FLOOD

Explicitly pitched as a response to the unrest of early 2025, the former Hüsker Dü leader’s first album in five years continues to confidently summon instant-earworm hooks and visceral thrills.

This 75-minute opus pays tribute to Baldwin’s righteous witness, applying his moral and spiritual rigor to Black experience in contemporary America with big ideas and vivid emotions.

The prodigious jazz band leader shifts from kinetic energy to meditative tranquility as he puts down the sax on a solo release that’s somehow both calming and jarring.

The celebrated Philadelphia rapper’s debut full-length is made up of masterpieces in miniature—two- to three-minute songs intimate in their scope and spare in their production.

Exposure is the dominant mode on the Chicago-based songwriter’s latest, in which her language feels more carefully chiseled, more focused and impactful than ever before.

Beyond being wiser than her debut, this sophomore LP is also sharper, meaner, funnier, more assured, more pleasurable, and more persuasive that Rodrigo is operating on a plane of her own.

Coalescing disparate genres, generations, and value systems into a big-tent pop blockbuster, Batiste’s latest streamlines musical and ideological sophistication into an LP designed for mass appeal.

The jazz fusionist plays to his strengths as a sample-based thinker and collage artist while also showing how he can wrestle his micro-moments into long-form works.

The teen punks’ debut is a set of sturdily constructed songs that blur the line between bubblegum tunefulness, power pop crunch, and punk abandon.

Kacey’s latest feels like several types of divorce album spliced together, at once messy, conflicted, and purposeful.

The jazz collective’s fourth album is first and foremost a dance record, bruising, visceral, and thrilling in its physicality.

Bird reconnects with his Squirrel Nut Zippers associate Mathus for the most straightforwardly old-timey music he’s made since the late ’90s.

The latest from Sir Paul is warm, inviting, a little weird, persistently tuneful, endearingly merry.

“Moon Piano” creates an environment that emanates tranquility without ever overstepping its bounds.

“Rumors” may seem almost like a deliberate provocation of the country purists.

HAIM has always made their music sound effortless, but here they sound genuinely unencumbered.

On “Petals for Armor” Williams is in full blossom, telling her story without requiring our permission.

Looking for a consolidated history of soul music in one handy package?

The narrative behind Aaron Livingston’s third full-length as Son Little is one of relinquished control.

It’s not exactly a Beck album without precedent; but maybe at this point, that’s asking too much.