Jenny Lewis has reached her troubadour phase. She’s telling tales like never before, singing live in the studio while charismatically leading a band that includes elder statesmen like Benmont Tench and Don Was, not to mention cameos from Ringo Starr, Beck, and Ryan Adams (recorded before the allegations against him emerged).

It’s quintessential Jeff Rosenstock—an album formulated around evergreen sociopolitical concerns yet sounds like it could’ve been written 30 minutes ago.

His latest, Way Out Weather, is the fully formed pinnacle of his career.

Even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation.

If This Is How You Smile was the complete house tour of Lange’s psyche, Far In is more like an afternoon barbeque in the backyard. It doesn’t tell as complex of a story, but you’re more than happy to hang out in the sun for a while and enjoy his company.

Kempner has a knack for these odd little about-turns that elevate Dry Food above the usual plainspoken acoustic indie fare.

Royal Headache have taken steps forward since their last album--they’ve cleaned up their production and diversified their songwriting. Ultimately, though, the important bits are intact: the passion, the power, and the hooks that demand being shouted joyfully.

The chemistry has changed, the music is harder, the frustration's more palable, and you can hear that this is some kind of a make-or-break moment. And this time they made it-- just.

It turns any living room into an art installation where interesting things may or may not happen, and its lack of direction and specificity is in its own way brave.

Between their respective spotlight turns, both musicians are on equal footing, challenging and surprising one another, and their listeners, with music that feels alive and wondrous.

Girls Can Tell is more mature and accomplished, but at the expense of the spark of spontaneity.

Snakes for the Divine shows that metal, in its most basic and elemental forms, still has plenty of visceral thrill left in it--as long as it's done right. And High on Fire do it right.

It's cacophonous and polyrhythmic, continuously falling apart and putting itself back together.

More than a continuation of that trajectory, Three Futures feels like a quantum leap. There are more voices, more perspectives.

From end to end, Rakka thrives on instability and the fear it fosters. Its beats lock into a grid for only a minute or so at a time, allowing you just enough space to settle into a groove before dropping you into some cacophonous abyss.

There is still something magnificent about what Gibbons, Penderecki, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra have accomplished here: They have managed to make the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” feel dark, even dangerous.

Shall Noise Upon is a great record, and an impossible one to digest in just one sitting. That's hardly a problem, though, because coming back to it is so rewarding.

In many ways, Thrashing Thru The Passion is so alive and elated that, if not for Hold Steady’s well-documented track record, it could be mistaken for the work of a band just hitting its peak.

It’s clear that the pleasure isn’t in the novelty of these two forces aligning. The pleasure is in the groove, in the quiet confidence of Liv.e and Riggins making such a curious record, in the way it sneaks up on you and commands your attention.

These songs feel personal. They tug at important moments. It's a quietly masterful, emotionally rich work. Of all their records, it's ultimately the one that sounds the most like the image their band name evokes.

Motion Graphics’ contradictions--simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant--make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt.

The drums are the most overt scaling-up device throughout the album. Carey often slowly brings songs to a crescendo and then proceeds to play around or against them with all his strength. As captured in Whitesel’s immaculate recordings, unburied in the studio haze that cloaks most of Bon Iver’s records, this approach is arresting: something like Glenn Kotche drumming for Def Leppard. Vernon’s voice, too, comes into sharper focus. .... The greatest foil to Vernon’s voice, though, is Wasner’s electric guitar.

If the sound of Short n’ Sweet is occasionally fuzzy, its sense of humor is diamond-sharp.

The Evens positively brims with revelations, not least of which is the consistent effectiveness of MacKaye's singing voice.

As a collection of tunes, Look Now is a triumph for Costello, a showcase for how he can enliven a mastery of form with a dramatist’s eye. But as an album, Look Now is a success because of the Imposters.

Sundowning is an empowering listen, and Lukic's roars force you to reckon with what's raw inside yourself.

Daughters’ accessibility is directly proportional to their uncompromising compositional choices—hypnotic dissonance, martial drums cranked to incapacitating volumes, scathing vocal repetition, all rendered through impossibly vivid production. This is not music interesting in growing on you: it consumes and dominates.

Sonic Youth were always a very social band—supporting fellow musicians, self-releasing records with fans in mind, and generally making people feel part of an informal club that the four members provided a soundtrack for. In that sense, In/Out/In is as Sonic Youth as it gets.

The record also feels like an important moment in time marked on a door frame--it's an intriguing peek into the restless, youthful development of King Krule.

Rarely does dark doubt sound quite so inviting.

Unexpectedly, though, some of the record's best moments come when Byrne strips away the rhythmic accessories and relies on basic orchestral backing... And yet, the majority of the album still relies on primal, swinging grooves.

This is a band that absolutely revels in the possibilities suggested by its obsidian thrills, no matter the potential changes in the audience’s size and scope. Down Below is about death and hell, sure, but it’s proudly, defiantly not meant for an underground anymore.

Water Made Us is dextrous and steady. It conjures a profound sweetness from ordinary musings and takes the guile out of relationships.

Rae is at her most delightful balancing camp and sincerity on starry-eyed numbers in which all the world’s a stage.

Though thoroughly enjoyable, the album isn't always riveting, either, and occasionally the attention does stray.

As ever, Ragon's lyrics are highly evocative if not outright provocative.

Now all parts of Shepherd are on display, the scientist-DJ-producer-jazz-musician who can have his cake and eat it, too.

In its minimalist opacity and Vantablack depths, it’s the polar opposite of Goblin’s playfully neon-hued approach, and it’s in going to that extreme that Yorke has made Suspiria his own.

The particulars of the feelings evoked here will vary from one set of ears to another, but above all, Knoxville offers an opportunity to lose yourself in a rush of highly detailed and overpowering sound. And the spaces it builds come across as beautiful and celebratory, no matter how crazy things get.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

The warmth of Infinite Moment radiates from its symbiotic growth of melancholy and hope. Willner doesn’t privilege one over the other, but allows them to knit together, watching from a distance to see the shapes they might take.

Even while making a turn towards formalism, Golden Retriever remain as inventive as ever. Rotations is also richly emotional.

Sunn O))) is a behemoth, a leviathan, a statement of purpose worthy of the late-career self-titling gamble. Despite that, maybe because of it, I can’t imagine wanting to listen to it more than once every few years.

They’re effortlessly in sync, belying their limited experience collaborating with each other.

Isn’t It Now? also retains the band’s knack for defamiliarizing their influences, in the same way that Sung Tongs could make you feel like you were hearing a guy strumming an acoustic guitar for the first time in your life.

With the help of Nathan Jenkins, aka producer Bullion, Westerman achieves a synthesis of these previous experiments, fusing together whimsical curiosity and technical proficiency. Over a backdrop made of the sounds of the past, his lucid yet uncomplicated lyrics interrogate the uncertainty of the present.

What’s unique to Exile is the unreal world of the Outer Ring, which is as well developed in the music as it is in the lyrics and videos.

Reality Testing stands as one of the year's best, most luxuriant, and accomplished electronic albums, more proof that when it comes to forging a new future out of what’s already taken place, Cutler remains at the top of his game.

LC! have never sounded so muscular or crafted melodies as instantly memorable.

Lala Belu rings out with the resilience of a onetime dreamer who’s absorbed disappointment and settled for something close to optimism.

Thorn refuses to see an ending as the end on Record, and the results are wickedly funny and relevant to listeners of all ages.

Unlike the spiteful divinity that stalks these songs, Hayter’s music is full of reverence and empathy for our most challenging task: to be human.

He manages to convey the same exuberance and spirit in his own music that he hears in his favorite old tunes.

Each song on Glasshouse has its own distinct aesthetic; unlike her previous albums, 2012’s Devotion and 2014’s Tough Love, there are no songs here that could be confused for each other, none that seem an afterthought carved from the greater mood of the album.

Rise’s “You Know It Ain’t” expands the spoken-word interludes of Black Is into a full song. While these moments can feel heavy-handed at other times, here the humor is welcome and specific.

It's probably his most immersive single release--or album, or mixtape, or emanation, or whatever--in a year and a half, better than both Based God Velli and I'm Gay.

Smart but never intellectual, given more to the words we use over the words we know, Newman peppers these stories with little references to the Great Migration, climate change (the swells on Willie’s beach keep getting bigger), global politics, and American myth.

His music is of the wholly sensual, painfully physical kind, and with Held he triumphantly translates his bruised intimacy to full-length format without losing any of its skin-prickling power.

Read is full of great, idiosyncratic house tracks and Jummy is packed with them.

Flying Club Cup would be a triumph even with those layers stripped away; that's not to say that the cultural patina obscures the "real" songs underneath, but its removal allows us to sidestep mind-numbing questions about authenticity and intention.

The uptempo tracks are breezy and chill; the ballads are lush and deeply felt.

MADE might be a small album, one that never musically ventures outside Scarface's comfort zone, but it's a heavily personal work from someone with a whole lot to say.

It was sometimes unclear when Stereolab's mid-century references were meant as kitsch, but here, Gane & co.'s retro-futurist flashback feels optimistic, as though convinced that the key to fulfilling the promise of a new era were just one perfect rhythm away.

The tension between artifice and reality is what gives Seth Bogart most of its conceptual heft, but it obviously helps that the album is very fun to listen to.

If you're a lifelong garage-rock purist or just enjoy the occasional Jay Reatard track, there's a good chance you'll get a lot of mileage out of Help. It's hard not to: This is like meat and potatoes prepared by a master chef--totally familiar but utterly delicious.

If his tales feel like strangers’ snapshots found in a box at the flea market, his songs have an equally vintage tint, shot through with a déjà vu quality that makes them feel like you’ve heard them before, but can’t quite place where.

Ross knows his lane and stays in it on Teflon Don.

Glitter and Doom Live is not simply a souvenir of a tour most fans didn't attend but a de facto greatest hits of Waits' fourth decade of music, during which his gnarly adventurousness didn't wane but only intensified.

While alternating between derivative and rudimentary, On!Air!Library! is nevertheless well executed in its obviousness.

On Time Out of Time makes the billion-year-old buzz of two neutron stars into something heart-stirring.

Mise En Abyme hunts that sensation of flux and liminality, unearthing warmth in a landscape of paranoia.

For all the album's wandering spirit, the first eight tracks on Push the Sky Away are neatly structured into two complementary, four-song halves that mirror one another.

Still Brazy solidifies YG as a torch-bearer for west coast gangster rap.

It's a strange and forgiving album, less toothsome than the ones that preceded it, but Musgraves' resistance makes this album important, even when it's imperfect.

For a technically sophisticated record that doesn’t have a great deal of dynamic range, EARS has a surprisingly strong emotional tug.

Even if this is an album that defies obvious lineage and needs a roadmap to uncover the specific sources from Joe Barrite's archive, there's an inescapable sense of emotional impact here.

Building off a simple guitar note, the record’s slow-burning title track is perhaps the band’s greatest accomplishment yet.

Curious, constantly in motion, full of puzzle-like counterpoints and arresting chord changes, it's a joy to listen to, and one of the brightest, most invigorating records I've heard all year.

Treble and Tremble showcases a full array of old-school remedies, from inventive mic'ing and overdubbing to brutal filters and bullhorn distortion a la Mark Linkous of Sparklehorse. If Espinoza sang any better than he does, he'd probably be bored in the studio.

Little Wide Open is the most cohesive, tuneful and cleanly drawn album of Morby’s career.

It’s tricky to praise music so clearly based on form and balance. Comma isn’t filled with a mind-warping atmosphere you’ve heard nowhere else, it’s not an invitation to meditate or do yoga, and it probably won’t make you cry. It offers something ineffable that I can best call a “presence,” and its ability to center you in the here and now is, in its own low-key and meticulous way, overwhelming.

Granted, it's not mind-blowing, and it's not nearly as masterfully executed and affecting as their earliest work. But there are only a handful of bands out there that can put out an album as well-constructed as Rock Action and still expect people to bitch and moan about it.

Akoma radiates cool, simmering control. There’s never any doubt that each percussive element and textural glint has landed precisely where Patton intended, yet this samurai-precise music is as unpredictable as a shroomy Ricardo Villalobos odyssey.

Her mesmerizing, eventful, and strange album brings these remote voices close enough to feel their breath in our ears.

The album anticipates the year’s mood: restive, anxious, sometimes antagonistic, and above all, searching. Beneath its rockslides of wrong notes lies the conviction that a different kind of order is possible. Dorji’s other albums may be more soothing or more conventionally beautiful, but none feel better suited to the exigencies of the present moment than this one.

It is perfectly sequenced, mysterious and moody. For a debut album, the fully-formed nature of their songwriting, sublime pacing and monolithically tasteful atmosphere is remarkable.

While Why There Are Mountains reminded me of what those records [Perfect From Now On or The Moon and Antarctica] sounded like, Lenses Alien does something more difficult by reminding what it felt like once they were over and you were left to wonder if you just stumbled upon a cosmic, philosophical treatise disguised as an indie rock record.

Dorji’s music is rapturously motivational, bolts of pure feeling that at least make me want to be a better citizen of the world. It is perennially honest about the long odds of the struggles that inspire it, too, how the work of fixing this place is never done.

It’s a reminder that any redemption must first reconcile the lessons of our history, to learn from the mistakes that led to misfortune. It’s also a testament to the beauty of resilience; as an indictment of power, it elicits inspiration rather than depression. This is music that makes you feel less alone in your rage, a chorus to join with your anger and frustration, a funnel to channel that energy.

Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits.

And though In Stormy Nights-- with its numerous false leads, over-the-top presentation and undisguised self-indulgence-- can hardly be said to be a perfect work, one has to admire and celebrate Ghost's determination never to step in the same river twice.

Banhart's disinterest in obvious narratives is, for now, his greatest strength.

Minor quibbles and missteps aside, Body Talk Pt. 2 is a perfectly solid-- and occasionally awesome-- record.

They may not be doing anything especially new, but Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings are the very best at what they do, and they've made another excellent album.

There’s little of Future’s jadedness. If in the past Thug has made everyday experiences seem chaotic and formless, his achievement here is distilling the murky waters of young love and lust into vital, undeniable pop.

Total Control make an EP of curveballs sound puzzlingly coherent thanks in no small part to their fine craftsmanship.

Hippo Lite can be thrillingly episodic, like the oddest edges of the Raincoats’ Odyshape or contemporaries such as Palberta.

At a time when some ambient music can feel like it’s drafted solely for inclusion on a “chill” playlist to anesthetize the overworked, Cantu-Ledesma’s explorations have been steering towards deeper waters. On Tracing Back the Radiance, his most profound work to date, he finds them.