It’s an album that seems to exist primarily to be disliked, and it couldn’t seem prouder of itself for achieving that sad goal. Credit Joan of Arc for this, though: 20 years in, they’re still finding new ways to alienate and infuriate.

The Ornaments are yet another in a long line of floppy-haired guitar bands flying the flag of a purer pop past, but they’re also, unmistakably, one of the better, least pretentious ones. Sometimes it pays to be grateful rather than cynical.

These pendulum shifts--from frustrating to fascinating and back again--play out within the songs themselves.

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.

Even as it draws on new and old songs, 50 presents a startlingly current and nearly apocalyptic vision of America; it’s album full of brimstone and brine, perhaps more perfect for this moment in history than we’d like to admit.

Some of Fair’s bug-eyed mantras feel even more impactful when the music can swell in tandem, but there’s also the threat of just sounding like a very good rock band than like the joyful mess that they can be.

Machine Messiah, though, is the rare Sepultura album where the vibe of the music doesn’t consistently match its central themes.

With Hang, Foxygen have proven their capacity for lavish spectacle, but they’re still at their best when they give themselves the freedom to roam.

All told, Migration is an impressive improvement over The North Borders, and easily the most listenable record of Bonobo’s fifteen-plus year career.

Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish.

This agreeable sameness infects much of the score, turning the voices of two inimitable musicians into hack work for hire, churning out glossy tones for images of cheap thrill and intrigue.

At least half of The Blood Album’s songs feel virtually interchangeable and the other half sound like AFI wrote this stuff in the time it takes to play it.

As an album, I See You has the eerily seamless wholeness of the self-titled debut, a smooth and polished object with no visible edges.

With the exception of James Blake’s “Colour of Anything,” which here sounds like an outtake from the Virgin Suicides soundtrack, Morrissey and White fare better with the more recent material than with the old.

Like an solid frame to a complex painting, Levi’s score concretizes and helps control the artistic experience of the film. In effect, the score may not supersede its filmic anchor, but is sure does make the entire endeavor more beautiful.

The Return of East Atlanta Santa leans on this lighter, more playful side of Gucci’s personality, proving along the way that back to business doesn’t have to mean an absence of fun.

Unusually for such an introspective album, the guest spots are welcome respite.

Each note acts like a pebble dropped into a pond, sending out ever widening ripples that slowly decay, but not before certain tones linger and swell until they more closely resemble drones. Listen closer and certain small frequencies emerge and flutter higher like down feathers in a draft.

Pete Rock and Smoke DZA have forged something we still need, too: a great, modest New York rap album of concrete beats and blood-in-your-mouth bars.

Musgraves’ album summons up the mid-’60s era nostalgia of A Charlie Brown Christmas, gliding naturally from her established Western-swing throwback aesthetic to kitschy exotica and vintage pop, with an expertly curated song selection that leans on campy novelties, classy standards, and a stocking’s worth of originals.

The 87-minute runtime is both ridiculous and somehow necessary; if the redundancies were cut, some of the self-importance would be lost. The extended monotony allows you to get lost in Cudi’s ego and your own head, clearing room amid the nothingness to discover and create meaning.

Not the Actual Events turns out to be so slight, at just five tracks with no dramatic shift in form. It’s the least essential non-instrumental album the band has released.

It isn’t quite as punchy as RTJ2, which was brutish in its tactics, with nonstop bangs and thrills, but RTJ3 is a triumph in its own right that somehow celebrates the success of a seemingly unlikely friendship and mourns the collapse of a nation all at once.

Her skipping cadence and ability to dance around words while establishing that each one is equally important are poet's skills, making you listen to every word without ever seeming overdetermined or obvious.

These many mismatching, criss-crossing threads create an incredibly convoluted 77-minute slog that is as tough to listen to as it is to digest.

To make mood music out of already gloomy materials is easy; on Wonderland, Demdike Stare spin the most unexpected stuff into music for haunted dancehalls, and the results are wickedly compelling.

A front-to-back listen through Patterns of Light can feel like a tour through all the places where pop radio and esoteric thought crossed paths during the ’70s, and a tribute to the ways both music and physics strive to explain a universe that can sometimes feel stubbornly unknowable.

Each of the six tracks generates a be-here-now flash of present-tense psychedelia, hallucinations by way of overtones and volume.

Williamson has evolved subtly over her two records, and Heart Song lifts her finally and definitely out of the world of “folk” into something deeper, more uncanny, and out-of-time.

Musically, it is hardly satisfying, as the fleeting enjoyable moments are swallowed up by a great deal of frustrating mediocrity.

Even on some of the stronger tracks, Zimmerman seems to be going through the motions.

A classic tour from start to finish, the set’s only drawbacks owe more to the format than the music: Various incomplete or missing songs, a few over-saturated vocal tracks, five CDs worth of grotty audience tapes, and the fact that Dylan performs nearly the same set lists in nearly the same order at every stop of the tour, from Long Island to Stockholm. Thoroughly consistent, especially by Dylan’s later live standards, the repeated performances from the 22 represented shows might be seen as feature, not a bug.

The ark-like box should provide serious leisure-time satisfaction for both longtime Floyd freaks and aspiring heads alike.

The title track, which closes the album with a missive for those young girls, is anchored by his personal anxieties, making for some of Cole’s most affecting writing to date. ... At its lowest points, 4 Your Eyez Only rehashes Cole’s worst tendencies.

WORRY. is stuffed with so with many sugarcoated melodies it’s almost headache-inducing. Yet there isn’t a single insubstantial lyric here.

The Hamilton Mixtape has managed to drain away the edge and danger from a Broadway show, a curious inversion and just more proof that you can’t Xerox Miranda’s inimitable work.

This album may not be their most compelling release to date, but it remains the work of two uniquely complementary musicians set on an ever-evolving path.

Defying all bureaucracy, borders, and strife, this concert and this orchestra proves that art at its very best is a grand gesture of empathy above all.

Nearly twenty years later, GAS still assaults our presumptions about electronic music.

The alternate takes and the lively banter plop you right there in the studio as the artistic process unfolds. It’s what differentiates Freedom Jazz Dance from past volumes of this enthralling series, which were all live concerts that showed how Miles’s groups evolved on the bandstand.

Listening back now it’s an album that would have sounded fresh and vital released at any time over the past quarter century.

While the songs on Peace Trail are unquestionably timely and occasionally poignant, Young’s songwriting-as-immediate-response sometimes fails him.

Both tracks feel like small pieces of a larger piece we don’t get to hear; there’s a wispy, vaporous, interlude quality to each, like we’re in a place where something just happened or something is about to happen but the present moment is all suggestion.

Metal Box stands up. It stands for all time.

Harlequin is an odd album with perplexing priorities and a conflicted sense of scale, but just enough sweetness and heart to make you want to give it the benefit of the doubt anyway.

On its own modest terms, Blue & Lonesome offers promising proof the Stones can still be a band instead of a brand.

While Wings is hardly a showcase for any kind of vocal gymnastics, Lambert’s voice remains the star throughout.

There are times, however, when that nodding feels more like mimicry than anything else. Maybe he’ll figure out how to smuggle Donald Glover’s heart into Childish Gambino’s brain eventually, but if he hasn’t figured out what he wants out of Childish Gambino yet, it’s increasingly rewarding watching him try.

Abendrot never feels dishonest, just occasionally overwrought in its desire to achieve the stakes and transcendence of similarly inspired records like Holy Ghost or Goodness. Fortunately, You Blew It! just as often let their guitars speak for their behalf and Abendrot can be heard as the completion of a directive started by their last two albums: grow up, dude and keep doing what you’re doing.

With Broken Knowz he’s fully built up his own identity.

Even as its mood slides from pensive to morose to quietly exuberant, this remains throughout one of the more enjoyable experimental releases this year.

Singles offers a wide-ranging but accessible route to his unearthly sounds.

Here, it feels like a glimpse of foregone possibility on a lower-stakes project, the sound of two pros blowing off steam by proving they can recreate Top 40 spectacle.

Darkness and Light isn’t the political feat Mills and Legend had hoped for, but it’s a step forward in the singer’s evolution. He may never be a firebrand, but Legend proves there’s still strength in humility.

As it is, Häxan occupies an odd slot in Dungen’s hard hitting and respectably consistent discography: a labor of love that is less than essential, rewarding but not attention grabbing, remarkably ambitious and yet strangely ephemeral.

He effortlessly squeezes so many ideas into its barely-there, four-minute frame, it's easy to wish he'd settle in and record an entire album of such quietly masterful pastoral mood-setting.

The music is infinitely interesting, possibly more so than the artist singing it. But then again, you shouldn’t count out anyone releasing an album like Nightride.

If anything, the album now sounds more like the masterpiece it felt just short of at the time, a work nearly on par with its more universally regarded, nocturnal sequel Automatic for the People.

24K Magic is the rest of the park: rebuilt shinier and glitzier and safer, every element engineered to please more than the real thing, and with a hell of a tour guide. It’s not history, not even historical fiction, but harmless fun.

The productions cobble together and iron over a mix of styles appropriated from both the dance underground and Top 40, with results that are structurally varied, but with a uniform surface.

Starboy, by way of contrast [to Trilogy], feels more like an opportunistic compilation of B-sides than an album. Who is the Weeknd? At this point, even the man behind the curtain might not know.

Much of Woman sounds like music designed by committee, better suited to soundtrack a car commercial than to actively engage the listener.

The album plays to his strengths. It is more playful than his last LP, and also more finessed.

Whatever the actual year 2020 will hold, for now, Pavo Pavo's escapism feels cozy, uplifting, and wholly appropriate.

The integrity of Richard's voice provides the through line, which is often caught in ghostly tangles of itself or locking into prismatic harmonies, similar to how Prince or D’Angelo treated their voices.

Before the Dawn demystifies what we’ve fetishized in her absence. Without draining her magic, it lets Bush exist back down on Earth.

Few artists could assemble a group of musicians like that those found on Hubris at all, but Ambarchi lets everyone do their part, then fade into the background. It's the difference between hubris and vision.

Unsurprisingly, this is heavy listening.

Part of the revelation of Boots No. 1, then, is witnessing Welch’s music made mortal, to hear her navigating her many influences with a young artist’s enlightened uncertainty, and to hear imperfect recordings that may not necessarily conjure universes on their own accord so much as they recall old-fashioned country music that’d sound at home on the radio.

MC4 falls short of Wave Gods, but is a leaps-and-bounds improvement over Excuse My French.

The album isn’t quite the overwhelming achievement that Ten Freedom Summers was, though the refined ensemble playing of Smith’s newly convened “Golden Quintet” is consistently ravishing.

Its twelve songs–the vast majority of which extend well past the five-minute mark–fall into two categories: galloping nods to Ride the Lightning, of which the first disc is primarily composed, and doomier mid-tempo cuts à la Sabbath, which make up the bulk of the second. The LP’s highlights--“Hardwired,” “Moth Into Flame,” “Atlas, Rise!” all fall into the former camp, front-loading the record with fire. The second disc, by contrast, is a slog through nondescript, uniform chug, devoid of dynamics or instrumental nuance.

He’s almost literally stopping to smell the roses, and the result is an album about growth and development, about the virtues of taking your time rather than the crutch of constantly sprinting forward. In the process, it advances Bachman’s oeuvre significantly.

More limber and fiery than ever, the band has risen out the experimental cul-de-sac with a riveting work that should appeal to both its expected audience and to new fans who might have otherwise dismissed this style of music as too antiseptic for their liking.

Highway Songs ultimately feels hopeful rather than weary, upbeat rather than defeated.

No Waves stands as a memorable document on its own and a hopeful harbinger for new material to come.

Thankfully, Marching Church’s sophomore effort scales back the melodrama and ramps up the discipline: Rønnenfelt and company are focused on verses and choruses and dynamics, rather than self-indulgent noodling--and in the case of this album, a little bit goes a long way.

If A Weird Exits was Thee Oh Sees’ Thanksgiving feast, An Odd Entrances is Friday’s turkey and stuffing sandwich--hardly a destination meal, but plenty satisfying in its own way.

Madness is a spacious and satisfying record: what it lacks in standout moments, it makes up for in coherence.

One of Speedy Ortiz’s strengths is that beneath all the instrumental layers, there’s a narrative puzzle to unpack. Sad13’s Slugger solves its puzzle for you, but in the hope that you will be able to go at it alone in the future.

We got it from Here... Thank You 4 Your service is all just beats, rhymes, and life. Nothing about this feels like a legacy cash-in; it feels like a legit A Tribe Called Quest album.

Unfortunately, their sun-zapped slacker outlook drags them back, miscasting themselves as a modern-day answer to hollow, overly attitude-conscious acts like Black Rebel Motorcycle Club.

Even though a release like Lady, Give Me Your Key unearths never-before-heard material, it still doesn’t reveal anything new about the mercurial man.

Rocky consistently entertains without delivering any one-liners, and the album is sequenced to mask some of the lesser members’ weaknesses. Cozy Tapes stays true to its name.

Too much of Long Live the Angels just feels turgid.

For all its wrath and fury, Devil Music feels safe and predictable. It’s a hell of a party, but it’s one we’ve been to before.

Scott Morgan has made a career of showing us waters and watering places. With Monument Builders, we are finally invited to drink.

Ultimately, though, after making such an indelible and unique contribution to the language of modern heavy rock, Hamilton continues to show that he's hemmed-in by the style he invented.

The rhythms on HERE represent a departure from her previous efforts and indicate a willingness to experiment with her sound but the lyrics, which rarely betray a sense of adventure, cancel out most of this good work.

Don’t mistake their expanded palette for a lack of focus: as always, Darkthrone keep these eight songs’ latent chaos on a tight choke-chain, timing the hellish tremolo riffs as carefully and slowly as an October surprise.

Trap or Die 3 offers real reminders of Jeezy’s greatness, then, something Church in These Streets couldn’t claim. But some of these songs just sound terrible.

That Lodestar exists at all feels like a minor miracle. That it is so exquisitely done is a small blessing on top.

Too many of these songs are just bluster in search of a purpose. Casualties of the duo’s noncommittal approach, they fall into a thankless gray area, too tinkered-over to function as punk, yet too haphazard to be great pop.

Every so often, the album strikes that tricky balance between queasy and cute.

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

Pazner knows this stay-out-of-the-way tactic well, and the Olympians make their toughest tricks sound effortless because of it.

It makes you feel like you are in on a longstanding inside joke with an old friend. Even if the joke is super dumb and at times problematic, it is strangely comforting to know that the guy responsible hasn’t changed one iota.

It remains exceptional because it captured a moment when a premiere showman worked his hardest to win over new fans. Decades later, these 1966 concerts at the Whisky A Go Go still possess the power to convert skeptics so seems that Otis Redding did indeed get his wish: He made one of the greatest albums that ever came out.