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.

Carla dal Forno is willing to provoke listeners on a number of levels without spoon-feeding them. With You Know What It’s Like, she manages to do so on her own terms, in a way that feels both distant and inviting and rewards the listener’s willingness to sit with the ambiguity in between.

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.

Toting a whole gleaming new set of synthesizers and some surprisingly complicated riffing, Gales transforms the band completely. The experience is sort of like catching a show you used to watch on a CRTV in high def for the first time.

Dissociation hits its stride when the band grafts new elements onto its classic sound--something that, for all their chops, hasn’t been easy to pull off in the past.

Although the scattered nature of some of the songs keeps any single narrative from taking shape, the album is a significant improvement for a band that’s still coming into its own, still, in other words, in its youth.

Lady Wood is short, but Lo finds ample darkness to plumb.

What keeps many listeners coming back to Hauschildt’s records is precisely the promise that each album will sound practically interchangeable with the one that came before--just, perhaps, marginally better. On both of those counts, Strands succeeds, yet it also marks a shift in tone: At just eight tracks and 43 minutes long, it is noticeably more restrained.

The band already sounds comfortable with their new sound, settling into a weightless groove that make you feel as if they’ve played this way forever. It’s one of Lambchop’s greatest strengths, that even when they’re overtly experimenting, they wear it as naturally as the garish pearls that have adorned their stage attire.

What makes this record so refreshing is its unabashed ambition, the sound of a band rejecting indie-darling complacency for riskier, more mature territory. And the gamble more than pays off.

D.R.A.M. doesn’t really have new ideas to pitch into this ball pit, but on his full-length debut Big Baby D.R.A.M., he reminds us that new ideas aren’t the whole game.

Overall, the half of Beyond Now that focuses on McCaslin’s original material fares far better, and should be sought out by anyone who wants another experience of the invention heard on Blackstar.

While JoJo sounds great on big ballads and floor-filling tracks alike, Mad Love. lacks a cohesive sound. The abrupt genre shifts are jarring at turns, but paradoxically it’s this malleability that should be key to JoJo’s continued success.

The pleasure of Lighthouse is that it’s best appreciated as mood music: with its buoyant acoustic guitars and murmured harmonies, it casts a light spell.

This isn’t his grand final statement (that was Blackstar), it’s a cool little postscript tagged onto an earnest, unthrilling tribute.

Produced in spurts of Dropbox exchanges and playdates over the span of two years, but working on a strict deadline, LP2 stresses proficiency and immediacy.

The new album trades in queasy atmospherics for a more robust rhythmic attack, with Tagaq feeding off the band’s energy as much as vice versa.

Joanne never reveals much of a narrative or stylistic through-line, and even her brief dips into indie-rock--her collaborations with Father John Misty on “Sinner’s Prayer” and “Come to Mama” (Misty is also credited as a writer on Beyonce’s Lemonade), and Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker on “Perfect Illusion” (Rihanna covered Parker’s “New Person, Same Old Mistakes” on Anti)--feel familiar.

Philosophy of the World is the realest version of the Shaggs, flaws and force in full-view. A teenage symphony this is not.

Taken as a whole, Masculin Féminin is a scrapbook made of records that already felt like scrapbooks, but collectively they form a portrait of a band more multi-dimensional than their Sonic Youth Jr. rep suggested.

Walking the fine line between so many gradations of emotion can be tricky, and there are more missed opportunities on Say Yes! than revealing interpretations.

The true charm of this record lies in the way it craftily retrofits the sound of ’70s excess for our age of austerity.

As engaging as that bluster is at first, over the course of ten songs Whatever Forever begins to grate not unlike a person who tries too hard to look nonchalant when they would hold your attention longer if they just opened up a bit more.

The Violent Sleep of Reason galvanizes most when Meshuggah rise to the challenge of writing music that matches the urgency and global scope of its subjects. All too often, though, even as they’re captured playing together in a room for the first time in ages, Meshuggah sound a tad more comfortable than agitated.

Cohen is not a songwriter who panders; he speaks above us, sometimes quite literally to higher forms, but also to universality instead of common denominator. Topicality, to him, remains somewhere around the Romantic era. But Cohen is also keen to experiment here.

It just took some time, but we’re finally hearing what Adkins has to say for himself.

Woptober slogs towards the end, but it moves too quickly to feel like a chore to sit through. It has all the markings of what we’ve come to expect from Gucci’s music only this time—rather than drowning in his addictions—he’s found a way to integrate drugs and violence into his new outlook.

Rather than feel cathartic or caustic, it’s oddly cold and rote.

It boasts the sort of large-scale electronic compositions that can often feel monolithically lonely, and she does it all by herself. And yet the album sounds and feels collaborative, as if it were the product of multiple viewpoints and inputs.

Sadly, they seem content for the kind of mediocrity that designates you as the headliner Firefly and Bonnaroo call when someone else isn’t available.

Every Now & Then is often vivid and enjoyable, but after a few listens, you may find yourself switching back to one of the band’s predecessors. The former is a fun ride, but Screamadelica could still blow your mind.

What’s astonishing here is the way they manage to forge a sound nearly as rich and original as that of America’s most blunted.

Throughout, Sport is crude, queasy, sometimes shockingly ugly, and often quite funny, in a madcap, slightly threatening way. It thrills and it mystifies in equal measure.

As much of a throwback as Mering can seem, at her best she captures her era in her words.

In Spektor’s catalogue, Remember Us to Life balances comfort food for Spektor fans with the maturity and wisdom you'd expect from a singer-songwriter passing the 15th year of her career.

If you’re in the mood for a good-enough orchestral rock album that lifts and falls in all the expected ways, you might as well queue up one you haven’t heard before. Mono are doing their part to keep you in a steady supply of them.

If you’re happy to ride some riffs into the sunset, High Bias is a worthwhile trip.

It’s a party vibe that doesn’t entirely know the party’s about to end in the worst way. But while it lasts—through the Afrobeat fusion of “Mad Dog in Yoruba” and the upfront yet faraway-sounding horn blasts in “Macumba 3000” and the baile/bossa simmer of “Todos Os Terreiros”--it’s enough to make you wish the background music was up front.

If this is his new beginning, it’s an unambitious one: Lidell has never sounded like more of a traditionalist than he does on this amiable but uncomplicated record.

COW has some of the Orb’s most gentle moments to date, but in eschewing their own classic album and instead oddly reflecting on one from their peers, they fail to get beyond the Ultraworld and the world of Chill Out, at times mimicking little more than some BBC sound effects.

Outer, fittingly enough, projects its energies relentlessly outward, broadcasting its emotional content in a way that too often feels heavy-handed.