If you’ve been fascinated by any of Stallones’ work, Belomancie will get you stoked about not only what he’s done, but how much more he can do.

Nothing’s Real offers a fresh vision for pop’s new reality.

Hex Dealer is as frenzied as it is hilarious.

While its ingredients are undeniably basic--all of the songs are built from a few period-appropriate keyboards and chugging drum machines, and that’s mostly it--what makes Cake Knife so consistently endearing is how effortless it all sounds.

Mostly the record commits to what he does best: substantial rap with clear stakes and an uncommon sense of purpose. After a career marked too often by botched opportunities and wasted potential, Meek Mill has finally risen to the moment.

Arabia Mountain may be poised to push this band further over-ground, but they're not going up without a fight.

Land of No Junction is the sort of record that seems to acquire more confidence and force with each passing track.

The beauty of Under~Between is how elegantly it illustrates the idea of interdependence, tangling together seemingly unrelated sounds so that they are impossible to tease apart, and creating a space for peaceful contemplation in that web of interconnectedness.

Gotye's exemplary pop sense may be the big revelation of Making Mirrors, yet it's his arty restlessness that will continue to keep him interesting.

It would be extremely easy to dismiss this album as Billy simply taking out the accumulated garbage of the past couple years. It would be easy, that is, if it didn't almost redeem the Pumpkins.... This album features an abundance of tracks that throw the deficiencies of their previous record into even sharper relief.

It would have been far easier to ignore these complications, play the lovable oddball, and put together an entertaining tour of his home city for outsiders. Instead, Wauters seems to have gone searching for his hometown and found his own reflection.

Can't remember many bands whose B-sides/rarities comp things I liked as much as their full-lengths, but here's one.

It’s easy to class 1989 as an artistically lesser entry in Swift’s catalog, however counterintuitive to its success, but these songs are wildly durable. 1989 (Taylor’s Version) isn’t plastered with a debutante smile like its predecessor—but it certainly hasn’t lost its luster.

Though treading familiar sonic and thematic waters at the start, On the Water really comes alive midway through.

It’s a fully-formed offering that seamlessly balances her more rugged raps with pristine pop songs (sculpted in “Body”’s image) and tender slow jams.

Blanck Mass is all about Power excavating new domains while still working within that great glut of voluminous space he's already mapped out.

For all its craft, Getting Into Knives is too casual of a collection to sit alongside The Mountain Goats’ statement albums. But while these may not be Darnielle’s meatiest songs, the rich instrumentation turns them into one of his most welcoming records.

Steiner fills Printer’s Devil with half-remembered snapshots of adolescence—sprints down hills in the summertime, a ride on an airplane simulator at the mall—juxtaposed with images of overgrown grass, vacated lots and other innocuous signifiers of the passage of time that carry weight only in the rare moments we pause to consider them. The effect is comforting and sobering all at once.

Because Vado has an energy and a confidence that so few of his elders display anymore, Slime Flu instantly stands out by recalling a very specific late-90s moment. Vado, a guy who probably shouldn't be asked to carry a full-length by himself at this point in his career, makes it work anyway by doing the little things right.

There are two immediately apparent differences between Stephen Malkmus and Pavement's catalog: first and least surprisingly, there's less of a group dynamic here than on Pavement albums. It definitely has the sonic hallmarks of a "solo" album-- the songs are less jammy and spontaneous, more rigidly structured. Second, it's a lot more fun-sounding than Pavement was near the end of its shelf life.

This duality of lush, sensual guitar music and entropic noise resonates with the album’s implied textual theme.

The songwriting is the group’s sharpest to date. They can still whip up the staccato panic-attack special (see: “Alibis”), but that’s no longer the main attraction, nor the most compelling material.

Magic Oneohtrix Point Never touches upon all Lopatin’s usual themes: memory and forgetting, nostalgia, the mystery of taste. But where his treatment of those ideas can sometimes seem academic, the album is shot through with a powerful and pervasive sense of melancholy.

Live or not, this album has crowd noise, and something less than the cut-glass perfection of a studio album. Unfussy, dancey, and fun, Nine Inch Noize has a steady, thumping energy that makes it more of a romp than any of their classics.

As with Cheap Queen, Hold On Baby doesn’t achieve any great innovations, but thanks to their stylistic and structural instincts, and their innate star power, Straus still manages to thrill.

This time around, she takes on more sinister hues and foreboding melodies. It’s a gripping transformation, one that illustrates the full range of her gifts as a composer, and reveals a darker side of her era-blending music.

It's hard to know what Sufjan fanatics, who have been waiting four years now for a proper full-length follow-up to Illinois, will make of this one-off, but Run Rabbit Run serves as a welcome reminder that his curious, try-anything spirit is part of what got our attention in the first place.

Between Goias and Fancy's remarkable drop-rolling bass science and the girls' bratty-Brooklynite rhyming, the better singles on here wind up sounding like something unprecedented: a booty-bass record for small children.