Speak isn’t exactly a step forward or a step back, but more to the side, onto a new path with plenty of potential, as well as room for future improvements.

In the absence of a less effable genius, there's always elbow grease. Painting With feels, more than anything, like a kind of construction project: Each sound meticulously built and only faintly familiar, each second crammed with doodads, as though the band was worried either they or their audience might get bored.

So Pitted sound like they move as a unit. This is where their true energy derives--from their internal communication. You don't hear the gears grinding or see the wires--you only see the bull in all its terrifying, joyful glory and the destruction it causes.

Most of the textural differences from song to song on Né So are slight, so they tend to bleed into one another.

With Basar, they have assembled a vast glossary of fresh sounds, considerably enriching the language of contemporary dance music in the process.

A madcap sense of humor animates all his best work, and The Life of Pablo has a freewheeling energy that is infectious and unique to his discography. Somehow, it comes off as both his most labored-over and unfinished album, full of asterisks and corrections and footnotes.

Overall Still in a Dream is a job well done: an accurate portrait of an era that, while it can’t really be described as a lost golden age for rock, nonetheless provided sorely needed radiance and refuge during a particularly grim period.

It delves as far as it can without hitting government-name territory, and for that the true fans will embrace it. But how many times can you retell the same story?

Opus oscillates between two poles. On the one side are entrancing progressive house numbers like the bookending "Liam" and "Opus."... At the other end of the spectrum are songs informed by Prydz’s pop instincts, and these can be more of a mixed bag.

Man Made Object is tailor-made for laid-back enjoyment, to be consumed at a moderate volume without much fuss. It marks a nice step forward for a group that lives comfortably beyond artistic restraints.

It's billed as something of a minor release (in the same way What a Time to Be Alive was minor but they still wanted your money for it), but it's still an "official" one, meaning Future swings for a few radio hits here. They feel more obligatory than outright bad.

Like most of Lissie’s albums, My Wild West is most compelling at its most messy and raucous.

Cardinal feels like one big determined push outward, an album-length fight against solipsism without losing your sense of self in the process.

There is much more to Heaven Adores You than endearing scraps, however, and none of them are more important than the version of "True Love" that appears here.

Unfortunately, the duo's apparent ambitions to be something more hold it back from reaching serotonin-peaking heights (like Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION).

All I Need had the potential to be so much more than mediocre and forgettable.

The Gamble sounds like the peek into a group of friends' private rituals that it is--as charmingly patched together and messy as it is well-paced and dynamic.

SVIIB is not only the group’s most technically accomplished work, their perfected swan song--it feels true.

I’m Up doesn’t muster up the highs of the Slime Season series—the infectiousness of “Best Friend,” the sublime structuring of “Draw Down,” or the woozy euphoria of “Raw”--but Thug manages to compile many of his best attributes into a tightly-wound 38 minutes.

As a whole, We Are KING is seamless: It properly showcases the group's breezy aesthetic and has the feel-good creativity of black music's great luminaries.

Pool is an introspective record, tailormade for lonesome nights.

Overall, Smoke still gets over on his ability to craft rich, moody soundscapes, although almost all the tracks on the album would have worked better as standalone instrumentals.

Throughout Wabi-Sabi, Cross Record thread their way between graceful and sinister, unfiltered beauty with heavier and uglier sounds, and tap into a dark well of energy that has potential to grow more powerful the further they explore it.

Even in its quietest moments, Thought Rock Fish Scale is an album brimming with passion and protest. It finds confidence in humility, power in relaxation.

There’s something invigorating about hearing two alt-country veterans take apart their tried-and-true sound and reassemble it slightly askew, and Scheherazade is not only their most modern-sounding record; it might be their best since Old Paint.

On Islah, his hook-writing is sterling.

It's impressive and frankly unusual to see a band five albums into their career experiment with new sounds and actually make it work, but Junior Boys have pulled it off. Career longevity looks good on them.

Black Tusk's combination of sludge, rock, hardcore, and death metal remains fluid, fertile, and most importantly, full of life, in spite of the tragedy that threatens to define it. Far from funereal, Pillars of Ash has plenty of love for good ol' heavy-metal melodies.

It doesn’t help that Nine Track Mind is all ballads except for three tracks, two of which are duets (Trainor, a sleepy Selena Gomez) that somehow still feel like ballads. Puth cannot fill this frame of sentimentality with any genuine sentiment.

Throughout all 23 tracks, the score straddles the line between weariness and wonder, like someone constantly recalling the danger this stunning planet is capable of unleashing.

This production is ultimately what makes Paradise such a standout; there are plenty of young industrial and noise-rock bands running hard on all cylinders, as Pop. 1280 did on their prior efforts. The extra gears and moving parts in their sound feel like necessary moves to avoid quick and certain burnout.

The album balances the Brewis brothers' predilection for unusual song structures and unconventional instrumentation with a decidedly grown up narrative.

There are times where DIIV threaten to become too in love with their own sound, particularly toward the middle. But beyond lending Is the Is Are a necessary heft to back Smith’s claims, these songs are convincing portrayals of checked-out living.

Listening to the 34 songs of Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone and The Ghosts of Highway 20 in sequence feels less like a chore than a long trip led by an expert navigator with good stories to share.

MartyrLoserKing doesn’t necessarily rise or fall on Williams’ ability to clarify his thoughts into a clear, memorable hook.

ANTI is a rich and conflicted pop record, at its most interesting when it’s at its most idiosyncratic.

The band’s diverse influences sound best when Kivlen's voice serves as a darker echo of Cumming’s angelic optimism, especially in a call and response. But the band's hodgepodge approach doesn't always work.

Occasionally, the dull roar manifests in some solid rock songs.

The old cliché about double albums is that most could be greatly improved if edited down to one disc, but that doesn’t hold true here. Animals is an anomaly: a two-disc set without enough solid material for even a single LP.

The late-album arrangement of these two outliers feels unnecessary and out-of-place. Two steps forward, one step back: such is the dance of courting other genres, even if the risks have helped keep Ulver vital.

Occasionally Palana will burst open, revealing churning undercurrents beneath Hilton’s surface calm.

Nugent makes up for those irritating suburban-blues licks with his exquisite chordings and inspired solos.

On Something About April II, Younge emerges as someone more interested in creating new classics than new samples.

The ephemerality of Original Machines assures that Keely never gets bogged down in any bad ideas, but often times, those are his most interesting ideas.

It's a complete piece of work, and one that serves as a commentary on the intersectionality of art and fame by someone who has recently acquired a new level of notoriety. But the sacrifice here is the personal flair that gave her previous album a spark of creativity and set it apart from the songs she had already been writing for other pop stars.

Much like records by the Smiths, Suicide Songs is both consoling and encouraging, revealing itself fully only after repeated listens and paying dividends each time. Manchester should be proud.

To make music this abstract work, pacing is key, and Porter's proves masterful throughout--that's as true of individual tracks, which heave like massive bellows, as of the shape of the album as a whole.

The album's best songs ("Tough Towns," "Fame II the Wreckoning," "Treat Em Right") temper the stream-of-consciousness and ramp up the atmosphere instead. When they resist the urge to troll (tell me a sardonic chorus that goes "Just like a tactical maniac/ I WANNA SHOOT YOUU" isn't trolling), Nevermen possess a deadly grace befitting Doseone's beloved hydra metaphor; for now, those necks are tangled.

The good news is that "The Love Within," Bloc Party’s comeback track, an indie disco-pop hybrid that is somehow both garish and bland, is comfortably the worst song on Hymns. A little better is "So Real," which trails a Silent Alarm throwback riff over low-key soul and hangover-soothing deep house; on "The Good News," a similarly midtempo Blur pastiche, a down-and-out narrator trudges from "the Gospels of St. John" to the "bottom of a shot glass."

Most of Don’t You aims for Babyface but lands somewhere around Surfacing-era Sarah McLachlan, except nowhere near as good.

With this album, they stake their claim to a musical inheritance left behind by predecessors who flouted boundaries and bastardized conventional notions of heaviness. Fittingly, they make the best of that inheritance by striking out on their own.

The Waiting Room might be Tindersticks’ most subdued effort to date, but it still flashes the irreverence that enlivened efforts like The Something Rain and Falling Down a Mountain.

With Jet Plane and Oxbow, Shearwater achieve not only their grandest statement to date, but their most grounded as well.

[Pond Scum may be] a fans-only album. And yet, taken on its own terms, Pond Scum is also a good-faith effort to plumb the nature of God. Not just any deity, but the distinctively American one born in 1741 in Jonathan Edwards’ hellfire sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" and since then praised and perpetuated in countless old-time folk and gospel songs.

The project doesn’t feel uninspired, exactly, just rushed. The best songs on Purple Reign still capture that shivering, waking-nightmare energy.

As much as the singles on Something thrilled, it struggled for coherence from song to song. The songs on Moth feel related and extroverted, pulled together by a common purpose. They have a charming asymmetry, they drift in sometimes oblique and irregular patterns. This is pop that wants to show you what it’s made of.

It’s a record about addiction, to be sure, but to an intoxicant more elusive, potent, and damaging than any street drug: desire. And like any stimulant, the highs are ecstatic (see: "Outsiders," a stained-sheet celebration of odd-couple consummation, or the nostalgically trashy "Like Kids") and the lows are crushing (see: pretty much everything else).

Revealing Rattling Trees as a soundtrack from the jump puts the Llamas at an advantage and a disadvantage. It helps to explain the structure of the album, which kicks off with an overture that touches on all the melodic themes to be heard later, followed by quick instrumental bits that precede actual songs. But without the full text of the play or a chance to see it before hearing the music, these pleasant-but-slight songs become more negligible.

At times New View can seem like a concept record detailing Friedberger's ambivalence about her main gift: spinning fragile memories and feelings into accessible songs.

Like Champagne Holocaust, Songs for Our Mothers puts too much emphasis on setting the smoky, sinister scene--upping the reverb, working in odd yelps or electronic clatter--and too little attention on establishing dynamic, compelling arrangements.

For all Not to Disappear’s forward strides, something remains of the debut’s pallor, and with it a niggling suspicion that, despite their commercial inferiority to the xx, Florence and the Machine, and even Foals, Daughter have no spicy condiments for those groups’ bread and butter.

Emotional Mugger still feels transitional--either the moment before he tucks in and gets way weirder or another stepping stone before he switches gears all over again.

Some of their more conventional tracks may pale a little in comparison to their newer aesthetics, if only because their evolution has been so slow and protracted.

In many ways, Adore Life feels more alive than Silence Yourself--in part because it feels more human, in part because it's telling you to be as loud as possible.

Coliseum stacks everything in the right place, and it’s all executed with the usual precision, so why doesn’t the album dazzle quite like the last few? Like the four albums before it, the Besnards self-recorded and self-produced this one at Breakglass, and more than its predecessors, it begs for an outside collaborator, somebody to shake up the band’s routine and perhaps lend some new tricks to their shrinking playbook.

This is a sincere, soulful project, brimming with honesty and humble perseverance.

The drastic acoustic reinterpretation on this album feels like the song’s natural state, the long-building crescendo threatens to swallow the singer before he has finished saying his piece.

The result is a record that, on the surface, sounds beautiful from start to finish. At times, though, these arrangements create a smoke-and-mirrors effect that obscures the weak spots in LeBlanc’s songwriting.

In between bursts of inspiration, Ardipithecus is largely a record of growing pains.

The redeeming moments are ones which make some unpredictable moves--any shocks are welcome on a record as polite and poised as this.

There's a wealth of both visceral adventure and reflective emotion in hs pieces. At best, these songs are thrill rides, mood swingers, and thought provokers, all at once.

As much as Blackstar shakes up our idea of what a David Bowie record can sound like, its blend of jazz, codes, brutality, drama, and alienation are not without precedent in his work.... Bowie will live on long after the man has died. For now, though, he’s making the most of his latest reawakening, adding to the myth while the myth is his to hold.

Speedin’ Bullet 2 Heaven is interesting the same way a friend getting a dramatic bad haircut is interesting: Once the shock wears off, you still have to look them in the eye and level with them.

The best moments on Leave Me Alone occur when Cosials and Perrote are going all-out, belting together without restraint.

The beats sound like money, and the raps are whip smart and cleanly tailored.

Main Attrakionz, who are sharper and more consistent than ever here, even if the high points don’t quite match those of 808s II.

As strange and surprising as anything Whitehead has ever made, these 10 songs bristle with an exploratory energy that has long been his best (if rather inconsistent) asset.

Though he’ll only tacitly admit as much, our player entrepreneur is hurt, and Beast Mode’s heavy-hearted sounds assist him in sorting through it just as Monster’s menace helped him turn spite to fuel.

Christmas in Reno is uncomfortable to listen to--the tracks that you so often associate with being jolly are torn up into pieces and burned at the core. However, that's exactly Ramone's intention.

His music works when every element blends together, and And After That, We Didn't Talk is most interesting when he shares only the most vital details from a moment. It's then that he can wring his experiences for their emotions and convey feelings with more than just words.

Late Nights, in its subtle seduction, feels all the more special in an era that increasingly rewards artists who shout the loudest. Jeremih makes you shut everything else out so that you can hear him whisper in your ear. It was worth the wait.

Bratten has made an expertly produced, emotionally honest record that defies genre and expectation.

Not to underestimate the experiences behind Reid's lyrics, but the loss of faith that unravels throughout the record comes off a little grave, reminiscent of those fogged post-heartbreak moments where it's impossible to believe you'll ever be happy again.... But there are also beautiful, revealing turns of phrase.

City Lake is a glimpse at the raw materials before all the splinters have been sanded down--and it is all the more exciting for them.

The synthesizers, the gang vocals, their approach to choruses--it's all reasonably similar across these 27 minutes. Even Hoffmann’s vocal style, thrillingly furious in its from-the-gut delivery, doesn’t vary too much. But the structures, stories, and overall tones differ enough from song to song that this never feels like a monotone slog. They've created a surefooted, aesthetic defining opening statement.

Much of Try to Be Hopeful is spent digging into the complexities of self and society with a lens that is simultaneously critical, sensitive, and goofy.

He's made tremendous strides as a producer, to the point where his touch exceeds Rodaidh McDonald's work on his debut. His sound is more three-dimensional, a series of shrouded corners and murmured conversations. This is wandering, grey-skies music, finding pleasure and even sensuality in solitude.

When one year gives you so many different options, a fun record that doesn't take itself seriously like Cool Uncle feels like icing.

G-Eazy is at his best when he steps out of the shadows and raps assuredly, and there are signs of that on When It's Dark Out.

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

He's at his most effective when he dials back the Rick Ross character, so the album’s standouts feature him laying bawse insight over slow-burners.

These are some of the biggest, strongest songs the Baroness have written; it's rock music that folds in their more metal leanings, along with something more delicate and spare. The hooks and melodies are their best.

A Folk Set Apart is scattered by nature but it has some of these moments, too--moments in which some line or turn that at first sounds unnatural becomes a signal both of McCombs' quiet confidence and of his casual rebellion against the idea of how songs are supposed to go.

Despite its street-level money, power and respect rhymes, almost all of it feels divorced from reality, free of any kind of narrative grounding or personal disclosure.

The results still sound as slickly produced and hedge-betting as any actual Foo Fighters album.

This box isn't exactly a grand opening of the vaults: as nice as it is to have all this stuff in one place, less than a quarter of it hasn't been officially issued before, and it's not like there's a shortage of Velvet Underground live recordings that could stand to be released for real. On the other hand, you can think of The Complete Matrix Tapes as a greatly expanded, better-mixed version of 1969 with less perfect sequencing and four songs missing, and considered that way, it's a jewel with a chip knocked off its top.

Despite the complexity of the system that produced Hexadic II, the songs and sounds measure up to the setup itself.