Even if tracks like “Can I Go On” or “RUINS” don’t manifest themselves as solidly as some of the others, they’re still interesting, well-constructed, complete thoughts. The Center Won’t Hold is a Sleater-Kinney record not only because their name is on the cover, but because all of the elements you first fell in love with are still here.

The Waterfall stalls the most during the usually incendiary guitar workouts. But this is Jim James accepting where he and My Morning Jacket are at the moment: a bit older, a bit broken, more skeptical but very much among the living.

Here Segall and his band perform the songs pretty much as written, only louder. It isn't Segall's best record, but it's worthwhile if only in that it documents the whole crew playing together at the peak of their ability.

Live at the Gluepot is more immediately impressive [than the new compilation], just in terms of sheer speed and momentum.

It’s not necessary to know the originals to enjoy his interpretations, but it allows you to appreciate them more.

Fever Hunting is a record of intense, personal reckoning, but one that doesn’t waste your time with concerns that are anything less than universal.

On his best effort yet, I Love You, Urick's dub obsessions have moved to the front of the room.

The allusions thrum just beneath the surface of these vivid songs, as if to suggest that specific moments of music can get us through hard times or even just move us a little further down the road.

John Talabot's DJ-Kicks entry isn't the flashiest mix you'll encounter this year, and there's plenty of room for debate as to whether it ranks in the upper echelon of the series' many installments.

Constantly varied yet consistent to her core sound, Love Hallucination is Lanza’s most fleshed-out album to date. She simply sounds more comfortable luxuriating in it all.

Man’s Best Friend is so committed to the part that it begins to approach self-parody—“I bet your light rod’s, like, bigger than Zeus’” is not Carpenter’s best work—but mostly it’s sublime.

It’s a brief rush, at a hair over 27 minutes, but covers a remarkable amount of ground. And as a blueprint for a new, pan-African pop music, it is thoroughly convincing.

The Shadow Gallery hits so strong and so true, staying this particular course for a little while longer shouldn't bother anyone.

Say hello to Allo Darlin': a welcome reminder that any aversion to cutesy music in recent years may have been due not to the aesthetic, but the quality.

The 12 compositions that make up Information have evolved his sensual, liquid style into one that distills the contradictory logics of the digital age—it’s tense, airless, and paranoid without losing an inch of his comic swagger or mischievous irony, a sensibility cultivated by bone-deep cultural exhaustion.

Like all of her best work, it finds new ways to provoke, and new parts of your brain to light up.

A record of overwhelming deconstruction and newly explored territorial demarcation.

The groove takes precedence over the words, and Murphy gives his studio meticulousness over to the energy of the group. The synths run bright and juicy. The bass sounds like it could knock you out if you stood too close. The drums hit fast and sharp. Murphy slips from his throne as record-geek auteur and dissolves into the group--one musician among many, and better for it.

Sixteen meaty songs strong, the album is part slightly-fictionalized tour diary, part rumination on unrealized success and finding fun in the day-to-day.

If there's emotional utility to be found in Epic Jammers, it's in how meditative, trancelike, and overwhelmingly positive this hour of music is.

The end result is easily the best Built to Spill album of the decade--an improbable late-career reawakening and heartening evidence that becoming dependable doesn't mean having to settle for being predictable.

For now, the musically and emotionally rewarding Anything in Return evokes the feeling of being young with options and in no hurry to figure it all out.

The Neon Skyline doesn’t require deep investment in its narrative to enjoy. Still, the closer you listen, the more rewarding it becomes.

For all of Dum and Mad's unebbing intensity--it never gets overbearing, it retains a dynamism through Shah's magnetic voice--she makes you want to stay in the darkness with her.

Phases isn’t as cohesive as her previous albums but, terrific and revelatory in its own right, it feels like a link between them, a trail of dropped clues to the creative process of the defiantly mercurial Olsen.

There’s nothing particularly wrong with This Old Dog, it’s more that DeMarco is keeping his sights low. Some people might appreciate this record more than his last two, with the extra refinement of the sound, others may prefer the earlier stuff, which had a bit more humor and with lyrics that painted more colorful pictures.

All in all this is a kinder, gentler Dinosaur-- you won't have another "Severed Lips", sorry--making a very solid album, one that finds the band gelling with half the fuzz.

While Bodies of Water are always noted for their vocal prowess, those guitar parts, like the fuzzy garage-rock figure that drives 'Under the Pines' alongside a psychedelic organ vamp, showcase a newfound muscularity to David's playing and riff writing.

While Drop the Vowels doesn't carry the game-changing nature of that album, the relative sonic variety it provides compared to Luxury Problems' expressively singular mindset makes for a solid introduction to one of contemporary techno's most consistently exciting collectives.

While this sense of riveting discovery isn’t fully achieved on “For David,” the album nonetheless offers a stunning journey into a vast, ink-black void.

Monch might flounder into familiar indie territory if his music weren't so lucid and lively.

Even the most direct songs here have a precision craftsmanship rarely heard in something that is still, at heart, a rock album.

The album’s best and most revealing tracks are those where James herself takes the mic, though she’s careful never to give away too much.

The resulting album incorporates considerably more atmospheric depth, including orchestral and keyboard overdubs. Pile are not growing soft, but they are growing.

Greys tear down everything they’ve ever known about making music, and piece it back together from the ragged-but-arresting wreckage. This dark incarnation of the band is one that their 2011 selves wouldn’t recognize—and they wear the change well.

Time and again he suggests that freedom itself is an act of improvisation, of imagination, that begins now: “We write our own story.” It’s in the context of these bigger ideas that Com lands some of his biggest gut-punches of all time, while rapping in his simpler, prize fighter mode.

The record’s best songs are imbued with real emotional weight.

Deerhoof are at both their most whimsical and most energetically approachable on Miracle-Level.

With the quality and effort put into this release, Def Jux and Aesop Rock have done what every EP should do, provide something of unique value and create anticipation for future releases.

It is an accomplished album full of puckish invention, singular production twists, and ambient murk that offers scintillating hints at where Jlin might go on her third album proper.

Awkward, youthful moments exist, but Women tire of them almost before you do. What's left are the best of post-punk ingredients: curiosity, noise, and sly artifice.

Many of the album's best songs seem to inspire comparisons with dancing: There is a connection to the idea of dance as liberation here, as Lloyd's blushing sincerity builds up potential energy, the nimble performance acts as a release valve.

Now he's breaking out with a full-length record that's more restrained, more skeletal, and often more mournful than anything he's done before, a metamorphosis from somebody who's had fans growing to expect them on the regular.

While no track dips below the quality line, the album lacks thematic fluidity and spark.

It’s rare to see a band as established as Electric Wizard come back from a slump with renewed vigor and a fresh shot of hellfire coursing through their veins, but with Time to Die, they’ve both surpassed expectations and proved that they’re still as vital as they ever were.

Perspective is the sound of an artist stretching herself and succeeding—not because of any embrace of the Western classical tradition, but because she challenges its norms so effectively.

Rather than muzzle their ferocity, the band's tight, tense dynamic amplifies the fuck-off stridency of their fourth LP, Castle Talk.

Unlike all previous Beastie Boys albums (with the possible exception of Licensed to Ill), To The 5 Boroughs sounds homogenous and singular in purpose-- dark, steel, and dirty like that incomplete Times Square station.

With Basar, they have assembled a vast glossary of fresh sounds, considerably enriching the language of contemporary dance music in the process.

What’s surprising--and thrilling--about their debut full-length, Constant Image, is that its social commentary would have felt just as timely at any point in the past 30 years.

For all its transcendent moments, Good News ultimately fails to hold together all that well as an album.

It can feel like Misty is in danger of spinning out, but for most of the album, what’s so impressive is the subtlety of his control. The band—including frequent collaborators Drew Erickson and Jonathan Wilson, plus a string quartet and eleven orchestra members—play with silvery poise and high drama. The characters may be odious and dissolute, but the way Misty sings about them is delightful.

The resulting album is an electric blend of unforgettable imagery, emotional depth, and lurid, sizzling pop-funk.

Like all Cat Power records, The Greatest is a mostly sad, heartbroken, hopeless, rainy-day affair; it just isn't damaged. For that reason, it's also going to gain her a lot of new fans.

Waterslide broadens Porridge Radio’s sound with honking synths, megaphones, horns, studio luxuries with the patina of junkyard grime—the influence of Rain Dogs smuggled into radio-friendly indie rock vis a vis Modest Mouse. Still, it’s Margolin alone who determines the trajectory of each song.

The result is another fantastic step forward, though not without some growing pains. In the transition from basement to studio, one component has yet to come into full focus: Baldi's voice.

Holley does with music what he’s done with visual art for decades: He collects our ugliest obscured objects and transforms them into singular reflections on our troubled world.

He winds up succeeding, thanks to the haunting quality hanging over much of Eternally Even, reflecting the tensions of 2016.

Watersports sounds terrific.

They may have changed up their game, but Dope Body still nail the sweet spot between savagery and self-awareness.

Their debut introduces a band that sounds confident and fully formed.

Her songs are like islands: self-contained, gorgeous little worlds where nothing is obvious—especially the genesis of love and its unsteady first steps.

Where Fiasco misses classic status is his sonic approach.

You can tell that these songs were shaped and sculpted and polished ten times over, the attention to detail and space a welcome step away from the often sloppy clumps of no-fi ruckus clattering up from garages and out of bedrooms everywhere right about now.

Follow-up Swisher doesn’t abandon the beauty of the duo’s earlier work (“Andrew” and “Rei” could easily be lifted from last year’s album) but it uses it more judiciously. This shift makes Swisher less immediately captivating but somehow more involving than its predecessor, establishing the ultimate core of the duo’s aesthetic somewhere deeper and altogether more mysterious.

As the band continues to evolve around and with her, Speedy Ortiz’s music finally sounds as complex as its leader dares to be.

Dulli's only got a set number of tricks up his sleeve, and Dynamite Steps deploys them all: the vocal soaring above the maelstrom of guitars (a trick he perfected back on the Whigs' 1965), the off-key croon that other singers might AutoTune, the delicate piano contrasting the gutter guitars, the sordid come-ons masking dark existential doubts, the sudden groove as if someone stepped on the gas.

That’s the surreal magic of Statik: pallid terror deceptively wrapped in an inviting soft-focus glow. If it’s not Cunningham’s best work, it may be his most quintessential, a true distillation of his ability to simultaneously attract and repulse.

Mourning in America and Dreaming in Color is more of a refinement than a deviation for Brother Ali, even though there's one prominent change that could set off questions.

It's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.

Thou are a blast even when Funck is digging into esoteric philosophy over the slowest riff you’ve ever heard, but it’s refreshing to hear them get real with themselves, jogging their music out of the enthralling but insular world they’ve created over the past 15-plus years.

Each track is fully realized, thoughtfully written, and prudently performed, rolled out with a steadiness that can become a little maddening after a handful of listens.

Organic and jubilant, it successfully weaves psych, world, rock, and folk traditions into something new and endlessly compelling.

Ultra is also Zomby’s most experimental record in ages.

At last, Young Widows sound less like a string of hyphenates and histories and more like their own demented, delightful selves.

The guests skillfully mold the originals into creations of their own, while still preserving some of the songs’ initial ideas.

It's tempting to call it one of the most messily brilliant things we'll see all year, but it can't, in good faith, be recommended to everyone: if the duo's buzzy neurosis was enough to drive some people nuts before, the raw jumping and nagging of Anxiety Always will sound to many like the shoddiest, most amusical sham to be held up as a masterpiece in many of our lives.

Like those first-wave rave producers, Arbez wants to have it all: to make listeners smile, shake their shit, and still walk away a little shaken by the music's intensity. Flashmob pulls off this near-impossible combo with more skill than even Vitalic's fans may have expected.

Stay Awake's neither a coda nor a collection of cast-offs or curios. In just over 10 minutes, the EP not only lays out five fresh TNV cuts worthy of any of their LPs, but throws a whole lot more of that "nuance" business all over the place.

Across the 40-minute album, Hunter emerges as a dexterous player and loose but imaginative composer. Rather than succumbing to the often corny tropes of new age music—mawkish melodies, pan flutes, chimes—she cleverly incorporates elements of contemporary R&B, pop, and jazz.

Estudando o Pagode is an impressive album, musically, conceptually, and lyrically, and the cast of musicians and singers Zé assembled delivers on his singular vision.

II is a perfectly balanced record, and its arrangements are so exact and delicate that it almost feels like one buzz of a doorbell or ring of a telephone could send the whole thing toppling over, splattering into useless bits.

The band's debut was kind of a crumpled, nicotine-smudged affair, but Atlanta feels brighter, less muddled, not polished but certainly tidier around the edges. Smith's voice remains a friendly, mid-range yawp-- emotionally precise if not always entirely on-key.

Blood Bank certainly dispels concerns that Vernon's accomplishment was somehow environmental--that "For Emma's" poetic circumstances, and not its contents, were responsible for its success.

The record’s best songs, like birth, feel hard-won and revelatory—journeys that might take place on a single physical plane, but expand psychically outward, broadening the spectrum of beauty, personhood, and existence.

Wild Loneliness is the natural endpoint of this long interrogation—the product of a band whose confidence in their own reason for being feels like a beacon.

With huge, ballooning vocals and a shit-kicking rhythm section, the record consistently threatens to pop its own feeble seams; by carefully shuffling away from their past outings, The Von Bondies have produced a booming sonic statement that's far more glam than garage, and a lot less "Detroit" than we've been trained to expect.

The Clearing feels lovingly erected, fashioned bit by bit.

The tape plays like a final installment, going out with a bang and saving some of the series' best for last.

Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.

Implosion brings out the best in each artist by highlighting their differences: Martin’s music comes off heavier than ever, while Fiedler’s fidgety rhythms are all the more dynamic.

Most of these pieces have a lot going on, designed for listeners who take pleasure in guiding their ear through each successive layer.

On More Issues Than Vogue, Michelle's third album, the performer and musician delivers her most affecting, skillful, and innovative record yet.

He typically sounds like David Allan Grier with amyl nitrate in the air. Our man raps in an "ohmygawd this is sooo ridiculous" tone that can make you either think he is a jackass or a jester. My instincts say it's the latter.

There's an impressive coherence on Derdang Derdang, showing how well ABO has developed an original and guiding aesthetic.

In addition to rounding up odds and ends, it's an important LP in its own right.

As producer, songwriter and persona, Dear has come into his own with Asa Breed, a bootstrapping album that not only reveals the miles walked, but an ambitious road map ahead.