FRANKIE COSMOS Different Talking (Sub Pop) — Greta Kline hadn’t yet seen twenty candles on one of her birthday cakes when she released her first album under the guise of Frankie Cosmos. That precociousness has long clung to everything she’s done, even as she’s evolved and Frankie Cosmos has grown to be less of a pseudonym and more of a full-fledged band. The sixth (sixth!) Frankie Cosmos album, Different Talking, really locks in the sense that this is now a group: Kline is joined by bassist Alex Bailey, keyboardist Katie Von Schleicher (who produced the band’s prior studio album and stuck around), and drummer Hugo Stanley (who joined as a touring member, in 2024, and stuck around). The quartet produced Different Talking themselves, holing up in a rented house that the effectively turned into a studio. In its somewhat drifty nature and lyrics of emotional malaise, the album feels like an expression of the hangover of being a young adult (Kline turned 31 this spring). It’s filled with warm, twee lyrics, such as Kline singing that she is going to “Hold a tote bag filled with other tote bags” and offering the excuse “Sorry I’m late I was writing a poem,” both lyrics from the track “One of Each.” The songs are deeply preoccupied with the band’s place in the modern music ecosystem: “Joyride” makes reference to blowing so much money on studio time that there’s nothing left over for a video, and “Tomorrow” is framed around grumpiness around being booked for a show they don’t want to play. It’s a mark of the band’s sincerity that what could easily comes across as obnoxious navel gazing instead feels like an extra intimacy being brought to the songs, making them feel like real expressions of Kline and her cohorts. Frankie Cosmos are also expert in their economy. The album ends with “Life Back” and “Pothole,” both of which are two minutes but feel impressively like fully realized songs. Kline is no whippersnapper any more, but Different Talking still shines with fresh-faced charm. Chat up the the following tracks: “Porcelain,” “One! Grey! Hair!,” “Margareta,” and “Your Take On.”

LORDE Virgin (Republic) — On her fourth album, Virgin, Lorde is still figure things out very much in public. Lorde has recently acknowledged in interviews feeling like she has recently been in a state of reexamining her own sense of identity, and that excited anguish is all across the new album. It shows up in the lyrics and in the way Lorde’s pop instincts gnarl back on themselves, like a razor-sharp briar bush. “Shapeshifter” is one the tracks that puts it all together, with bustling, restless pop sound and lyrics that refuse to settle in a simple definition of self (“I’ve been the ice, I’ve been the flame/ I’ve been the prize, the ball and chain/ I’ve been the dice, the magic eight/ So I’m not affected”). It’s the same sonic story with “Man of the Year,” the astonishing single that is raw and strident. Lorde’s wild walkabout hasn’t taken her so far away from her contemporaries that the music is distancing or unrecognizable. “What Was That” suggests a leaner, meaner Carly Rae Jepsen, and “Broken Glass” flirts with the gleaming, precise assurance of Robyn. Even so, those tracks can sometimes seem like islands to cling to in choppy seas. Lorde is lashed to the mast, screaming into the waves. Like a Virgin with the following cuts: “Hammer,” “Current Affairs,” and “If She Could See Me Now.”