This is heavy stuff and as fun as it can be, Cashmere is an unabashedly political record, careening from one geopolitical issue to the next the way that most rap albums treat boasts. Ultimately, though, its most impactful moments lie in the simple act of representation.

While it doesn’t always work, it’s Yves Tumor’s use of field recordings that gives Serpent Music an ambulatory quality.

The Altar has a lot in common with Goddess, including its fatal flaw: its attempts to position Banks as edgy or dangerous, despite all musical evidence to the contrary.

Ruminations is Oberst’s most emotionally legible work since Digital Ash in a Digital Urn, also defined by its similarly cloistered worldview and sonic cohesion.

Cody finds a more grown-up Joyce Manor, but every track contains enough blunt expressions of existential despair to tie them to their angsty past.

Crooked Man’s overall vibe is the timeless aspiration of people who share great parts of their lives on dark dance-floors. All these songs boil down to the idea of community and its desires and rules, a set of signposts to keep the party going in the right direction.

Day Breaks grows a bit tedious near the middle, and it's easy to forget it's playing if you aren't paying attention.

Taylor’s graceful accountability and invigorating songcraft makes him an anomaly. His own dose of perspective arrives at the end of the plainly gorgeous Heart Like a Levee.

As with The Things We Think, it feels like the sound of a curious band still working out how to make music as distinct as its influences; whether lyrically or sonically, they come across as either unknowable or proudly workmanlike.

Departed Glories’ strongest individual tracks are uncompromisingly abstract. ... Less profound, on their own, are the tracks that let edge-of-intelligibility vocal collages in the manner of Julianna Barwick do most of the work. But they play a flattering role in the album as a whole, which is how it should be heard

Opeth have gotten better at self-editing with Sorceress; still, their jammier tendencies fail them in the album’s lackadaisical middle, showing they may just be a little too cool.

Requiem is a double album, granting the band the real estate to stretch out more than usual and, at times, you wish they’d go even further.

Revolution Radio otherwise rarely escapes the Green Day archetype, an established language that, here, feels inelastic and calcified.

Torres has traded away some pieces of the humanity that colored his earlier work in favor of a conversation about something elemental that's still waiting to be discovered. That doesn’t make for an immediate record. It makes for one full of enigmas, of beautiful and undefinable things that promise further revelations to come.

On Big Boat, they come up with a few winning moments.

The rest of the album’s expansive epics are built on a shaky foundations, with too many songs that contain too many concepts for their own good.

Fires Within Fires is a piece of music that’s too skimpy to be a full-blooded Neurosis LP and too bloated to be a lean, concentrated Neurosis EP.

The truth is, if Head Carrier had arrived as the umpteenth Frank Black solo album, little about it would seem amiss. But coming from a band whose legacy was built on shock-and-awe transgression, Head Carrier feels overly pleasant and pedestrian.

That's the fascination and the frustration of Supersilent: it's like they keep destroying the lineaments of form just for the pleasure of vouchsafing them to us again.

A Seat at the Table, her third full-length album, is the work of a woman who’s truly grown into herself, and discovered within a clear, exhilarating statement of self and community that’s as robust in its quieter moments as it is in its funkier ones.

Without sacrificing extremity, they all captured the spirit of metal, not just the sound.

Guest voices mesh well with Machinedrum’s enlightenment through repetition, bringing a bit more flexibility and unpredictability than your traditional diva loop.

Hval is a clear disciple of Kraus. On paper, Kraus moves fluidly from reference to reference, dense with ideas; Hval’s music is like this, too, and never more than on Blood Bitch.

The most difficult part of making instrumental, non-dance electronic music for an audience beyond your typical avant-garde connoisseur is injecting it with a sense of narrative, a story, an energy that replaces vocals and conventional musical structures to give the tracks an augmented dimension. S U R V I V E are very good at this. They may be one of the best bands currently employing those skills, and RR7349 is their most succinct example yet.

Atrocity Exhibition finds Brown back behind the lens, capturing raw emotion with grainy 16mm.

Quietly adventurous, wise, and a welcome late-career turn, Blue Mountain builds an ethereal home for a rhythm guitarist who was tempered in the chaos-friendly environs of Dead.

Campaign outpaces his recent efforts like $ign Language and Airplane Mode but, still, mostly just preserve Ty’s musical bottom line.

He doesn't reveal many new tricks, but his knowledge of his own palette is masterful in every moment. More poetic and thoughtful than ever before, Jaar maintains an ability to fit seemingly disparate sounds together as if they were always meant to find each other.

22, A Million sounds only like itself.

The album as a whole is more suited for seated, solitary brooding than for anything as lively as moving your body.

Certainly Cohen’s music is serious and often melancholy. But there’s a lot of joy in the way her songs illustrate and embody her thoughtful verse.

The Healing Component would have benefitted for a couple of those brighter moments to keep things moving, but it’s a small gripe.

They’re just the latest to move these pieces around--to use distortion pedals and droning vocals to unpack the mysteries of the universe. But there’s a confidence that with time they could be the ones to finally solve the puzzle.

If You See Me may lack some of the tension and menace of Wye Oak’s best records, but that’s a fair tradeoff for an album this personable and at peace with itself.

Kool Keith trades verses with an array of guest stars, packaged with bare hooks and brisk running times. In most cases, he pulls his collaborators into his own orbit.

Heavy on ballads and low on energy, Banhart sometimes comes in danger of scrubbing away any remnants of his once-magnetic personality. Occasionally, though, Ape approaches sparse brilliance.

It’s exciting to hear the freedom of Jóhannsson’s compositions in autonomous music, and with Orphée he’s reasserted himself as not a just an elegiac film score guy.

[A] muddled, occasionally fascinating album.

It cribs largely from dancehall, but stops short of adopting any of that form’s humidity; these diaphanous tracks are a long stream of cool appraisal.

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.

Corpse overcomes its moments, due in part to concision and earnest songwriting.

Though several of the songs on Care are extraordinary, others are superficial, failing to deliver on the depth that has been such an essential part of How to Dress Well’s appeal.

It works best as group therapy, a 30-minute reprieve from the pervasive judgment of adulthood.

There’s something sadly anonymous about Sunlit Youth. It’s cloudy, distant, and inert when it should be effervescent.

On Mykki, her assertiveness never wavers, whether diving into top-shelf hedonism in the club bangers or keening to find love past carnality in the ballads.

It’s not that Leithauser has dramatically changed since his days in the Walkmen; rather, pairing with Rostam has brought out the best in him. It’s rare for collaborative albums between known entities to feel like equal reflections of both parties, but Rostam find a middle-ground in mutual longing for the past.

As Die Antwoord's energy level putters out, so too does Mount Ninji, an album too faded and immature to make a lasting dent on the face of hip-hop.

Chapter and Verse takes a relatively safe route, but it’s a beautiful ride: one where everyone in the car feels united and hellbent on making it out alive.

He sounded breezy and at ease [on 2014's "Good Kisser"], finally confident enough to date women his age. So it’s a little disappointing that on Hard II Love, Usher’s eighth studio album, he hasn’t managed to hang onto that effortlessness. But there’s plenty to like, starting with his voice, which sounds better than ever.

It’s just a meticulous document of a band whose hedonism kept them from restraining their absurd level of mastery. So here: have Zep as they both wanted to be and eventually were.

The music they make together is remarkably coherent. Crowded as it is with instruments and ideas, Grumbling Fur doesn’t sound like a collision of sensibilities.

Half the cuts here don’t make it to three minutes, but they still drill into your mind with ease.

KoKoro isn’t perfect, but Assbring’s knack for creating well-written, catchy melodies carries the record it even in its slightest moments and a huge step forward from Pale Fire, positioning El Perro Del Mar well for an interesting Act II as a modern world pop purveyor.

There’s a tense, nervous energy running through all the tracks, which connect to each other like wires that spark electrical currents when they meet.

ArtScience is the Robert Glasper Experiment’s most realized effort, mainly because they’ve stopped relying on outside talent to get their point across. They’ve created their own vibe, one that needed their own voices to truly resonate.

It’s easily his most intoxicating release yet, an odyssey of soulful compositions paring down his expansive and eclectic soundboard from the last few years into something distinctly cozy and pleasant.

The mysteries that Robinson can’t seem to turn away from might elude our understanding forever. With Light Falls, though, he makes a most convincing case to go toward them rather than try and evade or ignore them.

The new model Apples don’t always achieve liftoff, but Simeon still possesses the coordinates for dazzling new places.

Its vivid imagery, anthemic arrangements, and unsuspecting listenability position it as hardcore’s Carrie & Lowell: an autobiographical tragedy that soars in spite of an overwhelming urge to succumb.

An album that so movingly testifies to the difficulty of appreciating what you have while still reconciling what you’ve lost.

The headier and grander it grows, the more its heavy drones swarm, the more undeniable the duo’s alchemy proves to be.

Despite its faults and flaws, it mostly scans as two talented musicians just having a good time.

The Wink is a high-wire act that may find more fans among, say, free jazz listeners than conventional rock lovers. But even if the scratchy destination lacks home comforts, the journey is its own thrill.

Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight escapes as Travis Scott’s best work yet: a combination of elevated significance, self-awareness, and the old trick of spinning something so plain into something so luxurious.

This great unknowing serves as the album’s guiding principle. In Cave’s wounded voice, you hear him grapple in real-time with the incidental prophecies of his lyrics and his need to get the job done.

This time, the inevitable transition from vocalizations to near-unison saxophone shredding doesn’t carry quite the same charge. But on the whole, Blade Of Love shows that there’s plenty of sax-quartet innovation left for these artists to explore.

While she may never have been the most articulate and thoughtful messenger, in AIM, M.I.A. demonstrates her legacy as an artist eager to tackle issues that are volatile and antagonistic. But at this point her music is more potent in theory than execution.

It feels labored over, and it sacrifices some of the form’s early magic But there's room for this, too, and we need look no farther than Jlin to see the potential in footwork as more heavily produced, personally expressive music.

Anything But Words is the rare side project that might have been better off if both parties had cared a little less.

Away’s scope may be personal, but its takeaways are universal. It’s a touching album about moving on, about the satisfaction of leaving the past behind before it leaves you.

Acoustic Recordings stockpiles a great American songbook that can endure even after we’re all forced to live off the grid.

The ideas are articulated much more distinctly than on past recordings, bringing added significance to the gorgeous compositions.

For the most part, the music gives the illusion of being something sourceless, something created without effort--not product, but pure being; not labor, but freedom.

There’s a newfound focus that was missing even on Salvia Plath’s The Bardo Story and Silk Rhodes’ self-titled.

Even if Schmilco isn’t Wilco’s most exciting album, it’s among their most consistent and immediately gratifying.

It’s not his most revelatory performance, but it’s certainly his most joyful.

One can imagine the project’s subject would have ultimately preferred the more understated tracks, concerted in their muted menace--focused on the task of creating a cinematic impression of the unknowable.

That the songs can sound enormous while maintaining this kind of person-to-person intimacy is Jepsen’s particular talent.

It’s a complex portrait of a man in transition. The album is an evolution for an artist who still may have his best in store.

Cosmetic’s stewing textural undercurrent intensifies the band’s outer antagonism by highlighting the trembling, deep-seated dread within. It’s riveting and ruining in equal measure.

With Trouble, Russell, Morley, and Yeats have dug one foot deeper into the thick, sludgy, noise-strewn topsoil they’ve long called home. Call it a trench, if you will, but it isn’t is a grave.

The sense persists that the more Eluvium piles on, the less unique he sounds. False Readings On is awesome while it’s playing, and when it stops, it’s gone.

The album flows well, effortlessly segueing from Achtung Baby-like rock to mechanical new wave like Depeche Mode and Pet Shop Boys. O’Riordan and Koretsky sing simple lyrics, often repeating the same phrase over and over, allowing alternate meanings to sink in.

In its drive for conceptual rigor, the album neglects to engage the listener musically. That puts a lot of weight on the story, which tends toward the abstract.

Middle-aged rap has rarely sounded more grown, with all the mixed-blessing perspective that comes with it. Anonymous Nobody is kind of a downer, but sometimes that’s what you need, especially when the optimism’s just below that melancholy surface.

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.

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

Her lyrics have the conviction of someone like Fiona Apple: a profoundly individual presence that centers, above all, on self-reliance, on searing autonomy, on the act of becoming. My Woman does this more vividly and lucidly and daringly than before.

While Brettin’s singing is greatly improved--lazy but more present and self-assured--his lyrics are at best inscrutable and in general lacking in substance.

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.

So as good as it often is, Amnesty feels like a missed opportunity, the first safe album from an act that once would have recoiled at such a thought.

Hopelessness has always been a throughline in Staples work but Prima Donna puts a finer point on that feeling, both in its songs and interstitial spoken word bits.

It’s rangy and stunning, an exciting new curve in the fascinating Young Thug arc.

Take It, It’s Yours may be one of the comfiest cover-sets in recent memory, but beneath its chilled-out façade lurks an identity crisis.

Motion Graphics’ contradictions--simultaneously placid and disorienting, warm and chintzy, intimate and distant--make it a seductively unusual listening experience as warm as the surface of your laptop. There’s no irony here; Williams’ lucid machine dreaming is deeply felt.

Even if McCombs remains impossible to pin down, on Mangy Love, he’s never seemed more intent on making a connection.

Standouts struggle to hold their own amid the album's more overwrought anthems and straight-up misfires.

["Sometimes" is] a knockout punch to an already gripping body of music and a fitting last word that cements this album not just as a heartfelt expression of love for John Cage, but for love itself.