With The Future Is Here and Everything Needs to Be Destroyed, the Armed gleefully close the door on whatever shreds of accessibility they dallied with on their last few albums before it, but this unrelenting barrage of excitement and glorious confusion is a welcome replacement.

Despite the fractured path to its creation, Two Ribbons is Hollingworth and Walton's most cohesive album yet. They've grown just far enough apart to be themselves, and they've come together to make something equally beautiful and meaningful.

[A] mesmerizing debut.

Despite the fact that this is the fifth album completed in six years, Statik Selektah's Extended Play doesn't seem sloppily thrown together. Instead, it's a dense, imaginative outing that pays tribute to classic East Coast hip-hop lovingly.

On spirityouall, McFerrin does what he has always done as an artist -- he makes this troubled world shine bright as a diamond.

Overall, Movements lives up to its name perfectly, moving listeners to get on the dancefloor, moving them to feel something real, and moving We Have Band right up to the top echelon of modern dance-rock acts.

Standards finds Cole at a place of razor-sharp renewal. He uses the past unapologetically yet vitally, and delivers a record fans will find both irresistibly familiar and firmly of this moment in his career.

V is a raucous, incendiary portrait of the band's maturity; it's creative and expertly crafted, an exploratory step further into an unknown that refuses to compromise or forsake its established sonic footprint or identity.

In widening the lens, LeBlanc has taken his Springsteen-esque narratives out of the woodshed and onto the open road, and has delivered his best offering to date.

There's never a sense that Lake Street Dive are preaching with heavy hands, and cuts like the bluesy "Hush Money" and the lyrical "Nobody's Stopping You Now" have a universally relatable feeling. That they also evoke the classic album-oriented work of artists like Fleetwood Mac and Carly Simon speaks to Lake Street Dive's ever-deepening sense of songcraft.

In sum, it doesn't displace or replace the original, but adds immeasurably to its meaning and dimension.

For all of its incendiary music, furious soundscapes, and rhythmic madness, Pray for Me is beautifully produced, mischievously strategized, and expertly performed.

With each subsequent album, Horan just gets better and better. The Show is his most immediate and engaging set to date, endlessly listenable and full of heart and charm.

Where Mr. Money with the Vibe charted his rise, Work of Art firmly cements Asake's place as a Nigerian star with global appeal.

Bewitched offers up 13 tender, decade-defying originals in all, alongside a seductive, loyal version of the Erroll Garner standard "Misty."

Arirang not only stakes a solid claim for the group's place in the cultural heritage that helped inspire it, it's also a triumphant statement that cements the BTS legacy beyond the bounds of K-pop and Korea's borders.

Maybe it's divine intervention and maybe it's decades of working on their craft, either way on 13 White Denim sounds like a band born again.

Weller at the BBC (Vol. 2) is a dense digest of this particular category of his art form, and he shines throughout all of it.

More so than on Kamakiriad, or on the tight Everything Must Go, there is a sense of genuine band interplay on this record, which helps give it both consistency and heart -- something appropriate for an album that is Fagen's most personal song cycle since The Nightfly, and quite possibly his best album since then.

Field Songs is Whitmore's masterpiece thus far: unflinching, stubborn, demonstrative, and inspiring.

23 is mysterious and modern, with an artfully strange beauty that is more memorable than perfection.

With its ready absorption of, homage to, and engagement with the past, Walker's skills as a guitarist and arranger make Primrose Green as musically compelling as it is willfully indulgent.

If the musical qualities of Collapsed in Sunbeams suffer from a bit of sameyness by the end, the formula is a soothing, pleasant one with sentiment to spare and, as a debut, full of promise.

Some stellar outside contributions notwithstanding, Cheat Codes stimulates most when Mouse and Thought are sequestered, allowing the latter to leave space only for the occasional instrumental break or rare prominent sampled vocal.

An even sharper, more musically dense articulation of JID's profound talents with The Forever Story. The album is packed with nonstop displays of technical ability, complex wordplay, inventive use of beat switches, unpredictable shifts in flow and delivery, and forthright expression of experiences both personal and culturally shared.

Hazlewood manages to sound resigned, lightly disgusted, heartbroken, and deathbed wise as he sings his way through these songs, none of which ever hit anywhere near an AM radio station. It's easy to be excited for more volumes in this series after hearing this one.

The band's grandiose hellscapes can sometimes feel like horror-fiction cosplay, but in trading some of the myth and magic for the genuine torment of existential dread, they've managed to produce their most humanistic work to date.

The times have changed enough in the music world that Drone Logic won't get the same recognition and acclaim that albums by Underworld or the Chemical Brothers (or even Plastikman or Orbital) received 20 years previously, but it's every bit as good and expansively musical as anything from that era.