The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

On Appreciation, Horse Feathers’ sixth full-length, that introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of both Stax-era soul and the country-fried sound of Doug Sahm and the Flying Burrito Brothers. While the looser grooves can deflate the tension, they also frame Ringle’s world-weariness in terms that are directed, finally, at us.

Tear aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness.

Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.

The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.

There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

What makes Hundreds of Days so special, though, is how often it hits ambient music’s sweetest spot--a place where the world slows down and the performer’s free-floating noise makes you appreciate everything around it.

Rausch, though hardly topical, feels current, as jarring and revealing as last night’s nightmare.

Where Malkmus’ solo work has sometimes walked the fine line between too detached or too self-satisfied, the record cartwheels over it with the assurance of an artist who’s correctly assumed that so long as he’s enjoying himself enough, others will too.

It may have taken them too long to get here, but on To Drink From the Night Itself, they recapture their heyday while leaving their imitators in the rearview.

In the Rainbow Rain isn’t always this thematically dense, though, and its more laid-back songs help loosen the philosophical knots that tracks like “Human Being Song” tie.

Mark Kozelek is a thoroughly modern album, one doesn’t separate the art from the artist but collapses the two completely.

True to form, the record hides moments of grace within an impenetrably violent landscape, capturing a rupture at the boundary of what is bearable. The songs gain intensity as the album progresses, leading the listener deep into a hell of the Body’s careful making.

With Sam Prekop on vocals, though, a Sea and Cake album is genetically incapable of sounding like anything other than a Sea and Cake album.

For all this record’s hubris, the long-touted “generational voice” that is Alex Turner has never sounded more real, or more himself.

Murmurations represents a breakthrough. It’s thrilling to imagine where Simian Mobile Disco might go next; here’s hoping they get the chance.

On 7, all the contrasts that mark their music are dialed up to blinding; you are plunged into darkness and then showered in light. The experience is so enveloping that you find yourself contending, once again, with that familiar itch to locate meaning.

The best thing an album like DNA Feelings can do to you is make you feel lost, and it does, frequently.

Singularity is ultimately grounded in the personal, not the cosmic, which is what makes this head music so rich.

These songs pull their power from slow reflections, from a series of sights that have been seen and pondered during long drives down open roads or quiet nights of deep thought.

It’s an album full of interstitial forms that flicker in between fixed states, and its magic lies in that liminal no-man’s-land.