Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition.

This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away.

Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic.

Its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back.

Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone.

The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

On Appreciation, Horse Feathers’ sixth full-length, that introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of both Stax-era soul and the country-fried sound of Doug Sahm and the Flying Burrito Brothers. While the looser grooves can deflate the tension, they also frame Ringle’s world-weariness in terms that are directed, finally, at us.

Tear aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness.

Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.

The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.

There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves.

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

What makes Hundreds of Days so special, though, is how often it hits ambient music’s sweetest spot--a place where the world slows down and the performer’s free-floating noise makes you appreciate everything around it.

Rausch, though hardly topical, feels current, as jarring and revealing as last night’s nightmare.

Where Malkmus’ solo work has sometimes walked the fine line between too detached or too self-satisfied, the record cartwheels over it with the assurance of an artist who’s correctly assumed that so long as he’s enjoying himself enough, others will too.

It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie.

Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.

True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable. The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making.

With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance.

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently.

Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich.

These songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought.

It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.

SR3MM ends up being their clearest personal statement yet, finding their voices almost coincidentally.

It’s sexy like the Stones, and, in moments, unbearably tender. But it’s also funnier than anything the Stones ever did, and infinitely more self-deprecating.

Dove’s punchy ruefulness benefits from sparkling production by Tom Gorman and Paul Q. Kolderie, with whom Donelly has been working since her time in Throwing Muses.

On Good Thing, Bridges has kept his heart on his sleeve but updated his parlance to something a little less affected, a little more believable.

While Lost Friends’ slow-building ascents and soaring choruses function as necessary release valves for the unrest bubbling up from Joy’s lyrics, over the course of 12 tracks, a certain identikit quality takes hold.

Lanois and Funk demonstrate that even the briefest pause can reveal a more becalmed state of being lying just beneath all the noise and bustle.

Its pieces are beautiful and always different, and yet always the same, generic without losing character.

On Beyondless, Iceage reach for grandeur with more tenacity and suspending energy than ever.

There are elegant touches like this on each of Hollow Ground’s 10 songs, resulting in an album whose familiar melodies don’t demand your full attention but earn it anyway.

Rebound isn’t seismic—longtime fans will have no trouble cozying up to many of these songs. There are elements, however, that separate the album from its predecessors and suggest some tentative movement toward a new way of working.

If Knock Knock is a more conventional album than the more psychedelic and twisted Amygdala, it’s also a more affecting one. The fact that some of the guests appear more than once (Murphy gets two turns, as does Sophia Kennedy, the vocalist who released her strong debut album on Pampa last year) lends cohesion, and the production is extra lush.

At times it’s almost impressive how long an album called Beerbongs & Bentleys can go without cracking a smile. It is more assured and impressive than its predecessor, Stoney, but it’s also more exhausting.

Monáe has given us a pop record that feels gleefully youthful, perhaps even the album she wishes she could have had as a teen in Kansas City. The songwriting is precise if not always flawless.

Taken together with her other albums, it’s a part of a motley crew of modes that is shaping Princess Nokia into a great experimentalist. On its own, it lacks the completeness of a coherent project of genre hybridization, and lacks a standout single on the level of, say, “Tomboy” or “Kitana.”

There’s a palpable joy to these performances that distinguishes this album from its two immediate predecessors, even as its kinship with Roll With the Punches and Versatile underscores how Van Morrison’s latter-day music is all about the present moment.

Grid of Points burrows back into ambiguity, the vocal harmonies overlapping in foggy indeterminacy even when they are unaccompanied by any other instrument. And yet they are more heavenly than ever, Harris’ melodies drifting in almost liturgical directions.

Lavender ripples with the densest, most expansive production yet recorded under the Half Waif name. The album’s lyrics might stand out first because they are sung so clearly and with so much urgency, but Plunkett accomplishes a difficult feat in welding her voice to her backing tracks so that each song emerges as a singular organism.

The album suggests a full story, but it still seems paradoxically fragmentary. After its slow burn fades, after our hero has returned home, what’s best about Conquistador might be the sense of possibility it poses.

Forth Wanderers, their Sub Pop debut, feels like the end of the montage and the beginning of something real.

While Twerp Verse offers no tune as stick-like-glue as Foil Deer’s “The Graduates” or Major Arcana’s “Plough” it offers compensatory pleasures.

There are ways to hear this album as both damning or redemptive, depending on the perspective. But it is never sanctimonious, and it is constantly breathtaking.

A wonderfully poignant album that leaves you wanting more, The Four Worlds is proof that restraint can sing louder than excess.

They may have no trouble getting creative musically, but their lyrical content isn’t quite as inventive.

Competent but not always compelling.

It’s substantive enough to warrant its extended genesis and boost Sleep’s legacy, not just reaffirm it.

The bluntness of Monroe’s lyrics lends depth to the self-portrait she sculpts in these songs, revealing just how much she longs for and cherishes human connection.

4/876 is as professional, good-natured, and helplessly uncool as its billing promises.

Primal Heart is a collision of hard electronics with light sprinkles of au courant R&B making for Kimbra’s most mainstream statement yet. ... However, her most ambitious efforts don’t quite reach their apex, causing her somewhat cocky assertions to land flat.

If the original recordings of Tonight’s the Night are a honey and hash-soaked lamentation, Roxy: Tonight’s the Night Live is a salve for such palpable tragedy in the grand tradition of a live communion.

The back half of the album becomes harder to pin down, as Ras G switches up styles every few minutes.

KOD, with its stripped-down production, snare-drum flows, and focus on virtue and vice, can feel like a pale shadow of DAMN. Unlike the Pulitzer winner, Cole is far more predictable and accessible.

Paradox exists as a conduit between a dreamed history and a fantasized future, a place formed of nothing more than fragments that evoke a past that seems more mysterious than the present. If the end result is as light as a feather or as memorable as a breeze, that’s also the point.

This blunt narrative ought to sound contrived, but Hardy’s gift for delicate phrasing is defiantly alluring.

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

But where their previous three albums translated that dynamic into emotionally-charged metal, Eat the Elephant assumes the form of a gloomy adult-alternative record flush with grand pianos, classical strings, and slackened tempos.

The layers of sound Taylor presents are sumptuous, full of tossed-off licks of piano and guitar that gather into motifs more deluxe than his recent solo work but far scruffier than Hot Chip. Tucked into them, Taylor’s lyrics make strange but welcome bedfellows.

The project’s overall cohesiveness and clarity of purpose make it almost movie score-like, yet there’s no part of the album that’s intended to underline anything but Jiha’s compelling musicianship. That is what makes Communion so easy to listen to. It’s creative and singular in a way that’s soothing, not alienating.

The artistry of her voice lies in those moments of versatility and charisma, but they’re too isolated across Joyride to land with the kind of impact they deserve.

The individual performances are gut-punching in their potency. ... But the discrete presentation of the songs sucks them dry, with the abrupt fade-outs robbing the album of any in-the-room ambience and natural momentum.

Nearly every highlight, however, feels hermetically sealed--produced in a vacuum and unable to feed into or connect with the others. It turns Song for Alpha into a catch-all for Avery’s disparate experiments, something that less resembles a fully realized album than a dynamic, robust playlist from a seasoned DJ taking a break from the road.

It arrives at this whole in a sneaky way, and it manages to avoid feeling like a concept album, or like anything else Mouse on Mars, or anyone, have done.

Throughout this album, the band generally keeps within its sweet spot of familiar, wistful progressions complemented by Kim’s interior detailing. But that’s not to say it’s without brave moments.

The album probably doesn’t need to be 100 minutes long. Its length might have worked better if he had more neatly divided its 18 tracks into a right-brain and left-brain side, rather than breaking up its flow by zigzagging between satin-finish soul and misted minimal house. But the few surprises scattered along the way that make its unpredictable course feel worthwhile.

What unfolds is a kind of Great American Songbook approach to Johnny Cash, traversing the country and western, mountain bluegrass, blues, and Scotch Irish balladeer range of his own work.

The Messthetics is a carefree, low-stakes endeavour for its participants; recorded live off the floor in Canty’s practice room, the album captures two old pals communing with a new one, exploring the potential of their developing dynamic and sculpting ideas into song-like shapes.

Breakbeats have become fashionable again, so a dusted-off track like “Undone” doesn’t sound quite as dated, with Paradinas playfully bouncing between tympani boom, percolator bip, and dramatic background strings. ... But “Bassbins” also shows that the more aggro and cartoonish take on it (which anticipated the rise of breakcore) remains out of fashion for good reason.

In one sense, The Other is a logical extension of its predecessor’s more lustrous moments, like the jangly acoustic outlier “Eyes of the Muse” and the stargazing ballad “Staircase of Diamonds.” But the execution here is more sophisticated—and the overall tone far more serious.

The Deconstruction produces no eccentricity, pop smarts, orchestral creativity, or emotional revelation.

The album’s just a little over half-an-hour long, and it’s all of a piece, conveying casual imagery that meanders from the hands-in-pockets wistfulness of drifting and kicking on trash cans (“Knockin’ on Your Screen Door”) to turning on the TV and looking out your window. Throughout, he has a virtuoso grasp of understatement.

Pinned reels in some of APTBS’s famous noise, but it doesn’t budge Ackermann from his station as a long-standing rock’n’roll archivist.

There’s Always More at the Store showcases a few new wrinkles to his sound while also reminding us that he can also easily bang out a cool beat, too.

Each note and phrase on the album is colored to depict this struggle. The instrumentation is bracing, almost as if played live for a crowd, but it has the intimate tenor and tone of Saba recording the entire thing alone in his basement.

Her lyrical tricks are unexpected and endlessly quotable .

Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present.

It’s an overridingly pleasant listen, but that pleasantness is too often maintained by featureless production and other manifestations of Misch’s risk-averse instincts.

If adult critics really loved this stuff, the Xanarchy team would no doubt feel they’d made a wrong turn somewhere. It’s punk, or it’s the thing people who don’t really know what “punk” means call “punk,” or it’s a dog whistle meant to sail over the heads of the the elderly (i.e. anyone over 24).

Isolation is a star turn from an artist who has proven she’s ready for it.

For all the songwriting strides Molleson makes on Loud Patterns, the album’s carefully sculpted beatscapes ultimately result in a reactionary act of noise.

The production on the album is sumptuous and varying. A record daring enough to produce the buzzing “Bartier Cardi,” the R&B-infused “Ring,” and the quiet prowler “Thru Your Phone,” Invasion of Privacy never shrinks away from a potential risk, delivering hugely satisfying payoffs.

Sex & Food is best in this spaced-out zone, where alienation sounds genuinely alien. The record’s disembodiment is precisely what makes it intriguing and, occasionally, unlistenable.

At 19 tracks in length, their debut appears daunting but proves to be light and accessible, with plenty of offbeat wit and many an unexpected twist down gothic country roads.

Moosebumps will make aging hip-hop fans very happy. But new listeners are unlikely to come running at the good doctor’s call.

Fans of big, stadium-swinging hooks might find Sister Cities a sparser, more introspective affair than they prefer, but the band seems okay with leaving South Philly basements behind and seeing more of the world.