He surveys ideas on wealth and success with a confidence that makes even his most clumsy boasts about not going ham on the ’Gram seem sophisticated. Rap’s biggest winner coolly sustains his biggest losses.

The miracle of his catalog is how the seams mend together, stitch by stitch, a different way forward, as if creating no “endings” for himself. Many of Iowa Dream’s tunes instantly find a place in the pantheon of Russell’s best work, though perhaps it’s more fitting to say they create oxygen in his ever-expanding world.

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart simply made a slyly confident debut that mixes sparkling melodies with an undercurrent of sad bastard mopery.

This is straight-up anti-pop-rap: unpolished, unevenly mixed, structurally unbalanced, primarily self-produced, and polarizing. ... They don’t sound half-baked so much as purposefully unfinished, a move even further off the grid for one of our most promising shut-ins.

About half the songs drift by without choruses, and the other half only barely have anything you could call a chorus. The whole thing is over in about 45 minutes. It all adds up to a woozy waft of a record--a perfect listen for mid-summer, when breathing in the humid air is almost enough to get you high.

Even when Mannequin Pussy venture to truly dark places, Patience is such a pure joy to listen to. In its biggest moments, Dabice’s raw edge is matched by equally colossal riffs, explosive energy, and surging momentum. Patience, is without a doubt, one of the year’s strongest punk rock records.

Heart is a valuable pop record for those of us whose cardiac muscle hasn't stained completely black.

All these lurches and groans and crashes and bangs and stutters and roars come together to form one consistently rousing, emotionally immediate whole. From them to you.

I Know I’m Funny haha is full of this delicious texture. It might come off a little shallow, but it reveals its great depth at its own unconcerned pace. It’s probably one of the best records of the year.

It grants him the freedom to play with tone, to write personally or use his gravelly voice as texture, to treat the harshest raps and the most delicate hooks as mad experiments gone wrong.

It’s an album that uses the rejection of metal’s well-trodden forms not as an endpoint but as a catalyst for bringing something else into being.

Wild Beasts certainly aren't the first rock band to stand up society's dregs and outcasts, but few others immortalize them on such a wondrous, mythic scale.

elela’s music is hydration for the soul, seductive and relatable even as she continues to refine and evolve her sound. You can be drawn in by Raven’s all-encompassing atmosphere, but it’s even better to lose your whole self in it.

Like Punken before it, Brandon Banks is a major leap in craft and style as well as refinement of his self-image.

Plays like a big, half-drunken romp through golden-era rock 'n' roll-- airy and thrilling and shifty as hell.

Black Sea is positively huge while also being much more accessible. You get a sense here of how far Fennesz has come, how far his music reaches, and the unexplored possibilities that still exist.

Every song here could be a single, but taken together, they add up to a sum greater than its parts.

Remind Me Tomorrow is not unyielding. It is the peak of Van Etten’s songwriting, her most atmospheric and emotionally piercing album to date.

Life Metal underlines the point of it all: These four pieces are best suited to take over a room, to fill a venue as massive as the sound itself and, in turn, to be felt. They vibrate, pulse, and quiver. In a time where we experience so much media on a seemingly microscopic scale, from earbuds to smartphone screens, Life Metal takes up a large space, where devastating waves of sound that make actual ceilings crumble somehow become a restorative listening experience.

Radical Romantics is essentially a collection of notes on love. Love—whether sexy, overwhelming, or vengeful—links together the recurring motivations of the Fever Ray catalog: curiosity and exploration, family born and chosen, sexual freedom and pleasure.

Shrines is not about range, instead offering subtly different versions of a single, near-perfect idea. You might think of the album as a sculpture, and each track offers a different vantage point... compulsively listenable.

It’s not just the guest roster that sets Pop 2 so apart from the mainstream pop landscape, it’s the way these voices are integrated, making its 10 tracks feel less like a cool-kid curation project and more like a popping afterparty you’ve stumbled into.

The duo’s music was always full of the small details, but they now conspire toward something bigger.

This exercise in excess makes the ambitious You Forgot It in People seem positively understated by comparison.

No matter how far into the red Cartwheel pushes, there’s one sound that stands out: Anderson’s humble, everydude voice, somehow rising above the clouds of dirt and grime even at a mumble.

While Field of Reeds is a mysterious album in many ways, what it makes clear is Barnett’s faith in the purity of sound, rather than words, to communicate.

Each of the dozen laments on Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers balance catchy choruses, exquisite instrumental interludes, and the complex words of a man's grieving.

With J Robbins producing and the vastly improved sonics, you have a much clearer idea of what everyone is doing. Little things are important with this band, and here, you can actually make them out.