On Art Brut’s last two albums, Argos’ act soured a bit, as he lashed out at a world that was buying less and less of what he was selling. Wham! Bang! is good-hearted in a way those records weren’t, and the newfound humility flatters him.

That ability to blend the real and the absurd, the cartoon and the corporeal, distinguishes CupcakKe from any other rapper. There’s a pulsing power in the center of her songs. It’s the sound of a woman in charge.

An album in which he and his reformed jug-band compatriots paradoxically reach for a musical approach both more complex and more approachable, instead landing squarely in the realm of mediocrity.

Four years later, Flatland still sounds ahead of its time, but Cocoon Crush is leagues beyond it. It shows a total disregard for club music’s strictures, concerned primarily not with floor-filling, but world-building.

An EP is often a great place for a band to experiment and test out new ideas between albums, to make mistakes and start again, especially when their trademark sound seems tired. But Little Dragon show none of those desires.

Faithfull channels her body and mind’s ache into an album that’s her best and most honest work since Broken English. With Negative Capability, she reinforces our links by exposing her own broken places.

They’re crafted artifacts that never quite captured his live charisma. Still, his weathered, yearning voice provided a focal point for Brenneck’s retro fantasias and helped freshen them. If anything, this farewell helps preserve the singer’s charms by illustrating how his revivalism wasn’t pure.

The songs here are absent of feeling or inspiration, but even creepier, they feel absent of intent.

With its often effortless synthesis of funk and rap, Oxnard is a wide-angle portrait of Los Angeles’ hedonistic landscape--it’s just a little out of focus.

Offering more than mere updates of classics, Songs of Love and Horror also showcases the depth of Oldham’s catalog through obscure tracks like the slow, haunted “Most People” and the previously unreleased “Party With Marty (Abstract Blues).”

Yes, these are songs, supposed expressions of a character, but they are as artless, discursive, and slapdash as a to-do list or a diary entry; the central character seems to be only a deep sense of self-pity in need of external validation.

It is one of the most exciting and passionately composed albums to appear not only in the global bass tradition but in the pop and experimental spheres this year.

This is a band that has given up on trying to look cool to most anyone, so Muse do here what they have always done and likely will always do—throw money at their latest fancy with the indiscriminate, earnest taste of a teenage boy. ... If there’s anything Muse truly nail here, it’s at last embracing just the right amount of camp.

Despite the attempts to recreate the dense power chords and pained whines that made Saves the Day emo poster boys, the formula fails when applied through Conley’s rose-colored vision of his own glory days.

As frightful and bewildering as a Dion McGregor nightmare, Thought Gang reveals Lynch and Badalamenti’s shared drive to disrupt any through line or logical outcome, the sounds and words as baffling as dream logic.

Reynolds has a story to tell, but the music fails to be the ideal delivery system.

On Queen of Golden Dogs, he slashes the ropes and soars into the stratosphere, pulling off an extraordinary fusion of chamber music, choral quintets, poetry, surrealism, mysticism, and, not least, rubble-making electronic epics.

This turntable of pastiche never allows Grace and the Devouring Mothers to develop an identity beyond Against Me! side project or to scratch much more than the surface of these assorted styles. Owing in part to the trio’s shared experience and chemistry, this feels a lot like rock-band karaoke.

You may hear a little more snap and pop and dimensionality here and there, but this is a restoration, not a revision. Everything that’s made Justice sound assaultive and insane for the past three decades--closer to Ministry’s “Stigmata,” released around the same time, than the band’s own “Enter Sandman”--remains.

She Remembers Everything is a collection of miniatures that collectively paint a vivid, haunting portrait of the blessings and bruises of life.

On Elastic Days, he’s somehow as accessible but elusive as ever.

Come Over Pt. 2 lacks a single, a glittering pop-punk exclamation point like “Awful Things” or “The Brightside” to break up the album’s long drift. But that’s OK, really. The album is a valentine offered to Peep and to his fans, and it is built for immersion, not for persuasion.

Daughters’ accessibility is directly proportional to their uncompromising compositional choices—hypnotic dissonance, martial drums cranked to incapacitating volumes, scathing vocal repetition, all rendered through impossibly vivid production. This is not music interesting in growing on you: it consumes and dominates.

The Last Rocket is the closest we’ve been yet to seeing one of the Migos with his mask off.

Much of More Blood, More Tracks elicits an eerie feeling, a dramatic feedback loop of Dylan’s shifting self-image. It’s not uncommon for the Bootleg Series to leave breadcrumb trails for fans, yet hearing Dylan obsess over these songs about obsession creates an uncanny Synecdoche, New York effect.

It is a tease, an intriguing suggestion of possible next steps in the motion of one of this year’s most promising new singer-songwriters.

The content is memorable, but the melodies aren’t. Still, stronger and more diverse than their debut.

Ultimately, No Tourists is the sound of a once-inflammatory band happily lodged in its comfort zone, where virtuoso water treading meets industrial-strength customer satisfaction.