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.