POP/ROCK

Brandi Carlile, "In These Silent Days" (Elektra)

In 2019, Carlile brought her song "The Joke" to the Grammys for a show-stopping performance that seemed to finally transform her into a star. Soon she was palling around with Elton John and Joni Mitchell, and wrote a bestselling memoir, "Broken Horses," tracing her sometimes painful journey as a churchgoing gay kid in rural Washington state.

Her new — and seventh — album opens with yet another stunner: a sweeping piano ballad called "Right on Time," in which she reaches for a high note, then climbs up a few more steps just to ensure she's tingled every listener's spine. Other cuts ponder marriage, loyalty and religious hypocrisy and offer hard-won parental guidance to her children, as in the harmony-drenched "Stay Gentle."

Heartfelt and intimate even when Carlile is aiming her songs toward the rafters, "In These Silent Days" is sure to please the longtime fans who've followed the singer since she began working the Seattle club scene in the early 2000s.

MIKAEL WOOD, Los Angeles Times

Tirzah, "Colourgrade" (Domino)

Some pop artists amplify familiar, universal feelings: the gentle moments spent in love, the torturous pain of heartbreak. But others require us to listen with different ears. They ask us to resist the desire to fully understand music. That is the crux of the new album from this British singer-songwriter. The 10-song collection is a fluid excursion through trip-hop, noise, R&B and electronic music, but genre categories cannot capture its free-flowing depth.

Tirzah has long had a knack for meditative, asymmetrical pop. Recorded after the birth of her first child and shortly before the arrival of her second, "Colourgrade" engages themes of motherhood, birth, death and community. But rather than make a rosy album about parenting, the album revels in mood, intimacy and texture.

ISABELIA HERRERA, New York Times

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