Spoon's latest is their magnum opus to date; it takes a scalpel to the highlight reel of their career, cutting and pasting a 35-minute tour de force that ends too soon.

This is probably the most uplifting album of his career... Exhilarating.

Black Origami is a gorgeous and overwhelming piece of musical architecture, an epic treatise on where rhythm comes from and where it can go.

Beauty and the Beat sounds like a record made by someone who once devoured the catalog and history of his favorite artists, traced their lineage as far back as he could, and has discovered his place in the genealogy. With that enlightenment, Edan is no longer an impersonation of his idols, but one of their peers.

Bad Bunny’s sixth studio album, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I Should Have Taken More Photos), is a bold declaration—a groundbreaking testament to his evolved artistry and vision for the future of música urbana.

Music Can Hear Us lays out DJ Koze’s panculturalist ethos clearer than any of his prior studio releases, island-hopping from wispy echoes of son Cubano (“A Dónde Vas?”) to Japanese-language doo-wop (“Umaoi”) to, uh, Damon Albarn-fronted Afrobeats? .... To show the next generation how it’s done, DJ Koze throws two absolute heaters into the back half of Music Can Hear Us.

This is music that digs deeper and burrows beneath the level of shared associations to discover the sparkling emotional potential of carefully arranged vibrations moving through the air.

This unguarded, individualistic expression encourages strong identification in listeners, so don't be surprised if this record earns Garbus a very earnest and intense cult following.

These 14 complex compositions warp the pop textbook into something more knotty and internal, creating a unique zone where the 27-year-old thrives: She’s never sounded so large, even in the record’s quietest moments.

Pray for Haiti is his most ambitious, definitive project since his 2016 masterpiece Haitian Body Odor, a collage rendered in full.

Alvvays came out with a record that finally is large enough to contain the band’s splendor. Every song on Blue Rev is a feast, done up with effortless élan.

Definitely Maybe is the sound of people who feel like they need to scream to be heard—and even then, the chances of anyone actually listening seems depressingly unlikely. And yet, not wholly impossible.

Washington’s strengths have never been clearer. His sound is sinewy and centered, his rhythmic footing sure. And he’s a catharsis engine who also knows when to shrewdly dial it back.

New York, New York is a significant artifact. The music and photographs capture the formative moments of punk and new wave, before those genres had been thoroughly defined.

These are soulful sing-alongs with grit, pop nuggets that hold up to hours of repeat play in humid bumper-to-bumper traffic, and ultimately, the sound of a great songwriter hitting his stride.

Bored is one of 11 songs on I Love You, Honeybear, an album by turns passionate and disillusioned, tender and angry, so cynical it's repulsive and so openhearted it hurts.

It's deeply refreshing to hear an artist who exudes such depth and consideration.

The album is loaded with songs whose greatness is revealed slowly, where the simplest, most understated chord change can blow a track wide open and elevate it from simply pretty to absolutely devastating.

Audacious and spectacular high stakes.

Helplessness Blues' analytical and inquisitive nature never tips into self-indulgence.

Less ferocious, more deliberate but in many ways more compelling, Everything in Between finds No Age matching a new, nuanced approach to their expansive noise.

Ra alights on almost all aspects of its bandleader’s multidimensional sound and presents a coherent trajectory through it, alternating between otherworldly explorations and earthbound beats.

The appeal of the Miles at the Fillmore material is obvious: This is an amazing band and they rip, but they never leave traditional ideas of rhythm and melody behind.

It's both epilogue and prologue, yet these songs retain their own specific flavor, as R.E.M. map the borders between small clubs and large venues, between underground and mainstream, between rhythm and melody, between outrage and hope. That in-between quality still sounds invigorating so many years later.

Invention has very few peers, in my opinion. Though Schlammpeitzinger's Collected Simple Songs of My Temporary Past and Andrew Coleman's Everything Was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt come close, I'm firmly resigned that I'll not hear a more effortlessly charming album this year.

It's the kind of meet-you-halfway hipster party record the Dismemberment Plan has decided they don't want to make anymore.

This album sounds every bit as absurd, chaotic, and exhilarating as it did 14 years ago.

Lorde captures emotions like none other. Her second album is a masterful study of being a young woman, a sleek and humid pop record full of grief and hedonism, crafted with the utmost care and wisdom.