Thomas Bedenbaugh

On World Wide Whack, Philly-born rapper Tierra Whack examines her complicated and at times contradictory feelings surrounding her rise to fame over the last few years. The album’s brief opening track, “Mood Swings,” sets the tone lyrically and sonically, as Whack’s verses about her friends’ and family’s concerns about her mood swings are juxtaposed with a mellow beat. Whack exudes a newfound confidence and braggadocio throughout WWW, sometimes rapping from the perspective of a character.

On her sixth studio album, Deeper Well, Kacey Musgraves digs into both her psyche and the sounds of folk music for an affecting and mellow set of songs. The album kicks off with the crystalline, fingerpicked intro of “Cardinal,” an almost startling introduction given the pop-heavy sound of Musgraves’s last album, Star-Crossed, before giving way to a more contemporary acoustic-guitar passage as the singer muses about lost loved ones.

Trevor Horn’s Echoes: Ancient & Modern finds the veteran musician and producer attempting to recontextualize some of the biggest pop hits of the past 40 years within the sounds of contemporary pop and electronic music. At best the results are bland, and at worst they exemplify Gen-X nostalgia at its most saccharine. The album opens, rather unexpectedly, with a cover of Kendrick Lamar’s “Swimming Pools (Drank),” featuring a characteristically impassioned vocal performance by Tori Amos.