FLOOD

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.

A record that still “sparks shit” today.

They remain faithfully yours in taut, ruthless, uncompromising rock and roll.

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.