Shabazz Palaces deserve credit where it’s due for building their sound outward; if Black Up established their status as hip-hop outliers, then Lese Majesty solidifies their place in the pantheon of rap’s oddball geniuses.

As its title suggests, Quixotism’s narrative arc is obscure, and as such the album contains no real highlights or low points; instead, each part maintains a discrete identity of its own, serving both as groundwork for each subsequent part and the basis for its counterpoint.

The Man Who Died In His Boat is, to put it simply, more of the same--and whether that’s a worthy thing for an album to be is largely down to your view on this period of Grouper’s output. For what it’s worth, it’s absolutely fine by me.

Nobody's denying Herndon's ambition and technical chops, but the goals of this album--however successfully they might be achieved--are often unappealing; the sonic outcomes, regrettably, a little dull.

It’s not there yet, but Beast Mode is an excellent place to start.

Cutler’s music hasn’t tended to concern itself with tension so much as otherwordly harmony. When he introduces a bit of friction--between the real and the imagined, the grit of life and the sheen of fantasy--the results are all the more seductive.

In Visa, Ripatti has constructed an album evocative of one extremely specific place--and it’s a place which couldn’t have been accessed by anybody but him.

By taking electronic to mean, largely, removed introspection, WIXIX might be the one example of a guitar band who, by fully embracing electronica, have regressed.

Vernon guest-spots aside, though, To See More Light matches its predecessor in terms of quality.

Patience (After Sebald) is an unnervingly quiet album.

This album is a good example of how to revive twenty-year-old sample relics and construct new, wildly dilapidated material from them like they were so much reclaimed timber.

Thundercat sprung The Beyond / Where The Giants Roam on us unexpectedly, but in its surprise and brevity is the awakening of his voice.

Whilst My Name Is My Name has one of the best selections of beats on a major label rap album in years, and Pusha’s enunciations are still as sonically potent as a decade ago, his singularity largely comes across as a stubborn resistance to change in the face of how ambitious the LP (and so much new rap, frankly) sounds, and suffers from a tracklist too concerned with features to allow this singularity to reign supreme anyway.

If Dagger Paths was a revelation, Engravings is a refinement, long to arrive but worth the wait.

If anything, they illuminate an increasingly formulaic approach that, in its attempt to express extremes of human emotion, ends up saying not very much at all.

While the lyrical content can be a little prescriptive in places, all of Womack's contributions are frank, honest and humble

With this record Laurel Halo has created a strong work that, while being notable and challenging for its unusual, compact combination of pop, ambience and musique concrète, is also immersive and enjoyable for this exact reason.

Rather than limiting this EP's scope, restricting it to the use of only one synthesizer allows Terje's innate quirkiness and sense of humour even more room to maneuver.

I Shall Die Here is a bracing listen, certainly no easier than The Body’s conventional albums, and in its application of intense studio treatment, at times perhaps even more intense. But it is also a whole lot better than The Body’s 2013 album for Thrill Jockey, Christ, Redeemers.

Rich and disorientating, KOCH accesses a different pace of life--or rather several, bewilderingly, all at once.

Despite its patchier moments, fIN's effective command of light and shade make for an involving listen, and it's a sound that's pretty much Talabot's own.

Future’s lyrical sensitivity wouldn’t work without the album’s pitch-perfect production.

Kill For Love matures with each listen, and there's enough craftsmanship at work to more than compensate for the more listless moments.

Though the songs on Swisher are occasionally a little too long--even the shortest is more than five minutes, and ‘Andrew’ nearly 10--they’re mostly dynamic and varied enough that boredom never really has the chance to set in.

While it may take until the next album for these darker elements to be as rewardingly complex as Wilner can be, it’s still an immersive trip.

This timid spike ['Afterlife'] in urgency is short-lived, swallowed whole by closer ‘Supersymmetry’ and its 11 genteel minutes of caressing synth-loops and mental nothingness, completing perfectly what is an utterly tangential statement.

Bestial Burden, remarkably, achieves exactly what it sets out to do: to turn the gory inner mechanics of the body outward, and lay bare its unpredictable capacity for self-destruction.

While My Krazy Life is YG’s debut, it feels more like an album-length celebration of Mustard’s ratchet revolution, a sound distilled from LA G-Funk, Atlanta snap and Bay Area hyphy.