Laughter in Summer serves as a summary of Copeland’s career, but it’s also a portrait of the artist in his last act: confident, generous, and unafraid.

Panda Bear and Sonic Boom counter with the longevity of artists who have never compromised, and they give us the defiant Reset knowing that despair is a weapon in the hands of a present hell-bent on stamping out our souls.

Ancestral Recall, aTunde Adjuah’s ninth studio album as a leader and his most progressive statement of stretch music yet, is a testament to the contemporary flexibility of the jazz tradition; at times, it also constitutes a hyperspace leap out of it.

Even in its moodboard looseness and nostalgia, Angel’s Pulse has all the charm and careful attention to detail of Blood Orange’s last two magnum opuses.

A return to textbook Mekons-- from gracefully shambling country to deep-beating tribal rhythms, by way of good, clean rock 'n roll.

The incarnation may be new, but the music’s underlying spirit, its animating force, is very much the same.

While Some Echoes starts out as a good album, by the end it reveals itself as the best thing they've ever done.

An admirably cocksure debut on which Levi makes like a 21st century T. Rex-- which, our current retro-obsessed rock culture notwithstanding, is not an easy thing to pull off.

An album that refuses to draw a neatly conclusive arc. Instead, Gentle Confrontation offers an invitation to bear witness to a process that’s human, hard to define, and close to the heart.

The writing remains the main attraction in Finn’s work, and both as a storyteller and a rock songwriter, he has never sounded more in control.

It’s a sweet snapshot of London 2018--an encapsulation of a newly brewing jazz community, uniting numerous cultural strands that make up the city. When the scene needed him most, Kamaal Williams returned to show the way.

The Expanding Flower Planet feels like an album full of trap doors, where a single, unexpected sound can deposit you into new worlds.

It's a great bunch of songs, and it solidifies the notion that XTC are back from the wilderness and ready to rock the show.

It’s her best and most daring album of this century, featuring some of her heaviest and most haunting performances.

1966 is one more piece to a puzzle that will never be complete--which is of course how Dalton herself would have had it.

Free Reign II is precisely the sort of risky, rejuvenating album Clinic needed at this point in their career, one that audaciously upends the perception that this band just releases the same album over and over.

It all comes together to make an album that stands up as a varied and well-sequenced work, and as a collection of songs you can scatter through a shuffle and dig just as deeply.

For all its sprawl, The Argument maintains a brisk pace, with a White Album-inspired sense of irreverence that ensures Hart never gets stuck in place for long.

Bellowing Sun feels delightfully out of time with the rest of the world. Its length and complex structure dare our shrinking attention spans to fight the pull of Twitter timelines and breaking news, to lean into the present.

At times the songs can sound cold, as though they want to keep their distance, refusing to shed any armor. Although this could be a handicap on other albums, it only serves to makes Carboniferous more intriguing.

It's jaw-dropping, certainly, and what's more, it actually works.

The duo’s latest, Rong Weicknes, is their prettiest, poppiest rush-hour prog-jazz clusterfuck yet.

Disappeared rewires many of Deerhunter’s aural hallmarks. The band has often sounded either gently sprawling, as on Fading Frontier and Halcyon Digest, or aggressive and claustrophobic, as on Monomania. Here, they manage to hit both moods at once.

No Age’s name seems self-actualizing. And in their psycho-candied sound, which has progressively gotten better, they still know how to locate the timeless, fever-pitched feeling of a beginning.

Arpo refines and then traipses further afield than anything else in his discography.

Lionheart is brought to life by McEntire’s soulful voice, by a sweeping Nashville sound, but more so by a deep sense of conviction.

Backed by an all-star band that notably includes Wilco’s Glenn Kotche and Megafaun’s Phil Cook, Tyler is able to summon a wide range of moods, from plaintive pastoral folk to a particular kind of kosmische American music that fuses Brad Cook’s spacey synths and Luke Schneider’s gorgeous pedal steel like a slow, steady breeze on a hot summer day.

One of this year's most interesting records.