FLOOD

Their third album may feel almost like a tonic for those befuddled by last year’s bizarro-world “Boarding House Reach.”

The singer-songwriter notes that he’s long been fascinated with the cowboy mythos, which captures both the freedom and the solitude of life on the great open frontier.

Try as he might to sound brash and nonchalant, Rivers Cuomo still comes across like the goofball nerd that he is.

“Sunshine Rock” is bedazzled with literal bells and whistles, including an eighteen-piece string section to lend Mould’s muscular rock a sense of transcendence.

Rightly intuiting that they’d only embarrass themselves by carrying the “boy band” ethos into middle age, they long ago shifted into pure adult contemporary.

“Goes West” summons all the majesty and loneliness of Tyler’s other work, but condenses it into his tightest, punchiest, and most palatable set of songs yet.

It’s not an album about what Tweedy has been through so much as an album about what we’ve all been through—a weathered yet buoyant reflection on shared trauma.

Even if it’s pitched as a continuation of earlier works, “Look Now” never feels like a rehash.

These songs take on a kind of confessional immediacy that you don’t hear much on proper Prince albums, and there’s stark emotion in abundance.

For a band that’s so steady and sure-footed, Low are uniquely gifted at conveying a sense of unraveling.

Mitski is deepening her craft and heightening her emotional availability, but never dulling her edge.

Cowboy Junkies have never reckoned with the times as vividly or as pointedly as they do here.

More than ever, Welch trusts her magnetic personality and her unerring gift for skyscraping pop hooks to do the emotional lifting.

Everything’s writ large; it is music that contains multitudes, and it’s teeming with joy and power. 

Friedberger has crafted an album of contoured melodies and steely precision.

Every generation needs its own soundtrack for kicking against the pricks, and Monáe delivers one here.

Willie’s addressing his twilight years with a light touch and an amiable chuckle.

They may be the only band around who can make the New Wave sound old-timey.

What the indie rock veterans offer is an album’s worth of palate-cleansers—songs of pastoral purity and laid-back reflection.

“Loner” could rightly be called a feminist album or simply a human one, weaponizing empathy in an age of despair.