You, Forever isn’t a soft-rock record, but it is a record that reframes a certain kind of softness as strength.

Hell-On is a record that can feel equally fragile and impenetrable, its songs like complex universes connected only by proximity.

More than Lightbody’s lack of cogency, the imperious tone burdens Wildness.

Unclear messages and unspooled melodies break new ground for Hval, and she inhabits it with grace on The Long Sleep. It’s as penetrating a work as Blood Bitch and its predecessor, Apocalypse, girl, but more humble in concept and more suspicious of its own claims.

It is a profoundly lonely place, this album, and it would be unbearably cynical were it not for the moments of sublimity rustling through its sneers.

If anything, ye compresses the Kanye West character, making everything about the artist feel smaller, blurrier, like you are squinting at an image once larger than life.

Puff may sound as slight as its name suggests--but this idiosyncratic and inventive record is anything but lightweight.

Present within these songs are grace and generosity--two words I could not imagine summoning to describe Father John Misty’s music a year ago.

On Vibras, he’s poised to take his place on the global stage—mi gente in tow.

But even as he’s singing his most accessible songs to date, Johnson’s voice remains a highly impressionistic instrument, his words wafting through like smoke rings, disappearing just as they seem to be acquiring definition.

This looming sense of familiarity extends past the album’s musical elements and into its writing. Shawn Mendes is populated with stock characters: the girl who’s a little too high on her own supply, the girl worth waiting forever for, the girl who got away.

Love Is Dead is admirably righteous, but it’s chilly, lacking the rallying impact of peers who have shown that empathy is more powerful than polemic.

Its loveliness is a bit more tentative, more cautious, more formulaic than Campbell’s music with Camera Obscura had become. One understands. This project has time to grow. For now, we’re just so glad she’s back.

Rocky’s anything-goes tests come up short, but they feel like his alone.

The oafish opening to “Hard Piano” aside, the writing on Daytona is knotty and strong, with texture and grit and plenty of tight turns. The album is, in many ways, a years-late payoff of the promise shown when Ye and Pusha performed “Runaway” at the 2010 VMAs.

On Appreciation, Horse Feathers’ sixth full-length, that introverted persona has thawed, revealing a surprising affinity for the joy of both Stax-era soul and the country-fried sound of Doug Sahm and the Flying Burrito Brothers. While the looser grooves can deflate the tension, they also frame Ringle’s world-weariness in terms that are directed, finally, at us.

Tear aims for cohesion and produces fun, prismatic songs in the process.

If the record exchanges the uncompromising, diamond-sharp eloquence of VDSQ Solo Acoustic Vol. 12 for a more complex and sometimes imperfect vision, it also enhances the singularity of Henson’s previous work, marking Sarah Louise as a musician who’s bound to keep moving.

His music is heavier and more complex than it used to be, the arrangements harsher and stranger. And then there’s his singing: Once a competent and breezy instrument, Walker’s voice has evolved into a throaty speak-sing that sounds depleted, as though it’s been scooped out of itself. These shifts give the record a deeper emotional resonance than anything else he’s put his name to.

With Angels of Death, Castle confronts death’s forms with the clarity of a scholar and the reverence of an empath. It’s a meditation on something we never desire but always receive.

It’s complicated. There are no punchlines. In these songs of existential despair, a change in perspective is its own kind of revelation, as is Barnett finding the few good words to describe it.

Die Lit is an anomaly, an album that works almost completely from its own lunatic script. At its best--which is to say almost the entire thing, really--the album almost seems to suspend gravity.

Though Elysia Crampton blooms from big, propulsive drum patterns, the kind that must be played by a group of musicians and not an individual, it also conjures a sense of profound loneliness.

Maus has made more profound and mysterious records, but never one that has taken this much delight in its own ridiculousness.

The songs throughout are more legible and coherent than ever without sacrificing any of their ferocity or manic, vibrant energy.

There’s craft in Beach Slang, just not the kind that translates to a chamber-pop setting meant to showcase intricate arrangements, deft melodies, and arch wordplay. While he’s switched up the instruments, Alex hasn’t bothered to reimagine the songs themselves.

As with Human Performance, the broad strokes of Wide Awake! are familiar but the details are often excitingly out of place.

What makes Hundreds of Days so special, though, is how often it hits ambient music’s sweetest spot--a place where the world slows down and the performer’s free-floating noise makes you appreciate everything around it.