Even the wordless tracks on Arca are among the producer’s most powerful vignettes.

Each artist, individually, brings something impressive to the collaboration. The intersection of these gifts reveals something bigger, an art that embraces experience and vulnerability, but that also relies on studied craft. Whatever confessional comes through does so in an artful but not showy manner that makes this latest album more than just a likeable reunion.

What’s more notable, and important, though, are the continuities present here. Not just in instrumentation and mood, but also in those things’ presence in Cooper’s newest weapon: words.

Though there are no weak links in the 10-song, 30-minute track list, Cohen tucks the album’s finest moment midway into the second half. “Night or Day” is such a catchy, perfectly executed song that it deftly snaps everything into focus, prompting the realization of just how odd and sneakily exploratory Paint a Room can be.

This is Frog Eye’s most elegantly structured, premeditated, composed album ever. It is also miraculously, unexpectedly the band’s best to date.

On Help, bits of digital noise have worked their way into the sound, like the band is absorbing the textures of Dwyer’s more avant projects. Or maybe it’s just a crunchy topping to contrast with the creamy icing, because this is one cake of a record, as approachable as Dwyer has ever been.

Where "Arm’s Way" was mostly excess without limit, Vapours is tightly-controlled, yet still roiling beneath the surface.

Front to back, it’s classic Jack Rose, and while the themes and tones may still be the same, his playing is more assured than ever, summoning a power and immediacy heretofore unseen in his previous work.

The whole affair feels a little slighter, a little less important.

There are innovative and fresh beats and voices, and the record rarely falters.

They have a knack for making things just wrong.

She embodies strength and resilience, mustering loudness when necessary and fluttering a little with vibrato and emotion, but never giving in to it. The quieter songs as equally powerful.

There are messages in Wild Flag's music, but there are also challenges to the listener, and to the rest of rock music in general: This band built its own sound out of stock rock 'n' roll parts to make one of the best albums of this year.

Hallelujah Anyhow is the group’s third. And it’s a neatly balanced work: intimate in certain moments and larger in scale at others. What makes this album work, ultimately, and what makes much of Hiss Golden Messenger’s music work on a larger scale, is the use of implicit contradictions that run through it.

Despite the confrontational title, Broken Politics caresses like a lost Sade album. Cherry has done a most unexpected thing: soundtracked the Trump era in quiet storm soul.

Interestingly, the presence of the source music doesn't detract from the spooky, remote quality that characterizes The Caretaker.

The three singles—“Home,” “Never Come Back” and “You and I” ... follow the trajectory of Caribou’s previous and most successful commercial album, Our Love, in the conjunction of dance, R&B and psychedelic electronics, and will likely capture the same level of attention for it. Yet there is also much to like in the quieter, more contemplative cuts where frail, gorgeous shreds of melody reside in intricate electronic settings.

Cotton Crown is built from the same raw materials as their debut but feels more fleet-footed and robustly constructed. The band have refined all the qualities of their addictive sound, and these nine songs fly by in half an hour, nary a moment wasted.

Nothin’ But Blood is a wild, discontinuous kind of ride, rattling from tradition to mayhem, from salvation to specific descriptions of sex acts, in a flow of songs that are no more like each other than if you’d pulled them from a pile of tapes. What unites them? A bristling electric guitar. A laceratingly unsentimental view of life. A coruscating energy that burns right through whatever you were expecting and reveals the hard true life-force at the bottom of Biram’s songs.

In these songs, to steal a line from the other Go-Between, “Love Goes On,” and he’s got the chops and faith to make me believe it.

True to its title, Playing Favorites is still, despite the varied palette, obviously a Sheer Mag album and not without its share of more or less straightforward, beat-up-leather-jacket rockers. More or less, because even these often push the band’s sonic parameters.

Infinite Dissolution paints with the boldest of rockist strokes and then tears them all down again.

The songwriting and arrangements are uniformly strong, seemingly effortless and clever.

Jurado may not be as concrete or direct as he has been in the past, but his ability to conjure emotion is still very, very strong.

Real Warmth, her seventh album and sixth for No Quarter, is an authentically emotive rejoinder to the all too prevalent practice of pretend empathy.

Coding emotional experience into sound is what this stuff is all about, and Jones nails it again and again.

You get the impression that the artist is truly a giving soul, even if his gift is in the form of an emotionally wrenching, uncomfortably confessional record.

Raum shows that they can still make it happen, vast swatches of sound, space and symbol coalescing along paths toward those points in time when Tangerine Dream sounds like no one else.