell, SZA embodies a vulnerability as transparent as “the cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes.” On SOS, released at the tail-end of last year but coming to define this one, the horny metaphors and somber reflections on lust she’s wielded deftly since CTRL are sharpened to the point of drawing blood. Her soaring voice moves between revenge fantasies (billion-streaming fuck-you to exes everywhere “Kill Bill”) and wrenching candor (“Special,” where she bemoans becoming a loser by giving herself to one). She’s also playing with sound, from the rock-driven angst of “F2F” to rapping fools under the table with a vicious, elegant bite on the title track, where she lays out the album’s thesis amid swaggering verses about reclaiming her power: “All the funny shit aside / I just want what's mine.” This inability to keep anything to herself — be it self-hatred or self-empowerment — is what makes SZA’s artistry so painfully relatable. She’s cuttingly self-aware, dishing universal truths that make us blush with secondhand embarrassment or nod in resignation at our own fucked up love lives. Phoebe Bridgers feature “Ghost in the Machine” in particular finds the balance between the cringe and the profound: “Can you touch on me and not call me after?” followed by “I need humanity.” SZA has her knives out, but they’re in the hands of a gentle lover fighting her way back to herself. — ERP

Ten years in the making, Evian Christ’s debut album has the qualities of a party you’ve waited your whole life for and delivers in ways you could never have expected. Revanchist is a total reinvention for the producer, containing no trace of the menacing, trap-spiked dubstep that Kanye West tapped for 2013’s Yeezus. Now a progressive trance auteur, Evian Christ is interested chiefly in the genre’s expansiveness and its quest for serenity. Revanchist pushes its boundaries with a varied approach to the yearning. Sometimes that reaches a clamor — on the pulverizing “On Embers,” distant vocals plead, “You got to pray…” amongst the chaos. Immediately after, “Yxguden” pulses like the charges on a controlled demolition, enlisting Bladee to coo of “heavenly visions, ecstasy” and duet with a biblically-accurate rave angel. The rest of Revanchist is less direct, working with timed fuses and sleights of hand; sections of quietude build to revelatory explosions, or maintain the bliss throughout. For the entire duration of Revanchist, its music shines with the kind of deep personal enlightenment that can only come from a good deal of time in the shadows, away from the noise. — JD

Brazilian baile funk is one of the most consistently transgressive styles of music in the world, shattering every conventionally accepted standard of mixing and mastering to create a truly out-of-body sonic experience. São Paulo’s DJ K is the warlock behind a sound he describes as “bruxaria,” or witchcraft, and his debut album is appropriately haunted, a dark transmission from a rave in the deepest circle of hell. Panico No Submundo is a cacophonous symphony of metallic edges, shrieking cackles, and rapid-fire samples, as DJ K leads us through a sweaty throng of bodies like Orpheus in the underworld. For as massive as the beats can get, with explosive bass that constantly peaks into the red, what’s most remarkable about Panico No Submundo is the silence: between the heavy drops and the laser blasts are startling moments of quiet, as DJ K strategically utilizes extended pauses to make the peaks seem even higher, while traces of sound linger like long shadows. — NS

Detroit punk troupe The Armed (also known as ⋈) have been converting and inspiring new disciples since their early experimental post-hardcore howls, and on Perfect Saviors, they translate their gospel into language the masses might comprehend. Here, the boundless ambition of 2021’s Ultrapop is focused into a dozen pop songs, some leaning into psychedelia, some into funk grooves, some into unexpected melancholy, all bursting with melody like glow sticks snapped in half. Their devilish pitch to the world — we’re just like you, come join us, it’s fun here — is the same one that’s inspired great rock music from the jump. But it’s delivered with such wide-eyed conviction here that when Tony Wolski (or so we’re led to believe) spits on “Everything’s Glitter” that “this ain't the same fucking thing you've been sold before,” it’s irresistible. — ARR

At some point over the last few years, brakence realized it was possible to sound “higher def than real life.” That’s how he described his recent approach to production to NPR earlier this year, reflecting on the lysergic emoting of his second solo album, hypochondriac. It’s hard to argue with his assessment, as he laces pristine pop melodies with head-spinning tempo changes, spidery guitar lines, and prickly glitches, like a Merry Prankster dumping research chemicals into Max Martin’s punch bowl. brakence’s subject matter is mundane, almost deliberately so — mixing “self-expression with self-obsession,” he details the burnt-out life of a kid torpedoing his relationships by spending too much time playing guitar, scrolling on Twitter, and wandering the Lands Between in Elden Ring. But hypochondriac is so dizzy with ideas — there’s room for half-time falsetto codas tagged onto jittery maximalist pop songs, woozy guitars that sound like American Football records playing at the wrong speed, and flirtations with Jersey club — that it lends weight and perspective to these everyday concerns. Chaotic, bored, overwhelming, navel-gazey, it’s like real life — or even realer. — CJ

Beneath the often-monotone, always-nonchalant surface of Veeze’s flow, there’s a sea of intense ambition. Watching him in the studio for his FADER cover story, Brandon Callender observed him punching in every line, recording “fourth or seventh” takes of every bar before landing on the perfect delivery. On Ganger — a sprawling debut LP years in the making — the hard work shows. Still, imagining Veeze’s creative decisions as blocks in a calculated façade would be missing the bigger picture. Veeze may not have landed in the studio fully formed, but he’s a true eccentric. He’s paved his path to hip-hop’s highest echelon with a sui generis swagger, full of idiosyncrasies — unfinished ideas containing unexpected pearls of wisdom, tossed-off phrases that hint at his obsessive interest in pop culture, basketball, and conspiracy theories — that would be near-impossible to fake. If rap’s center has shifted to the Midwest, the Detroit native has broken into the operating room and set up camp — slumped in a swivel chair, feet up on the control desk, grin on his face. On Ganger, Veeze switches up flows and beats, pitch shifts, and even sings a little. Watch him in slow motion, though, and you’ll see his eyes are always dead set on the rim. The fancy dribbling might look like showboating, but he never wastes a movement. — RH

With time, the heaviness of loss lifts. Midway through the titular opener of Julie Byrne’s third album, The Greater Wings, the New York singer-songwriter arrives at a thought like this, a moment of clarity intoned with gravel: “Name my grief to let it sing.” It’s exactly what she does across the record, completed in the wake of the death of her close friend and collaborator Eric Littmann. Byrne told The Guardian this year that she “couldn’t outrun [her] grief” after his passing. As a result, The Greater Wings is suffused with his presence. She muses on life’s meaning, the weight of eternity, and the other spiraling philosophical questions that the experience shook loose. Meandering but thoughtful, these meditations are accompanied by some of the lushest arrangements of her career, wrapping her delicate fingerpicking in pillowy synth pads, gauzy vocal harmonies, and gentle arpeggiations. The pain and sorrow, as a consequence, are cast in golden-hour light. Even if this mourning takes longer to relent, even if there are always questions, she shares a kind of peace that she’s found in the mourning. — CJ

Great music should terrify the way an encounter with a ghost or a miracle should. When you hear a sound you can’t identify, a song that seems without providence, music divined by some mystical source rather than the materials of this Earth — that is fucking terrifying. No record this year has instilled more terror in me than Reverend Kristin Michael Hayter’s (f.k.a. Lingua Ignota) Saved! Composed of music very much of this Earth — gospel standards and originals written in a similarly clerical style — Saved! shakes tradition and filters the earthly through the hellish divine, with its audio errors, tape manipulation, and spartan keys that ring like the doorbell on the gates of hell. Saved! sounds like an album that should never have been heard by another living soul, a curiously chilling artifact discovered by some ethnomusicologist who went looking for a benediction but instead found himself cursed. The Reverend reaches out a healing hand to us all the same — but before we can clasp it, we must first walk through the flames. Listening to Saved! is the aural equivalent of reaching transcendence through self-immolation. Each song is like a blaze, burning with glorious, ecstatic terror; the promise of something beyond ourselves, the taunting of heaven. — EM

What is the ultimate desire? On “Blood and Butter,” a standout moment from her stunning second solo album, Caroline Polachek argues that it is to experience heaven: “Holy water, fire in sky.” Desire, I Want To Turn Into You sounds like it’s trying to ascend to paradise, filtering the unlikely sounds of Celtic music and flamenco through a pop lens to create something idyllic. Polacheck is aloof (“don’t drop my name”) on “Bunny Is a Rider'' yet found in the depths of a vulnerable moment on “Welcome to My Island.” Grimes and Dido appear on “Fly to You” but are blown away by Polachek, whose ability to climb her vocal register injects enough drama into the sleek drum and bass song to position it between the club and an opera hall. This characterful voice fills in the gaps where Polachek relies on abstract lyricism, with the occasional nod to literature or nature. But a line on “I Believe,” written as a tribute to the late SOPHIE, sticks out. "I don't know, but I believe / We'll get another day together,” she sings on a piano house beat cut through with razor-sharp synths. It’s a vulnerable admission of what has been left behind and what might await at the end of the ascent. — DR

Kali Uchis’s third album is a sparkling study in glamor, longing, and standing tall after heartbreak. Just over a decade since debuting as a recording artist, she’s come to embody a modern-day torch singer. In the same lineage as La Lupe or Sade Adu, Kali Uchis exudes languorous desire and divine femininity. Switching effortlessly between English and Spanish, Red Moon In Venus showcases the Colombian-American singer’s impressive vocal range, one that spans whistle tones (the karmic indictment “Moral Conscience”) and murmured whispers in a lover’s ear (“Como Te Quiero Yo,” replete with breathy invitations to stop fighting and make love). Collaborations with longtime boyfriend Don Tolliver and kindred spirits Omar Apollo and Summer Walker help the dramatics soar. Thankfully, though, Kali Uchis doesn’t need features (or a man, for that matter) to glisten bright as the full moon. Red Moon In Venus will go down as a crooning, sighing opus for the real lovers, a lighthouse guiding broken hearts to shore. — ERP

For years, the accepted industry wisdom has been that Spanish-speaking artists have to pivot to English in order to be embraced by the American mainstream. A new wave of regional Mexican music has upended that inherited logic, as boundary-pushing voices like Peso Pluma reach new audiences while remaining true to their roots. On his breakout album GÉNESIS, the Jalisco-born vocalist filters the acoustic warmth of traditional Mexican styles like ranchera and norteña through a druggy haze. As much as Peso Pluma embraces his musical heritage, singing over thumping guitarrón and brassy horns, he thumbs his nose at convention just as often. Tales of sordid violence and black market trades aren’t new to Mexican music. But more than an old vaquero howling at the moon, Peso Pluma evokes the depressive numbness of a rapper like Future — on songs like “LADY GAGA,” the material flexes are merely a gilded mask for the emptiness he feels inside. The instrumentation might be old school, but Pluma’s lyricism is distinctly contemporary. — NS

From its opening notes, Cleo Sol’s Heaven invites you to bask in the warmth of self-reflection. It's meditative, vulnerable, and looks to forgiveness as a means of rebirth. Produced entirely by Inflo, Heaven pulls from the funk-inspired sounds of Sol’s work with experimental R&B outfit SAULT, murky guitar licks and bouncy percussion adding depth to her affirmations. On songs like “Airplane,” Sol assures herself that life’s obstacles won’t stop her from taking flight, while “Miss Romantic” finds her warning a friend to get rid of a man who mistreats her. As self-assuredly firm as it is lovingly tender, Heaven is like a long hug from that friend who just wants you to do better. — Sajae Elder

The first rap song Sexyy Red ever made was a diss track aimed at the “lame-ass bitch” a lover was cheating with; her unfaithful boyfriend liked the song so much he would routinely ask her to rap it for his friends. No surprise, then, that Hood Hottest Princess is a masterclass in shit-talking, covering everything from dingy jewelry to overly friendly bitches and beyond. Was “Pound Town” the song of the summer? Or maybe it was “Hellcats SRTs.” Then again, “SkeeYee” rings off in a crowd. Sexyy’s easygoing confidence and tossed-off lascivity can scan as low-effort titillation to nonbelievers, but being hard of heart is their own loss — standing outside the club will never be as fun as dancing on the table. And Sexyy Red’s appeal goes beyond shock and swagger anyway. Listen carefully and it’s possible to pick out the brash bounce of Trina, the minor-key nihilism of Three 6 Mafia, the wry humor of Tay-K, and the zany unpredictability of 2011 Gucci Mane. It’s said that good artists copy and great artists steal. Hood Hottest Princess suggests that greatness can also be earned through sheer force of will. — VM

“Genre-bending” is a laughably limited way of thinking about Yves Tumor’s work, especially when it comes to Praise A Lord Who Chews But Which Does Not Consume; (Or Simply, Hot Between Worlds). On its own, it’s a rich, dense record that isn’t constrained by a singular sound or concept, but rather a feeling that’s both exhilarating and frightening in its enormity — where Tumor’s melismatic, R&B-infused delivery amps up the glam-rock roots of “Echolalia”; psychedelic guitar riffs push through shoegaze distortion on “Heaven Surrounds Us Like a Hood”; and frenetic screeching melts into belabored gasps and an aughties alt-rock earworm on “God Is a Circle.” Because Tumor is, and always has been, one of the few performers who can take a slurry of grunge-inspired guitar, piledriver synths, and penetrating industrial bass and arrange them into something akin to a spiritual revelation. By the end of Praise…, Tumor starts to feel like a divine figure themself, shepherding the listener through all the senseless noise and chaos towards deliverance. — SS

Exhaustion and ecstasy coexist on Radical Romantics, the third album from Fever Ray (a.k.a. Karin Dreijer). The music is an act of self-preservation cast as an avant-garde electronic-pop project; here, the club-centered coming-out odyssey of 2017’s Plunge is weathered as though from exposure, its bright neon colors curling like paint to reveal the steel that lies beneath. Opener “What They Call Us” announces this direction; the first of four songs co-produced by Olof Dreijer, Karin’s brother and bandmate in The Knife, the song’s synths are warped by paranoia and external pressures. There are these tart techno melodies and jolting grooves, and there are also frostbitten moments like the two Trent Reznor co-productions: the punkish and deliciously deviant revenge fantasy “Even It Out” and brutalist love ballad “North.” Dreijer’s voice remains a minor miracle, careening from the domain of mythic creatures and discovering new wells of energy from this plane’s pleasures and torments. Sex, paranoia, and parental protectiveness rendered homicidal are way stations on the search for lasting connection, with both Karin themself and the outside world. On “Kandy,” they spell out the stakes of their quest: “What if I die alone with this song inside?” — JD

As digital noises have mutated and refined, finding new steps and skips between downbeats, so have the dancefloors they spill onto, sticky with well liquor and grenadine. DÉTWAT is an ecstatic barrage of heart-pounding 808s and ferocious synths, a demand for movement and sweat, an invective to enter the mosh and shake something. HiTech’s synthesis of ghettotech, hip-hop, juke, and footwork could probably set off a party at any time and place in human history, whether a caveful of Ice Age hominids huddled around a fire or underground raves long after humans terrestrialize Mars. King Milo, Milf Melly, and 47Chops are “trying to kill club culture,” i.e. get people to stop pretending they’re too cool to cut loose. If DÉTWAT can’t do it, it’s hard to imagine an album that will. The warp speed pitter-patter of “SHRIMP & GRITS;” the downcast shuffle of “WHYYOUFUGGMYOPPS;” the hollow-point echo of “TAKEOFFINNAPORSCHE;” It’s as if their drums go straight from the ears to the limbs — no need for a conscious thought pitstop at the brain. Or, as they say on “TEETEES DISPO,” “if yo auntie in this bitch she gon get on the floor.” — VM

On Spirit World Tour, Sword II walks the impossibly thin line between beauty and brutality. These eight tracks sound as if a crate of butterflies were released inside a car factory. Every graceful chord is met with a screech, every perfect harmony paired with ear-ringing percussion. It’s an album of contradictions, of curated chaos. Take track two, “First Rule of the Bug,” on which Maria González’s paper-thin singing voice and José Izaguirre’s muttered Spanish monologues are orated over grating guitars and church bells fit for a baptism. Made up of four stalwarts from Atlanta’s DIY scene — González and Izaguirre plus Travis Arnold, and Certain Z — Sword II has been integral in organizing the fight against Cop City, an 85-acre section of a south Atlanta forest on which the city’s police department is building a training center. At a protest festival they performed at in March, hundreds of concertgoers were entrapped by police, 35 were arrested, and 23 were charged with domestic terrorism. Spirit World Tour is a dark album, reflective of the world around it. If the pounding instrumentation found on tracks like “Mirror” and “Crystal” represent destructive outside forces, then the vocals, subtle and light, speak of somewhere serene and promising. If that place can’t be found in this world, the album poses, then maybe it’s in the next. — Millan Verma

On his 10th album, Sufjan Stevens explores his past lives in his own characteristically intimate way. Javelin’s collaged cover art hints at its contents: this is Every Sufjan, Everywhere, All At Once. “Goodbye Evergreen” crash-lands with the folk-tronica of The Age of Adz. “My Red Little Fox” and “So You Are Tired” brighten the devastating minimalism of Carrie & Lowell. “Everything That Rises” begins as a tender plea for deliverance à la Seven Swans before morphing into something stranger, more akin to Stevens’s work as a neo-modernist composer. And the choirs and bells gilding the whole record make it his most Christmassy album since the actual Christmas album he released in 2006. On the day of Javelin’s release, Stevens posted a message dedicating the album to his late partner, Evans Richardson — laying bare what had always been the beating heart of his discography. That unburdening reaches its apex on “Shit Talk,” an eight-and-a-half-minute edifice of heartbreak that immediately stands among the best things he’s ever done. After almost three decades, Sufjan Stevens keeps finding new ways to cry. — WG

CBD Reiki Moonbeam’s thrills are constant, its innovations numerous. Here’s an album that plays like a breakneck joyride around a freaky, feral, and fucking fun version of Los Angeles, where garage and big beat blast from every club and your night ends with Kylie Minogue playing you an unreleased song called “On The Floor,” the hit from Fever that got left off the record. Seemingly designed exclusively for fags and their hags, CBD Reiki Moonbeam washes some of the narcotic haze from Gemmy’s music, allowing her serpentine voice — sometimes drunken and bratty, other times creaking like an old wooden door — and remarkable talents as a pop producer to properly shine. Like past Neggy Gemmy records, this album is often shot through with melancholy, but it’s more often searching and excitable. The electro-shoegaze of opener “California” gives way to music on constant lookout for a good time, finding it in over-the-top handbag house (“Gemmy Juice”), glazed-over trap (“Twisted”) and screwed up nu-rave (“Seeing Stars”). CBD… is a testament to the sheer thrills you can conjure with Ableton, heavy eyeliner, and an open mind — so much so that you’d hope the dance-pop divas currently flailing on the charts are taking note. — SD

Amaarae always has her eyes on the future of Afropop. The Ghanaian-American singer has been steadily working towards that goal since 2017’s Passionfruit Summers EP announced her arrival during the halcyon days of West Africa’s disruptive alté subculture. Her reputation as a transformative auteur was further established on her debut album, THE ANGEL YOU DON’T KNOW, where she bent words and moods at will thanks to her sirenic cadence and shapeshifting production choices that evoked desire and angst in equal measure. On her sophomore album, Fountain Baby, Amaarae continues to operate at a peerless level, reaching deep into herself to make the sort of genre-agnostic music that she has been inching towards for the last half-decade. Simply put, Amaarae no longer plays by conventions, allowing her to create a buoyant, unsinkable record rooted in supreme self-expression about self, community, and love. Here, Amaarae nonchalantly pulls threads from afrobeats, punk, R&B, and alt-pop into a zeitgeist-reshaping sound that’s as luxurious-sounding as it is adventurous. Romance, sex, money, and the supreme art of being a bad bitch guide the narrative of Fountain Baby, but Amaarae is also intimately aware of the trade-offs that life in the fast lane can demand. Look past the heavy subtext and mazy obfuscations of Fountain Baby, and you’ll find evidence of her fluid non-conformity in spades as she waits for the rest of Afropop to catch up. — WO

Defying both an exhausted mainstream rap scene and now-established underground approaches favoring slow tempos and drumless ambiance, Scaring The Hoes is a rap record that isn’t afraid to be fast, loud, and fun. The beats, all by JPEGMAFIA, chop up everything from TRL staples and Japanese jingles to no wave, noise, and gospel, funneling these disparate sources through a grimy, bitcrushed sampler with no concessions to TikTok trends. This kitchen-sink approach extends to the rhymes, with both Brown and Peggy riling each other up with increasingly outlandish shots at Papa John’s, ‘90s mixtape mainstay Canibus, and people buying Jack Harlow combo meals, among other targets. Here, Brown takes the lead, sounding positively liberated compared to his recent, grim-faced solo work, retooling double-time flows from his EDM-leaning days to narrate sexual exploits and comedowns in equal measure. JPEG, meanwhile, keeps the project grounded, playing the comparative straight man to Brown’s screeching lead while still finding new ways to troll listeners, notably declaring himself “the Black Marjorie Taylor Greene.” An audio smoking session with rap’s preeminent class clowns, Scaring The Hoes is a strong reminder that the best hip-hop is raw, off the cuff, and anything but overwrought. — SR

billy woods refused to stand still, but the world caught up with him anyway. Maps might seem on its surface to be the New York independent luminary’s most approachable album yet, after a career marked by hallucinogenically complex rhymes, coiled allusions, and lyrical sleight of hand. Kenny Segal’s beats are mostly looser and lighter than they were on his last full-length with woods, 2019’s nervy Hiding Places, and woods spills diesel-black comedy onto even his darkest visions (try the party scene in “FaceTime” where “the vibe was animal pelts”). Taken as a whole, though, Maps is disorienting. It’s a reflection of the relentless tour woods went on to make up for two years of lockdown, an album strewn with missed connections and jogged memories, jet lag, dead time in the Low Countries. And what lingers long after the last lonely jazz piano sample isn’t the hellfire vision of “Babylon by Bus” or the out-of-body depression of “Hangman” but the sense of something elemental having been left behind in a rush to catch the next budget flight. So while he raps half in defiance and half in awe near the top of “Soundcheck” that he “might watch the sunset over your city from a parapet or a park bench,” it’s really just another sunset he’s not watching over his own city. By the end, on “NYC Tapwater,” back home with his cat purring on his lap, he’s seeing that the block has changed in his absence. By the final devastating verse on “As The Crow Flies,” when he finally stops still to watch his son in the playground, he’s realized that every moment away is another moment closer to the end. — ARR

Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd does away with the idea that Lana Del Rey is a pop musician in any traditional sense, but it arrived during a year in which she was more popular than ever. Del Rey spent 2023 announcing arena tours mere days before they started and selling them out instantly. Her streams skyrocketed. Tens of thousands thronged to her shows across the world, treating her quiet, ramshackle spectacular like the goth girl Super Bowl. Amid all of this was Ocean Blvd, a diffuse but stinging LP that finds her dredging up the threads of her own life and career like hair from a drain. On 2021’s Blue Banisters, Del Rey sang candidly about her family for the first time, and this record expands on that new facet of her songwriting. On “Fingertips” — a lucent, chorusless ballad — she sings about her relationship with her mother with such fragility that it feels like it could break under the slightest pressure. And “A&W” — the fiery, seven-minute apotheosis of Del Rey’s career to date — details the cruel, reckless misogyny she’s dealt with throughout her life. Befitting an artist totally alone in her field, Del Rey fills Ocean Blvd with allusions to and samples of her own work: the strings from “Norman fucking Rockwell” on “A&W,” the chorus of “Venice Bitch” on “Taco Truck x VB.” It’s heady, sometimes impenetrably so. But in stripping back her work to its barest elements, Del Rey delivers a record that’s clarified and unflinching, and which makes a strident case for her way of doing things: forge your own path and have faith you’ll end up on top. — SD

“We always started by tellin' all our best stories first,” Karly Hartzman begins on Wednesday’s “Chosen to Deserve,” the catchy centerpiece of their best album yet. “So now that it's been a while, I'll get around to tellin' you all my worst.” Hartzman is Rat Saw God’s narrator, recollecting vignettes of the American South with wonder and staunch realism, scored by grunge-inflicted alt-country rock and doses of heavy shoegaze. The record is defined by its vivid, suffocating qualities. There’s the “Hot Rotten Grass Smell” of her neighbor’s freshly-mowed lawn, a sensation evoked by a vigorous onslaught of MJ Lenderman’s doomsaying guitar work. In a confession to a romantic partner on “Chosen To Deserve,” Hartzman details a past full of friends overdosing on Benadryl, “fucking underneath a dogwood tree,” and binge-drinking at her parents’ house. Xandy Chelmis’s distorted pedal-steel only adds to its conflicted nostalgia. Wednesday wrestle with voyeurism on “Bull Believer” — a ripping, eight-minute grunge anthem where the torrential downpour of instrumental chaos, alongside swarming drums and Hartzman’s wailing, make for an exorcism. Across Rat Saw God, they look beyond the grueling realities of their lives in the South and revel in just how pulsating with life it all is, crying for it to not be forgotten. — CS

Lee “Scratch” Perry was moved to create dub music as we know it after throwing on some porn in the studio. Decades later, dub’s sensuality continues to be heard, a sigh of pleasure echoing across history. That echo was singularly transmuted this year by a.s.o., the Berlin-based duo of Alia Seror-O’Neill and Lewie Day, on their self-titled debut. This is dream-pop for an abandoned megacity airport terminal in a William Gibson story, conspiring for an album that does not seek to mirror what came before to create its power. That’s not to say it runs from the past: there are strands of trip-hop — a genre of greyscale samples, atrophied breakbeats, and ennui rendered rapturous — as well as its more demure sibling downtempo, where dub’s inherent sexiness was integrated into rakish Eurodisco. But it’s in their confluence where something radical happens. The tension between the connections Seror-O’Neill seeks and their absence, and how she lays bare its effect on her, helps the music approach magic. Suddenly, the electronics are iridescent, the mood a deep and endless indigo. Her vocal presence flexes a range spanning from sauna lullaby to horny invocation and thrums with passion displaced by circumstance. People are strange and distant. Lovers can’t be trusted, nor can her own lonely thoughts. The music’s vivid pop orchestration keeps pace, conjuring 24 chrome-slick images every second.

Mere appropriation of the Gen X Soft Club aesthetic this album gestures to will be the goal of most ‘90s-mining artists; a.s.o. have a much deeper well of intention. It’s what makes a.s.o a success rather than imitating styles of music created three or four decades ago, and how the album glides out of their echoes and into one of its own. — JD