On We Are Always Alone, Portrayal of Guilt find a new level of confidence to express the pointlessness of existence. After all, what you consider to be “mood music” depends on whether you’re seeking counterprogramming or a chance to lean into the negative energy outside.

The resulting Shall We Go On Sinning carries itself with the strength of a soft prayer, masterfully fusing jazz, deep house, and minimalism into an enormous, featherlight shield.

If Empty Country is a shade less wondrous than Cymbals Eat Guitars’ final records, that’s more feature than defect. Those albums were grand statements, designed to resonate with a vast audience, even if that audience didn’t actually exist. What Empty Country lacks in wild swings for the bleachers, though, it makes up for with a rangy intimacy that buys it a different sort of goodwill.

Each of its songs evokes an individual voice, an individual woman, an individual context and though their stories burn in different colors, each contains an ember of catharsis, a feeling that lasts throughout the album. It is the rare political pop record that looks toward the future and offers us something new.

Within these songs is the struggle in realizing that self-esteem comes more from estimable acts than outside validation. Is Survived By should receive plenty praise anyway, but Touché Amoré lead by example.

Ultimately, the album’s heady diversity originates in Hval’s malleable voice, which alters style, approach, timber, and tone from one measure to the next.

Its 11-track, 35-minute runtime proves an abrasive, acerbic listen from start to finish.

The songs on Cocoa Sugar are unquestionably Young Fathers’ most accessible. They have a sense of a narrative flow and an overarching theme, but they’re still knotty and confounding.

The bulk of The Suburbs focuses on this quiet desperation borne of compounding the pain of wasting your time as an adult by romanticizing the wasted time of your youth.

These two releases [Gish and Siamese Dream] still resonate, as both a nostalgia fix underscoring how it was so easy to fall for Smashing Pumpkins in the first place, and as the best introductions to their music any newcomer could want.

Being from her country means contending with the legacies of some of West Africa’s most internationally successful artists; at this point, I’d say Traoré fits comfortably alongside her forbears.

It’s the dazzling culmination of Jamie xx’s last six years of work, gathering up elements of everything he’s done--moody ballads, floor-filling bangers, expansive and off-kilter collaborations with vocalists--and packing them tightly into a glittering ball that reflects spinning fragments of feeling back at us.

But while the album is stylistically and sonically brilliant, it still suffers from the primary flaw of the band's four previous albums: Their songwriting hasn't made the same leap as their chops.

The Creek Drank the Cradle is made of small epiphanies.

Voices From the Lake is a triumph of care and exactitude, the kind of well-executed work of art that feels effortless despite its obvious complexity.

The Songs of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach sounds like a heartfelt eulogy to an artist who helped pop fans find great beauty and even greater solace in all those lonely, uncertain moments.

Scratch It buzzes with a chattering methamphetamine sleaziness, as much Vegas as it is Nashville. The TNN studio lights that frame this record are so hot, they make the music sweat.

Rather than expanding outward, Knocked Loose have amplified and concentrated their aesthetic into something so dense that it has its own gravitational pull.

What makes this whole thing work in an album context is that all the thematic and sonic pieces fit together-- these weird, morning-after tales of lust, hurt, and over-indulgence ("Bring the drugs, baby, I can bring my pain," goes one refrain) are matched by this incredibly lush, downcast music.

Distress does not disappear entirely on Shore; it’s just accepted and worn, making for an album that is musically adventurous and spiritually forgiving, like it’s constantly breathing in fresh air.

Even if we're not taken by the subject matter, we're taken by how beautifully and personally Sufjan is taken by it.

Kala is clattering, buzzy, and sonically audacious.

Ultimately, Badu’s reimagining of Fela succeeds better than any of the previous box sets by making his music feel both very much alive and very much her own. Her curation pulls together a sonically and thematically coherent experience that comes close to being the macro-album these album-length macro-grooves seem to demand.

Hit Parade is the kind of highly original pop assemblage that the Irish singer has seemingly always wanted to make, a record of peerless highs whose best and worst quality is how alienating it just so happens to be.

These 10 songs represent her ideal playground, a space bright and broad enough for her dreamlike visions and mutable voice to take whatever shapes her imagination allows. .... arish knows the seance-like arrangement of microphones that will allow the transformation to occur.

Even with the subtle narrative running through the record, McMahon’s songs gain resonance less from their lyrics than from the forward pulse of his music.

The whole 12-part suite unfurls like a gorgeous symphony, as if the entire Space Program only served as preparation for translating a work of cosmic complexity into a language we humans could understand.

He hasn’t lost a step: WHO WATERS THE WILTING GIVING TREE keeps his signature storminess intact while seeking new contours to his breathless style.