Miss Anthropocene thrills when it reveals a refined, linear evolution of Grimes’ long-standing interest in rave nostalgia and alluring pop music from around the world.

Tip of the Sphere again rejects easy definitions and expectations, growing and surprising with every listen.

So naturally the big question now is if the rest of Get Color lives up to the promise of 'Die Slow.' The answer is that it does... kind of.

Drum's Not Dead is a majestic victory lap, and on all levels, a total fucking triumph.

A marvel of pure songcraft.

On Show Your Bones the Yeah Yeah Yeahs occupy only one corner of the territory they claimed on Fever, walking confidently in their own footsteps but without claiming any new ground.

No Burden is an uncommonly warm indie rock record.

Their most modest record to date. Think of Closer to Grey as an auteur’s niche art project—satisfying to the superfans, though not necessarily winning over new ones.

Surprisingly enough, the album’s highlight comes in “Sit Around the Fire,” which was surely Hopkins’ riskiest move. The deeply moving piano-synth track features the late spiritual leader Ram Dass speaking to a congregation in 1975.

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.

It’s another down-the-middle, crowd-pleasing Ryan Adams record at a time when that crowd was expecting him to bring the heat.

It's all delivered with sheer glee, and some of it is among the most wicked fun committed to record in 2015.

Even if Here, the band’s 10th album, finds Teenage Fanclub comfortable with their identity and largely uninterested in testing its boundaries, they still find some room for experimentation.

By putting old sounds into different contexts, Nite Jewel’s albums work as an exploration of a happier nostalgia. Because she takes a specific sound as her point of departure this time around, Real High is her most focused work yet.

Even at their most rigorous, these compositions manage to hold the listener close—a bare but rewarding intimacy.

The chaos comes on the very next track, “Grease in Your Hair,” one of a couple songs that performs the National’s old sleight of hand: working the anxiety around until they pull an anthem out of thin air. As a way to address one of the primary tensions in their catalog—writing songs about dissatisfaction in spite of great conventional success—it’s a great bit. But as Frankenstein moves from wrestling to reckoning, the swells are tamer.

While it's certainly enjoyable, it's also a bit more generic than anything they've done before.

Galás’ sense of dynamics is all the more moving when you sort of know how the song’s supposed to go.

There’s something nostalgic about Young, who feels much closer in spirit to the outspoken rebellion of Winehouse or Lily Allen than the puritanical, sober, “clean girl” stereotype of her generation.

Although Tchad Blake's mixing is a fabulous constant, his consistency means the weaker tracks are revealed for what they are: solid formula-followers lacking the elusive intangible charm that an unexpected note or rhythmic tic can bring.

His admirers will find this record beautiful in the strangest places, while his detractors might choose to see its occasional impenetrable gloom as a kind of desertion in itself.

There's enough of a sweet spot in the clean, backward-leaning production and offbeat samples to allow the record to distinguish itself as more than a sum of disparate parts.

For a collaboration between a songwriter and a producer who helped push her to the outer limits of her vision, Melody's Echo Chamber is an impressively immersive debut.

On Twisted Crystal, Guerilla Toss journey to the edge of the universe and grapple with the mysteries of human existence. Such adventures can be panic inducing, but here they conquer anxiety through curiosity, finding excitement and even solace in abstruseness.

Lungs is a cloud-headed introduction to Welch's world, where It Girl hype, coffins, violence, and ambition combust on impact; it's a platinum-shellacked demo reel drunk on its own hi-fi-ness.

One wouldn't expect Gibson's latest to bowl over any audiophile chasing the wow!-factor, but for the patient, contemplative listener, La Grande-- much like the campfire depicted on its cover-- is a record worth warming to.

Drift Code doesn’t sound like Talk Talk (nor anything that could be described as “post-rock”), but what it shares with the band’s best work is both the sense of being adrift in time and a meticulous approach to production. These arrangements flicker with intricate melodic detail and nonconventional instrumentation.

Matsson is both a romantic and a realist, and on The Wild Hunt, he uses the barest of pop-folk settings to give mundane moments--another break-up, another tour, another change of season, another Dylan comparison--a grandeur so disproportional that it's difficult not to identify and sympathize with him.

Usually, it’s easier to fit the pieces together if you’re familiar with the political references, or if you’ve already been living under colonialism’s yolk. But Shook feels more urgent, more arresting, with performances that draw you into their world.

There are bound to be uncomfortable moments listening to someone else’s therapy, but there are also passages of profound beauty and clarity amid the maelstrom.

Lotto gambles on TAGABOW’s ability to craft songs more compelling in their simplicity and vulnerability than their technical capabilities. By trading in their plastic sheen for a more ragged sense of real-life urgency, TAGABOW expose the tenderness at their music’s core: a refusal to anesthetize, an avowal to meet the bone where it breaks.

As far as improvements go, The Warning isn't so much a triumph as it is a reach in the right direction.

An album of sunlit melodies with the shadows of Detroit looming over it delivers more than expected; it’s not easy creating a doleful aftertaste that never quite dampens spirits, but Bonny Doon pull it off.

The tracks don't sound forced or awkward as they follow well-trod lyrical roads littered with wounded "you"s and "I"s, they sound honest, and an honest love song as always is hard to resist.

Hundred Waters are always set to simmer. That mostly works in their favor on The Moon Rang Like a Bell, as the album’s strength comes from its gradually accruing moments.

The slight nods to accessibility and the decreased stylization might disappoint some of the faithful at first, but Strange Geometry grows more appealing with repeated listening.

Is Collins fully recovered? Overlooking his ongoing physical struggles and instead focusing on Losing Sleep, the answer must be a resounding and inspiring yes.

If there's a gripe to be had with them, it's that a surface listen reveals a whole lot of lovely tones and not much else, and Autumn of the Seraphs is just as uniformly gorgeous and tasteful as any Pinback record.

They continually refined their punk-meets-post-rock sound and consistently moved with ease between loud chaos and contemplative quiet. The songwriting on Sorpresa Familia suggests a similar trajectory for Mourn. If they could survive label hell to make a record like this, who knows what they’ll be capable of next time around.

Featuring cements his legacy as a singular, eminent artist — a point he has made again and again and again, but he still sounds so good proving it.

Instead of drawing attention to their experimentation, Winged Wheel make those sonic paths feel completely natural, trusting us to follow along even if they’re not sure where they’re headed.

Like Orc before it, Smote Reverser can’t help but lose some of its power as it approaches the hour-long mark. ... But by that point, Oh Sees have put forth more than enough Progasaurus gusto to rightfully earn their capes.

What is most impressive about The Last Panthers is the way in which Clark has taken all of this incidental music and shaped it into a flowing 48-minute suite that conjures almost as much of an imagined visual story as The Last Panthers show itself.

His eighth album, Norm, is his most meticulous and beguiling, straying from his semi-autobiographical past work to span three perspectives and tactfully downplaying its philosophical quandaries with his lushest arrangements to date.

The King of Whys is never not magnificent, maybe too much for its own good–despite Kinsella’s unsparing account of his father's alcoholism and depression, the handclaps and chipper strumming of “A Burning Soul” could’ve made it a mid-‘90s college hit à la Guster.

The band’s music on Shape Shift is less straightforward than Transgender Dysphoria Blues. As a noisy, digressive follow-up to an anthemic rock record, it’s more a parallel to their audacious sophomore album As the Eternal Cowboy, and its relationship to their rumbling folk-punk debut Reinventing Axl Rose.

The whole album has a casual, freewheeling vibe, but it’s a testament to King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard’s unity that it holds together so well.

He’s so dedicated to synthesizing his most obvious influences--channeling Tyler, the Creator and N.E.R.D. down to their throat-clearing ad-libs and neo-New Jack funk--that he hasn’t quite established an identity of his own. That failing doesn’t dull the jams or diminish his evident potential, but it does hold him back.

“NO TITLE” is not without its mournful, meditative passages (could an interstitial track called “Broken Spires at Dead Kapital” be anything but?), but the album more frequently provides accessible and expedient pathways to its moments of communal ecstasy. It’s a record that welcomes you in rather than making you work for it.

Sanborn’s production clears space for her voice, building each song around it rather than contorting it to fit. He makes Wasner sound fully at home.

F&M's coy pose comes off as somehow original.

It's the album's end-to-end strength that speaks the most-- against hip-hop artists who fail to make solid albums and those rock idiots who say it can't be done.

Every card Gough plays is painfully transparent from the first time you play the disc. It's elementary stuff. It sounds manufactured, refined, cosmetic and sterile; in a word, silicone, like a pair of Badly Sculpted Breast Implants.

The Stills are what The Posies were in their day, and what The Libertines were a few minutes ago: stuck in a phantom zone called "not there yet," and possibly because the personalities of their influences eclipse any sense of identity they could muster.

Blur have finally found a sound to match their name.

The Dears, by and large, make tracks that would slide without much distinction onto any number of mid-90s albums, neither gumming up the works nor sounding particularly special.

Whereas her last album's smoothed-out eclecticism could be both daunting and empty, The Reminder is equally diverse yet more full-blooded.

The way that Everything Everything play against the macho, aggressive posturing of contemporaries who could care less about caring should be their strongest calling card.

All of those tracks work because they’re never played as straight genre experiments; they all sound first and foremost like Woods songs, even when they draw from a different vocabulary than any that came before.

Music has a way of conjuring a sense of intimacy between listener and artist, and La Maison Noir weaponizes that rapport without dismissing it. Noirwave may not be a movement but it is a force.

Loud isn’t their aim, and Plum’s special, big moments stand out against the quiet.

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.

An encouraging but ultimately disappointing contemplation of time's ceaselessness, love's promise, and Harvest-era Neil Young.

In execution, it's not too different from his previous works for the label. The music is busy and technique-intensive, but tuneful and meditative.

Bicep’s expansive production and compact song-lengths often lack the transportive and hypnotic potential that the best dance music offers. But it succeeds as a lean and consciously paced album.

While The Turning Wheel was originally planned for release in September of last year, its whimsical presentation and urgent, socially conscious lyrics give it a timeless feeling.

By culling from early releases and rescuing tracks from last year's tepid Drag It Up, the band showcases a surprisingly deep and ridiculously rich canon of loser anthems ("Wish the Worst"), dark ballads ("Salome"), odes to romantic doubt and suspicion ("The Other Shoe"), cowboy calls ("West Texas Teardrops"), and frenzied barnstormers ("Doreen")-- all written and played with generous humor and genuine exhilaration.

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

XOXO is a battle-scarred but unbroken collection, worthy of being filed alongside venerable mid-career milestones like Wildflowers and Time Out of Mind.

Black Hole Superette features some of his best compositions to date, a whittling down of his maximalist tendencies in favor of a more spacious sound that prioritizes wispy atmosphere over cluttered claustrophobia.

The Holy Pictures turns out to be very much a soundtrack--but one in which heart and mind prove to be as inspiring a source as any script Hollywood throws at him.

Ultimately, Constricting Rage will either prove redundant or ravishing.

It’s Shelton who confidently ties everything together and insinuates a larger story arc in the sequencing.

While most of the dance world continues to view the creation of a solid album discography as strictly optional, Signs Under Test is a strong entry that proves Tejada's quietly building up a legacy of excellence.

Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.

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

In addition to remasters of The Idiot and Lust for Life, Pop’s new boxed set loops in the decent if not great TV Eye Live (a live album originally released in 1978 to free Pop from his RCA contract), a disc of alternate mixes and edits, and three live discs all recorded in 1977, featuring Bowie on keys and with very similar tracklists—a show of excess for anyone but the most ardent completionist fascinated by the variations in delivery and ad-libbing from different performances on the same tour. [Grades for seven discs: 86, 90, 63, 50, 74, 72, & 63]

Book of Curses reaps the discontentment sowed through years of simmering anger, finding joy in perhaps the only reliable constant: the catharsis of punk rock.

Broken Hearts & Beauty Sleep is the latest chapter in the chaotic yet deliberate evolution of a no-holds-barred performer who’s only now reaching their apex.

Bottom line is that Mogwai are an insanely powerful live band, and these sharp recordings play like a unified set rather than a scraped-together compendium of disparate sessions.

Pissed Jeans haven’t overhauled their sound or reinvented themselves or “matured” as artists so much as they have amassed a new inventory of modern miseries to turn into scuzz-punk tantrums, from catalytic converter theft (“[Stolen] Catalytic Converter”) to crippling medical debt ("Sixty-Two Thousand Dollars in Debt").

The Stand-In is a gorgeous-sounding chronicle of such archetypal props, characters, and sounds, though the conceit does occasionally smother their narrator’s natural, vital wit.

Plenty of these tracks keep feeling like exercises: too thick and melodic to work like dance music, but with melodies that refuse to stick as satisfyingly as pop.

While there was an unspectacular battle-rap anonymity to his past lyrics, they were at least spit in the service of a strong overall style. Now he's grown a bit, upping the emotional dimension subtly and letting some more specific humanistic details come through, even in the lines that read like average boasts on paper.

The young British producer Mark Taylor offers a more all-embracing vision of rudely extroverted modern garage, unified by his familiar palette of turgid bass tones, decaying synth riffs and shuddering, syncopated beats.

His debut album, Knockin' Boots, could actually be the best LP-length statement to come out of house's reawakening.

While Forest Swords has always hidden hooks in his music that reveal themselves upon repeat listens, Compassion is by far his most approachable album at first pass.

She’s doing what she does best, calibrating lovesick or lovelorn synthpop that’s neither too hot nor too cold--and sometimes, regrettably, only lukewarm.

On Eyeroll, Ziúr crafts warmer yet more extreme textures, responding to the composed poems and vocal improvisations of a handful of guests. Ziúr’s collaborators are a fierce and versatile cohort.

Against those odds, Gillis turns these perceived weaknesses into strengths; as his most fussed-over and carefully plotted album, All Day paradoxically sounds like his most effortless.

Not the sundazed party record that was promised but an exploration of how it feels when the party’s over.

Some might lament the fact that so many tracks feel like teasers pointing toward something longer and more developed, with most of these two- or three-minute ideas fading out as soon as they get a good, eerie groove going. If so, you can take comfort that he's given himself so many possibilities for album number three.

Arcology, like its predecessor, is a genre study first and foremost, rearranging familiar elements according to McRyhew's own idiosyncratic vision.

This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries.

The Wasted Years, despite its sardonic title, is a worthwhile look back at the path he took to get to those heights. While it’s not a complete document of the band’s start—this set ignores standalone singles and b-sides from this era, like a rollicking cover of the Modern Lovers’ “Roadrunner”--it sets the table for a three-decade-plus journey that continues to surprise, confound, and satisfy.

Jaar and Harrington’s individual visions only grew more vast in the eight years leading up to Darkside’s return with Spiral, a work of unexpected and even unprecedented familiarity—less a portal than a kiosk existing entirely within the boundaries set by Psychic.

No one song matches the widespread appeal of Lupe’s best work. Still, the overall impression makes up for that lack of dynamism; the understated tracks give his intricate riddles room to breathe and Drill Music in Zion gives Lupe’s humanity and command of language plenty of space to exhale.

For all its insularity—she wrote the album alone and recorded it almost entirely with just one other musician, Jackson Phillips of the dream-pop project Day Wave—Vu’s music is unmistakably a product of this moment.